Dodge Cruel Death

The mod injects code into the dropItem method of Minecraft's Entity class. The injected method, named onDropItem, runs after the original method has created and returned the dropped item entity, so the change applies only once the item exists. It receives the dropped stack, whether the item was thrown randomly, whether the entity keeps ownership of it, and a callback object that exposes the original method call and its return value.

When the injected code runs, it first checks whether the dropped item entity is still alive. If it is not, the method returns without doing anything. If it is, the mod sets the item's age to Short.MIN_VALUE + 1. Setting the age to exactly Short.MIN_VALUE would make the item live indefinitely, so the one-step offset leaves the age very low while still allowing the item's lifetime to be counted. The item therefore lasts almost indefinitely.

The mod is published for Fabric only, for the single game version 1.21, and is released under the MIT License as open source. Either side can run it, and neither needs it. Source code and an issue tracker are linked from the project page.