Named Item Preserver

This mod gives mechanical meaning to naming items by bringing them closer to how named mobs behave in vanilla Minecraft.

In vanilla, naming a mob prevents it from despawning. Naming an item does nothing. Named Item Preserver closes that gap — deliberately, minimally, and with survival parity in mind.

Current state

Status: Alpha
Current version: 0.1.2 Minecraft version: 1.21.10 — 1.21.11

This mod is ready for testing and is already used on a real server.
No known bugs at the time of release, but this is an alpha release — expect that issues may exist and that behavior may change between versions.

Core behavior

• Items with a custom name do not naturally despawn
• Named items carried or equipped by despawned mobs are dropped instead of disappearing with the mob
• Unnamed items behave exactly like vanilla
• No teleportation, no chunk loading, no item recovery systems

If a player takes the effort and cost to name an item, the game should treat it as intentionally kept.

Optional behavior

Certain features are available to be enabled in config:

• Displaying the name above the dropped named item
• Container destruction handling (named items released when containers are destroyed)

What this mod does not protect against

This mod is not an item safety or recovery system.

Named items:

🔥 still burn in lava
🕳️ are still lost in the void
💥 are still destroyed by explosions or other vanilla mechanics

If vanilla would destroy the item, this mod will not interfere. Only natural despawn is prevented.

Feedback & visibility

The mod includes optional feedback mechanisms related to named items. It can provide logging or chat messages when a named item is:

• dropped
• destroyed
• picked up

These are intended for administration and debugging, not player tracking or recovery, and are configurable. By default, only the most important events trigger notifications, and messages are sent only to the server log.

Planned features

Further features are planned, including:

• Conditional location broadcasting for named items
• Particle or visual indicators tied to named-item events
• Dowsing Pendulum item as a way to use functionality above
• Translations

Important constraints:

• All additional features will be fully configurable
• All will be disabled by default
• The mod will remain usable as a minimal “despawn parity” mod without enabling extras

No roadmap, timelines, or guarantees are implied.

Compatibility & limitations

This mod is written for Fabric and Minecraft Java 1.21.10 and later (as time permits).

This mod does not intentionally break compatibility with other mods. However, item despawn and entity lifecycle logic are commonly modified areas, and conflicts are a known limitation of modding at this level.

Compatibility with other mods that alter item despawning, entity behavior, or container mechanics is not guaranteed. Overlapping behavior may occur and is expected.

Support, issues, and expectations

I have a full-time job. This mod exists because I needed it for my own SMP and decided to share it.

🐞 Bug reports are welcome
✨ Feature requests will likely be ignored unless accompanied by a clean pull request
🔧 Compatibility fixes are not guaranteed

I will do my best to keep the mod correct and stable, but this is not a service, contract, or obligation.

There are:

❌ no donations
❌ no Patreon
❌ no paid support

As a consequence, there are:

❌ no warranties, explicit or implied
❌ no promises that should be considered binding
❌ no quality assurance

AI usage disclosure

This project makes use of AI-assisted tools (including ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot) for tasks such as:

• sanity checks and reasoning validation
• smart code completion
• repetitive or boilerplate work
• searching documentation and prior art

The core logic, design decisions, and all important or unique implementation details of this mod were written by the author. All code was reviewed by the author. The icon was commissioned from a human artist. If this mod ever contains additional artwork, it will be created by humans.

AI tools are used as productivity aids, not as autonomous code generators.

If you prefer to avoid mods developed with the assistance of AI tools, please make an informed decision and refrain from using this project.

License, reuse, and charity clause

This project is distributed under a dual licensing model.

Third-party code, templates, and tooling provided by the Fabric project, Fabric API, and the official Fabric project generator remain licensed under their original licenses and are not affected by the charity clause.

All original code written by the author of this mod is licensed separately under the charity license included in this repository. In short:

If you benefit financially from this mod — directly or indirectly — pay it forward to a charity of your choice, in an amount you consider fair.

You are permitted to reuse, modify, and redistribute the author’s original code, provided the charity clause is preserved in full and unmodified.

Incorporation of the author’s code into projects released under well-established open source licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0, GPL, LGPL, MPL, etc.) is not automatically granted, but is explicitly welcomed as a discussion. Please ask — I will probably say yes. This requirement exists only to prevent silent removal or bypassing of the charity clause, not to restrict legitimate open source collaboration.