frozenne

I am very not fond of this idea, as it punishes players based on the choices they make on how to survive. Those who focus on agriculture will have little to no food available to recover; if seeds are included as perishables there would be an almost guaranteed force restart in gaining supplies. Those who focus on animal husbandry and hunting will have plenty of food and ways to regrow food, as long as they're responsible with their stocks. This method also pushes for chance based on seasons. Those who grow fruit trees might have plenty of food to gather in spring and summer, but death while fruit is out of season would force the player to choose another method to solve their hunger... assuming that they store their food on the trees. Logs are used to make charcoal (as we all know). Logs rotting would remove all fuel for those who use logs and charcoal as their primary fuels. This would give those who mine an advantage, as coal can be used in place of charcoal in most situations. If logs rot, it implies supports and other wood products would also rot (if they don't rot it would be potentially jarring and ruin the realism/consistency of the game). I can't imagine those with large homes would want to gather enough wood just to make enough supports to prevent their house being griefed. It would also cause issues with supports in mines. If preserving foods (for example drying, canning, jarring, salting/spicing) is made an option, as well as only having exposed wood products rot, I would be all for this in single player; it allows players to plan ahead for disaster. However, this still raises issues with SMP; dsmith77 covered a good deal of SMP issues in this section: Destroying the inventory of all chests a player has created or touched can be seen as part of the balance, forcing the community to focus on the survival of all players. (I wouldn't mind this on the server I play on with my close friends.) This is fine on small private servers, but no matter the size of the server there's no guarantee a player won't "turn" and betray the group by dying intentionally. (The only deterrent I've noticed for this kind of behavior is having an irl social consequence, but even that isn't absolute.)I'm all for having food rot if preserving is made an option, but having it rot based on time rather than death count would be a necessity for me. That way it's fair in both coop and pvp. This bit isn't really on topic though sooo My only suggestion for death penalties involves a bit more stuff than is probably realistic, but I'll have a go anyway. I suggest having locks and keys, with locks working in doors/chests/etc and keys being held on the player. (I don't know how they'd be held, but the most practical in terms of inventory space would be a key box that would allow a player to store more than one key in the box; otherwise the keys would function as normal items. Functionally, it would allow one inventory space to count as X number of spaces, but only in terms of keys. A way around the storage limit in the key box would be to hold one or two keys that unlock a chest or chests used for storing keys.) Keys could be crafted using a locksmith's box block, which would allow the shape of the key to be customized. Think similar to the knapping interface, but mimicking the teeth of a key. Although less realistic, gems, metals/alloys, wood, etc could be included in forming a specific key, allowing more combinations and therefore more codes. If a player can remember the code for the key, they can create however many they want and share these keys with other members of their community... or they can make only one and never share the "password" with another player. (Key data would probably have to be stored in a manner similar to tool damage in vanilla MC. It would be a lot of data for an item with limited use, which is one of the reasons I think this idea is a little over the top for this dilemma. It does have extended use though.) Locks could be "picked" by other players by guessing the key's code, allowing looting. However, as most players would probably use top tier materials to protect their most prized possessions, there would be the risk of creating a key that doesn't have any use while trying to lockpick. (Difficulty would change based on how many different materials were required, which would be decided on by the modder; it would be less difficult to break in if the only variable was tooth pattern, but if a gem, wood, metal/alloy, AND tooth pattern were required there could be thousands of potential combinations.) Upon death, all keys in a player's inventory are destroyed. If they've used a high tier metal to create their key, they'd have to be ready to "waste" more to get back into their stuff. This would likely force them back to lower tier materials, as their best stuff would be locked away to prevent theft. If the materials they use are difficult to get, they might even have to rebuild from scratch if they aren't prepared. The punishment of death, being locked out of your good items (and possibly even your house, vault, village, or kingdom), would be balanced against the penalty of leaving your items unlocked and unguarded, allowing for theft and griefing. This also rewards players who are willing to keep track of their keys. This doesn't really solve the specific problem presented in the OP, haha. Oops! I'm with the people who are for motivation to work through starvation rather than punish those who die. Then again I usually play on peaceful and farm sooo my vote doesn't really matter. I think this one is my favourite though: