How to Keep Your Inventory on Death

By default, dying drops a player’s entire inventory and held XP at the death location, where it despawns after 5 minutes if nobody picks it up. The keepInventory gamerule turns that off — players respawn with their inventory and XP intact, and nothing drops.

Enabling It

bash

gamerule keepInventory true

Run that from the panel’s Terminal tab — no / needed. In-game it’s /gamerule keepInventory true, and needs operator permission.

This applies to every player on the server. If you want it to apply to specific players only, that needs a plugin (EssentialsX and several dedicated “per-player keep inventory” plugins exist) — vanilla’s gamerule is all-or-nothing.

Note

Unlike some other gamerules, Java’s gamerule names are case-sensitive — it’s keepInventory, not keepinventory.

Pairing With Immediate Respawn

Even with cheats off, death still shows the “You Died” screen with a respawn button to click through. To skip straight back into the world instead, add:

bash

gamerule doImmediateRespawn true