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✨ Inspiration

SoulKeeper is the spiritual successor of DeadSoulsKT — rebuilt from scratch with a clean multiplatform architecture, async-first design, and a strong focus on reliability. Where DeadSoulsKT laid the foundation, SoulKeeper brings production-grade persistence, rich visual feedback, and cross-platform support to the same beloved mechanic.

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💀 How Souls Work

Creating a soul

The moment you die, SoulKeeper silently intercepts the death event before anything hits the ground. Your entire inventory and a configurable portion of your dropped XP are captured and stored in the database as a soul — nothing is scattered across the floor.

A burst of red particles and a resonant bell signal that your soul has been born. The soul appears as a shimmering particle cloud with a floating nameplate — "Soul of <Your Name>" — right where you fell.

Souls spawned in The End are clamped to a minimum Y so they can never sink into the void.

Picking up a soul

Just walk close — no right-click, no shift, no interaction. As soon as you enter the soul's range, it detects you and begins transferring:

Signal	Meaning
🔵 Cyan dust particles	Soul holds XP
⚪ White dust particles	Soul holds items
🔔 Beacon ambient sound	Soul is nearby — follow the sound
🟣 Purple smoke + anvil sound	Inventory full — items still remain
✨ Bright flash + extinguish sound	Soul fully collected and gone

Items flow back inventory-slot by inventory-slot. If your inventory is full, partial pickup works: XP is absorbed, whatever fits goes in, and the soul persists with only what remains — no items are ever dropped or lost because of a full bag.

Soul lifecycle

Death → [PRIVATE] ──── soul_free_after ────▶ [PUBLIC] ──── soul_fade_after ────▶ [DELETED]
           │                                      │
      Only owner                           Any player
      can collect                          can collect

State	Who can collect	Default timing
🔒 Private	Owner only	Immediately after death
🔓 Public	Any player	After soul_free_after (default: 2 days)
💨 Gone	—	After soul_fade_after (default: 14 days)

Background workers (FreeSoulWorker, DeleteSoulWorker) run on a configurable tick cadence and advance souls through this lifecycle automatically — no cron jobs, no restarts, no admin action needed.

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🗃️ Krates — Backup Storage

Every death also writes a Krate: a standalone YAML snapshot of the soul, saved to disk independently of the database.

plugins/SoulKeeper/
  deaths/
    <player-uuid>/
      <epoch-second>_0.yml   ← first krate
      <epoch-second>_1.yml   ← second krate (if retry occurred)
      ...

Krates are a last-resort safety net. Even if the SQLite database is lost, corrupted, or rolled back, an admin can restore any dead player's exact inventory from the krate file — zero database interaction required.

/soulkrate <uuid> <epoch-second> <index>

This reads the matching <epoch>_<index>.yml krate file and deposits its items directly into the requesting player's inventory. Use it when:

• A database failure occurred during a busy session
• A player was rolled back by an external tool
• Items need to be restored from a specific past death

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🚀 Features

🔄 Fully non-blocking

Every heavy operation — soul creation, pickup detection, database reads/writes, background worker loops — runs on Kotlin coroutines dispatched to background threads via KotlinDispatchers. The main game thread is never touched for I/O.

🛡️ Safe, explicit failure paths

Database operations return kotlin.Result<T>. Failures are logged at the call site and skipped gracefully — they never crash the server, silently eat items, or leave souls in a broken state. Concurrent DB writes in Sou✨aoImpl, the pickup loop in PickUpWorker, and death event handling in ForgeSoulEvents/BukkitSoulEvents are each guarded by their own Mutex.

📦 Krate safety net

A file-based snapshot is written on every death independently of the database. Items cannot be lost in a catastrophic DB failure.

🎨 Fully customizable effects

Every particle (type, color, size, count) and every sound (ID, volume, pitch) is independently configurable per event type. Six sound cues, five particle effects — all tweakable without touching code.

⏳ Configurable soul lifecycle

soul_free_after and soul_fade_after are plain duration values. Set them to seconds, minutes, hours, or days. Background services poll reactively from a config Flow — changes reload live without a restart.

📈 Partial pickup

If your inventory is full when you reach a soul, XP is collected first, then as many items as fit go in. The soul survives with the remainder. Walk back once you have space — nothing is ever force-dropped.

🏷️ Virtual floating name tags

Floating armor-stand nameplates ("Soul of <Player>") are sent as virtual entities via PacketEvents on Bukkit — no real entities are spawned into the world, so performance is unaffected regardless of soul count.

