Motivation:

In vanilla minecraft, you have two options for punishments for dying - drop all your items on the ground and respawn or just respawn. Dropping and potentially losing all the items in your inventory is overly harsh and can be a several hour setback. Setting keepinventory to true resolves this, but it trivializes dying to not be punishing at all when it realistically should be.

  Solution:
In this datapack, when you die, you respawn as a disembodied spirit. In spirit form, you'll be able to levitate by jumping and float back down by tapping sneak - however you'll be unable to place or destroy blocks while in spirit form. Your goal upon dying is to regain your body so you can once again interact with the world. To do this, you'll need to return to the spot where you died. As you approach, you should see soul particles emanating from the location of your death. Once you get close enough a unique zombie will spawn. Killing this zombie will regain your ability to place and break blocks.

If you ever die while in spirit form, you'll be penalized with the necrosis debuff. Upon regaining your body, you'll have slowness, mining fatigue, and reduced max health for 5 minutes (drinking milk will not cure necrosis, you just have to wait it out).



  Configuration Settings:
Two gamerules are added in this datapack: deathlight, and deathdrop. These can be changed by using the command /function ss:config

The deathlight gamerule governs how the daylight cycle is affected by the presence of players in soul form. By default, this gamerule is set to midnight, meaning that whenever there's a player in soul form the time will be set to night. Setting this gamerule to daylight will make the daylight cycle unaffected by the presence of spirits. I recommend solo players and small servers play with deathlight set to midnight as having to contend with mobs makes the challenge of retrieving your body more interesting. For larger servers I recommend setting deathlight to daylight (only one player needs to die to set the time to night for the whole server).

The deathdrop gamerule determines what happens to your items when you die. There are three settings: never, necrosis, and always. The default setting is necrosis, which means that when you die while in spirit form you lose your items which get stored with your corpse. This works similarly to gravestone datapacks and grantees your items will not be lost as long as you retrieve them carefully. When deathdrop is set to never, your items are never taken from your inventory on death and will remain with you no matter how many times you die. When deathdrop is set to always, your items are always stored with your corpse and you'll have to retrieve them every time.

If you die while your items are stored on your corpse, you will not lose them! A new corpse will be created at your most recent death, but all past corpses that store items will persist. When in soul form you'll only be able to access your most recent corpse; if you need to retrieve your items from a past corpse, you'll have to first regain your body then find the past corpse.