Shades
Shades, from quackandcheese, is a NeoForge mechanic mod that replaces the usual death drop with a Shade holding the player's items and experience levels.
What it does
When a player dies, a Shade spawns at the death location holding the items and experience levels the player had. Killing the Shade returns them, and the Shade's health matches the player's maximum health, while it can be struck only with the item or weapon that caused the death. If a player dies a second time before defeating the Shade, a fresh Shade is placed at the new death site, while the earlier one vanishes and its contents are gone for good. The mechanic is inspired by the shade system of Hollow Knight.
Several rules are configurable: allowing multiple Shades at once, dropping items when a Shade is replaced, limiting damage to the owner alone, spawning Shades on Peaceful difficulty, showing the owner's name above the Shade, and playing an ambient off-key music box. Shades is client and server, so the server and every player need it. The code is open source under the MIT License, and builds are published for NeoForge on 1.21.1 only, with 1.0.1 as the latest file released 2026-01-16.
Key features
Death shade
A Shade appears where the player died and holds the items and experience levels the player lost.
Shade combat
The Shade's health equals the player's maximum health, and only the weapon or item used in the death can damage it.
Replacing shades
A new death replaces the old Shade, which vanishes with its loot unless the option to drop items on replacement is enabled.
Owner-only damage
By default only the player who died can damage their Shade, and this rule can be turned off.
Configurable behavior
Multiple Shades, Peaceful spawning, owner name display and the music box can each be toggled in the config.
Gallery
Compatibility
Latest build for each game version and loader.
Only full game releases are shown. This mod publishes no snapshot builds.
Questions
Does Shades need to be installed on both sides?
Which loader and game version does Shades support?
Can a player recover items after dying more than once?
In the catalog
Shades is one of 29,952 Game mechanics mods on ModsFinder, and one of 12,140 Game mechanics mods for NeoForge. 32,366 mods support Minecraft 1.21.1.
Similar mods
What the author says
Instead of dropping all of your items when you die, a 'Shade' spawns at your death location, holding all of your items & experience levels. However, it won't just hand your loot over, you have to successfully kill it without dying. A Shades' health matches the value of your max health when you died, and will attack…
Official listing
- Modrinth page
- modrinth.com/mod/shades
- Owner
- quackandcheese
- Published
- 2026-01-14
- Updated on Modrinth
- 2026-01-16
- Facts verified
- 2026-10-15