While I like having a penalty for death, losing all of my items at once, usually never to be seen again, feels unfair to me. KeepInventory feels too much like cheating for my tastes. I liked the idea of only losing 5 random items on death, but there is no way to do this, from what I can tell. I've tried creating a mod for this, but I couldn't figure it out. If there is some way to do this vanilla or to mod it, I would like to know.
This basically. When you die, a gravestone will be placed at the location of death. Breaking it will pop all your items out and you can get them back. The challenge though, is finding it again and making sure the popped out items don't touch any nearby lava.
There are several gravestone mods but I don't think there are any that drop a configurable number of items while protecting the rest, as far as I've seen it's just all or nothing. They do have (optional) challenges that add hostile ghosts that come attack you when you open the grave.
This is a very complicated system, but having the items being teleported to an undefined location, and being sorted through hoppers, only allowing Y number of items through, while the rest are burnt.
Honour system a.k.a. Dropper Roulette: turn keepInventory on, but near your bed that you respawn at, run a chest into a hopper into a dropper pointing into lava. Dump your non-stackable goodies in there after death (your equipment is probably most valuable anyway), and hit the button the desired number of times, perhaps proportionally to how stupid the actions leading to your demise were. Whatever remains, you keep! Reminder that droppers randomly drop a single item from one of their 9 slots.
Anything else will be pretty difficult to do well in vanilla. Even with commands, you probably need elaborate (and large) item sorters to handle stackable items, depending on what "half" means for stackable items ... if you have 32 diamonds and 8 emeralds, do you lose all of the diamonds or all of the emeralds, or do you lose about half of each stack? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a lot of effort and would likely be imperfect.
For yet another option, leave keepInventory off, but put Curse of Vanishing on half of your gear (you can get this through villager trades or fishing, but as it's a pure nerf, spawning in the books isn't really a cheat, IMO). You could randomize this again with a dropper, I suppose. You'll get to keep some of your gear, but some of it will surely be gone, and all of your other items will drop where you died, so they might be recoverable if you didn't die in lava/the void.
That's all I can think of for vanilla. I sort of like the first option, as it's funny, elegant, and does what you want while keeping you honest. :-) But to each their own.
While I like having a penalty for death, losing all of my items at once, usually never to be seen again, feels unfair to me. KeepInventory feels too much like cheating for my tastes. I liked the idea of only losing 5 random items on death, but there is no way to do this, from what I can tell. I've tried creating a mod for this, but I couldn't figure it out. If there is some way to do this vanilla or to mod it, I would like to know.
https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/gravestone-mod
This basically. When you die, a gravestone will be placed at the location of death. Breaking it will pop all your items out and you can get them back. The challenge though, is finding it again and making sure the popped out items don't touch any nearby lava.
There are several gravestone mods but I don't think there are any that drop a configurable number of items while protecting the rest, as far as I've seen it's just all or nothing. They do have (optional) challenges that add hostile ghosts that come attack you when you open the grave.
Hm, then perhaps you should study how to make mods and do that. I'm sure there is a way you can figure it out however complicated it may be.
This is a very complicated system, but having the items being teleported to an undefined location, and being sorted through hoppers, only allowing Y number of items through, while the rest are burnt.
Honour system a.k.a. Dropper Roulette: turn keepInventory on, but near your bed that you respawn at, run a chest into a hopper into a dropper pointing into lava. Dump your non-stackable goodies in there after death (your equipment is probably most valuable anyway), and hit the button the desired number of times, perhaps proportionally to how stupid the actions leading to your demise were. Whatever remains, you keep! Reminder that droppers randomly drop a single item from one of their 9 slots.
Anything else will be pretty difficult to do well in vanilla. Even with commands, you probably need elaborate (and large) item sorters to handle stackable items, depending on what "half" means for stackable items ... if you have 32 diamonds and 8 emeralds, do you lose all of the diamonds or all of the emeralds, or do you lose about half of each stack? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be a lot of effort and would likely be imperfect.
For yet another option, leave keepInventory off, but put Curse of Vanishing on half of your gear (you can get this through villager trades or fishing, but as it's a pure nerf, spawning in the books isn't really a cheat, IMO). You could randomize this again with a dropper, I suppose. You'll get to keep some of your gear, but some of it will surely be gone, and all of your other items will drop where you died, so they might be recoverable if you didn't die in lava/the void.
That's all I can think of for vanilla. I sort of like the first option, as it's funny, elegant, and does what you want while keeping you honest. :-) But to each their own.