🔔 Proximity soul calling

A SoulCallWorker tracks every online player's position. When a player enters soul_call_radius blocks of a soul they can collect, ambient sounds and particles begin pulsing — guiding them back even in complete darkness or deep underground.

🌍 End dimension safety

Souls spawned in The End are clamped to endLocationLimitY so they never fall below the island floor and become unreachable.

📑 Paginated soul browser

/souls lists all visible souls with owner name, coordinates, age (formatted as "X days ago"), and item/XP indicators. Admins see clickable [FREE] and [TP] buttons inline. 5 souls per page; prev/next navigation included.

🗄️ Versioned database migrations

DatabaseMigrator carries all schema migration steps. Upgrading the plugin never requires manual SQL — migrations run automatically on startup.

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⚙️ Configuration

All settings live in config.yml inside the plugin data folder and are hot-reloadable via /skreload.

# Database file path (SQLite)
database: ...

# Soul becomes publicly collectible after this duration
soul_free_after: 2d

# Soul disappears permanently after this duration
soul_fade_after: 14d

# Radius (blocks) within which a soul emits sounds/particles to guide its owner
soul_call_radius: 100

# Fraction of dropped XP stored in the soul (0.0 – 1.0)
retained_xp: 1.0

# Minimum Y for souls in The End (prevents void loss)
end_location_limit_y: 0.0

# Show floating "Soul of <player>" name tags above souls
display_soul_titles: true

# How PvP deaths are handled
# NONE        – PvP deaths create no soul
# EXP_ONLY    – soul holds XP only
# ITEMS_ONLY  – soul holds items only
# EXP_AND_ITEMS – soul holds everything (same as normal death)
pvp_behaviour: NONE

🎵 Sounds

Every audio cue is independently configurable with id, volume, and pitch:

Key	Default sound	Trigger
collect_xp	entity.experience_orb.pickup	XP absorbed from soul
collect_item	item.trident.return	Items absorbed from soul
soul_disappear	entity.generic.extinguish_fire	Soul fully collected
soul_dropped	block.bell.resonate	Soul created on death
soul_calling	block.beacon.ambient	Soul pulsing near owner
soul_content_left	block.anvil.place	Inventory full, items remain

🌟 Particles

Every particle effect is independently configurable with key, count, and optional dust_options (RGBA color + size):

Key	Default color	Trigger
soul_items	White #FFFFFF	Soul contains items (continuous)
soul_xp	Cyan #00FFFF	Soul contains XP (continuous)
soul_created	Red #eb3437	Burst on soul creation
soul_gone	Yellow #FFFF00	Burst on full collection
soul_content_left	Purple #a103fc	Inventory full warning

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🛠️ Commands

Command	Description	Permission
/skreload	Hot-reload config and translations	soulkeeper.reload
/souls [page]	List your souls (5 per page)	(none)
/souls [page]	List all server souls	soulkeeper.all
/souls → [FREE]	Force-free any soul immediately	soulkeeper.free.all
/souls → [TP]	Teleport to a soul's location	soulkeeper.teleport
/soulkrate <uuid> <epoch> <index>	Restore items from a krate file	soulkeeper.load

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🌐 Multiplatform

SoulKeeper ships a separate fat-jar for each supported platform. All core logic — soul lifecycle, pickup detection, database, background workers, commands — lives in shared platform-agnostic modules. Only event wiring and item serialization are platform-specific.

Platform	Jar	Minimum version
Paper / Spigot	soulkeeper-bukkit.jar	Paper 1.21.1
Forge	soulkeeper-forge.jar	Forge 1.21.1
NeoForge	soulkeeper-neoforge.jar	NeoForge 1.21.1

Pick the jar for your platform and drop it in — the same soul data, the same commands, the same behaviour everywhere.

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🎬 Preview

On death — soul created

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ec5f1437-0dab-404f-a4a8-725ee1cd9129

Returning — soul collected

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/75f58f92-7d13-4c23-a7fb-b2d89476748b

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⚠️ Known Incompatibilities

• Plugins that cancel or heavily modify PlayerDeathEvent (Bukkit) or the equivalent drop events (Forge/NeoForge) may prevent soul creation. Items may not be captured correctly when those plugins are present.

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🐛 Support

1. Reproduce the issue in a clean environment (no unrelated plugins/mods).
2. Collect the full server log from startup through the issue.
3. Join our Discord and open a ticket in #support.

💡 Feature Requests

Open a ticket in #suggestions on our Discord and we'll discuss it before creating a GitHub issue.

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