Soul Shard

Soul Shard is a lightweight utility mod designed to refine the vanilla death mechanics without making the game "too easy." Instead of items scattering randomly across the ground, they are neatly contained within a Soul Shard crystal that spawns at the point of your death.

The goal of this mod is to remove the frustration of searching for individual items in tall grass or caves and the tedious process of reorganizing your hotbar, while keeping the core vanilla risks intact.
Core Features:

• Organized Recovery: All your items are stored inside a single crystal. No more hunting for that one missing tool or stack of resources.
• Vanilla-Friendly Risk: The crystal is a physical entity with 10 HP (5 hearts). It can be destroyed by players, mobs, or environmental hazards.
• Loot Integrity: If the crystal is broken, all stored items drop to the ground. This ensures that the "loot stealing" mechanic in multiplayer remains possible.
• Environmental Danger: If the crystal spawns in lava or is caught in an explosion and dies, your items will burn or vanish, just like in standard vanilla Minecraft.
• Despawn Timer: A 5-minute lifespan for the crystal (matching vanilla item despawn logic) to maintain the pressure of recovery.

Development Roadmap:

• Mod Integration: Future support for external inventory slots (like Curios or Trinkets).

Soul Shard doesn't change if you get your items back—it just makes the process of picking them up cleaner and more organized.