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Grave Behaviour

This page covers the full life cycle of a grave: capture, placement, protection, expiry, and per-player limits.

Item & XP Capture​

When a player dies (and has ascendra.place), Ascendra captures their belongings into a grave:

  • Full inventory — all inventory contents, including armour and the offhand slot.
  • XP — stored according to xp-mode (FULL, PERCENTAGE, or NONE).

When a grave is successfully created, Ascendra suppresses the normal item drops so nothing is lost or duplicated. If a grave can't be created (for example, inside a blocked GriefDefender claim), items fall back to normal vanilla drops.

Storage modes
  • EXACT restores items to their original inventory slots on recovery.
  • COMPACT fills available inventory slots efficiently instead of preserving exact positions.

See Storage & Database.

Safe Placement​

Ascendra tries hard to put the grave somewhere the player can actually reach it safely.

  • It searches around the death location within placement.search-radius (default 10 blocks) for a safe block.
  • It avoids unsafe materials listed in placement.blacklist — including LAVA, FIRE, SOUL_FIRE, MAGMA_BLOCK, CACTUS, SWEET_BERRY_BUSH, WITHER_ROSE, POWDER_SNOW, and more.

You can extend or trim the blacklist in config.yml to match your server's hazards.

Void & Liquid Safety​

Deaths over the void or large bodies of liquid are the classic cause of total item loss. Ascendra handles these with a temporary platform:

  • When grave-platform.on-liquids is true, Ascendra builds a platform when a player dies over large bodies of water or lava.
  • For void deaths, the platform is created at grave-platform.y-offset blocks above the world's minimum height.
  • The platform is built from grave-platform.material (default GLASS).
  • After the grave is emptied, the platform is removed after grave-platform.removal-delay seconds. Players standing on it are warned via the platform-removal message.
  • With grave-platform.remove-only-if-unchanged: true, Ascendra will not remove platform blocks that players have since modified, so it won't tear up builds.

Protection System​

Graves are protected so other players can't immediately loot them.

  • A grave is protected for protection.duration seconds (default 300).
  • During protection, only the owner can open the grave.
  • Players with ascendra.bypass.protection, and admins, can open protected graves.
  • If protection.killer-access is true, the player who killed the owner may also access the grave during the protection window.

When someone without access tries to open a protected grave, they receive the grave-protected message showing the remaining time.

Expiration​

Graves can be set to expire so the world doesn't fill up with abandoned graves.

  • Expiry is controlled by expiration.enabled.
  • A grave lasts expiration.lifetime seconds (default 3600). Set -1 for permanent graves.
  • When a grave expires, expiration.on-expire decides what happens to its contents:
    • DROP — contents are dropped into the world at the grave location.
    • DELETE — contents are removed.
caution

With on-expire: DELETE, expired grave contents are gone for good. Use DROP if you'd rather give players a last chance to grab their gear.

Per-Player Limits​

You can cap how many active graves each player keeps:

  • limits.max-graves sets the maximum (default -1, unlimited).
  • When the limit is reached and limits.remove-oldest-on-limit is true, the player's oldest grave is removed to make room for the new one.

This prevents a single player from accumulating an unbounded number of graves across the world.

Anti-Duplication​

Ascendra is built to prevent item duplication exploits:

  • Graves lock while open, so two players can't drain the same grave simultaneously.
  • The plugin tracks active grave state internally.
  • Recovery compasses are stripped from captured grave inventories, and the managed compass is handled carefully to prevent compass duplication (see Recovery Compass).

Explosion Protection​

Grave blocks are protected from explosions (creepers, TNT, etc.), so an unlucky blast won't destroy a grave and scatter its contents.