Mechanics

How AlphaGraves actually decides what happens to a player's items when they die.

What happens on death

On every player death, AlphaGraves captures the full 36-slot inventory, all armor, the offhand item, and total XP — then clears vanilla's own drops and XP loss entirely so nothing hits the ground on its own. From there, exactly one of three systems takes over, in this priority order:

1. PvP Grave — if the kill was a direct melee hit from another player (not a projectile) and pvp-grave.enabled is true.
2. Grave Slot — otherwise, the items go into the player's next available slot (see below).
3. Fallback Grave — if every slot the player has permission for is currently on cooldown.

Grave Slots

Each slot is an independent, permission-gated container a player can own, configured entirely in config.yml under grave-slots. Four ship by default:

Claim delay is how long after death a grave stays locked before it can be opened at all. Reuse cooldown is how long after claiming before that same slot can hold a new grave. Every slot can also carry its own claim_cost (none / xp_levels / money) — money costs silently do nothing if Vault isn't installed. Add as many slots as you want beyond the default four; the GUI lists them in the order they're defined.

PvP Grave

A direct melee kill (sword, axe, fist — not a projectile, fire, lava, or fall) bypasses the entire slot system. A physical grave spawns right at the death location instead, regardless of whether the victim had a free slot.

pvp-grave:
  enabled: true
  who_can_open: anyone      # "owner" = only the victim/admins | "anyone" = killer too, after protection
  loot_protection: 5m       # only matters when who_can_open is "anyone"
  grave_expiration: 20m
  expire_action: drop       # "drop" scatters items | "delete" removes them permanently
  notify_victim: true

Projectile kills (arrows, tridents) are not treated as PvP grave triggers — those fall through to the normal slot system like any other death cause.

Fallback Grave

The safety net: when a player dies and every slot they have permission for is still on cooldown, a physical grave spawns at the death location so items are never simply lost to a full queue.

fallback-grave:
  enabled: true
  who_can_open: owner
  grave_expiration: 1h
  expire_action: drop
  claim_cost: {type: none, amount: 0}

world-settings.no-fallback-worlds can disable physical graves (both fallback and PvP) in specific worlds while keeping the normal slot system working — if every slot happens to be full there too, items drop naturally instead of spawning a grave.

Auto-Claim & Reminders

Both are opt-in per player through /graves settings — the plugin never force-claims or force-notifies without the player choosing to.

auto-claim:
  permission: alphagraves.graves.autoclaim
  check_interval_ticks: 100   # how often to scan online players (20 ticks = 1s)
  drop_overflow_items: true

grave-reminder:
  permission: alphagraves.graves.autoreminder

Visuals & Holograms

Physical graves (both fallback and PvP) show a floating, optionally spinning/bobbing marker item plus a text hologram above it.

grave-visual:
  display-item: PLAYER_HEAD   # any Material, or "basehead-<base64>" for a custom skull texture
  scale: 1
  animation: true             # takes effect immediately on /agraves reload

display-item: PLAYER_HEAD shows the victim's own skin on the floating marker. The hologram supports full MiniMessage formatting and an unlimited number of lines — set lines: [] to hide it entirely.

grave-hologram:
  lines:        # normal (fallback) graves
    - ''
    - '&f{player}s <#FF0000>ɢʀᴀᴠᴇ'
    - '&fᴇxᴘɪʀᴇꜱ: <#FF0000>{time_remaining}'
    - '&fᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇ: <#FF0000>{death_cause}'
  pvp-lines:    # PvP graves — falls back to 'lines' if left empty
    - ''
    - '&f{player}s <#FF0000>ɢʀᴀᴠᴇ'
    - '&fᴋɪʟʟᴇʀ: <#FF0000>{killer}'
    - '&fᴇxᴘɪʀᴇꜱ: <#FF0000>{time_remaining}'

{killer} safely resolves to an empty string on non-PvP graves, so it's fine to leave it in a shared line.

Explosion Protection

On by default — prevents TNT, creepers, and any other explosion from destroying a grave's display entities. Set explosion-protection.enabled: false to allow graves to be blown up like any other entity.