Graves

Carry a light. If a creeper, lava or fall damage kills you, a grave appears where you died with your things inside, and it holds them until the light burns down. For a while only you can open it. Die in a fight and it's plain Minecraft.

Your first light is free

The Necromancer keeps the gate at the Graveyard on Lantern Hill, behind Moonfall Castle. The dead are his trade, and his lights are what hold a grave together. Stop by and he'll give you a Vigil Candle, tell you how it works, and open his store for you after that. One free candle per player, and it's yours alone.

Getting more lights

• Craft Vigil Candles at any crafting table: any candle in the top middle, a bone on each side of a gold ingot in the middle row, and three gold ingots along the bottom. One recipe makes one candle.
• Buy them from the Necromancer: Vigil Candles for $250 each, Reaper's Lanterns and Soul Lanterns for Coins.

The lights

The Reaper's Lantern is named for the scythe the Necromancer carries.

A lantern also puts a page in your grave saying what you carried, and hangs a lantern over it that glows for you alone, so you can spot it in the dark. Nobody else sees that lantern.

Lanterns are bound to you: they won't burn for anyone else, and they can't be traded or sold. When the last use is gone the lantern is burned out but stays in your inventory, and the Necromancer will light it again: 20 Coins a use for a Reaper's Lantern, 30 Coins for a Soul Lantern.

Which light burns

• Right-click a light in your hand to light it. A lit light burns first. Right-click again to put it out.
• Hold a lit light to see in the dark. With a dynamic lights mod (the Aurelune Pack has one), a lit light in your hand or offhand lights up the ground around you like a torch. Unlit and burned-out lights stay dark.
• With none lit, the cheapest burns first: a candle before a lantern, so a lantern's uses aren't spent where a candle would do. The Necromancer's store has a switch to burn your best light first instead.
• Only lights in your inventory, hotbar and offhand count, not ones packed in a shulker box, a bundle, a backpack or your ender chest.
• Your lights always stay with you when you die, the one that burned and all the rest, fights included.

When a grave forms

With a light, in the Overworld, the Nether, the End or the Deeper Dark:

• A head appears where you died, with a line over it ("A candle burns here") and how long it lasts. You get one chat line saying so.
• Died on the Nether roof? The grave forms far below you, straight down at the first spot with room for it, and it uses a light like any other. Only if there's no room at all below does no grave form.
• Walk back and right-click it to take things out, or sneak and break it to get everything back at once, armour straight back on. The experience it held comes back to you too.
• Once the owner-only time is over, anyone can open it. If someone does, you'll hear about it.
• When the light burns down, the grave crumbles and your things spill onto the ground there, where they vanish after the usual five minutes.
• Type /graves to see your graves: which world each is in, how long it keeps, and whether it's still locked to you. There's no teleport and no map marker: the way back is yours to find.
• Died in someone else's claim? You can open your grave and take things out, but you can't break it.
• The timer stops while the server is down, so a restart doesn't eat your time.

When no grave forms

Your things drop as they always do in Minecraft, and no light is used:

• In a fight. Killed by a player, dying within 30 seconds of a fight, or logging out mid-fight: no grave. Graves are for deaths to mobs, lava and fall damage, never a way out of a fight. See Warzones.
• No light on you. The first time, you'll get a line pointing you to the Necromancer.
• Three graves already waiting. Go and fetch some first.
• The void. It keeps what it takes.
• The Nether roof, with no room anywhere below. Rare, but then there's nowhere to put a grave.
• Outside the survival worlds. No graves at spawn (the dungeons included), in the lobby or in the arcade.

Lava is fine: the grave forms beside it, not in it.

What never goes in a grave

• Legends (gear you named at an anvil, see /legend), keepsakes and trophies drop at the grave as items instead of going inside, even when they're packed in a shulker box or a bundle.
• Items with Curse of Vanishing or Curse of Binding, and Soulbound items, do what they always do when you die.
• Your lights, which stay with you.