Setting Up a World to Safely Test Death Messages

If you want to hunt down the mod's 35+ unique death messages without losing your gear, experience levels, or travel progress, adjusting a few vanilla game rules makes testing painless.

Preparing Your World Rules

Before testing combat or environmental hazards, confirm that chat announcements and inventory protection are enabled:

1. Open chat and run /gamerule showDeathMessages true so every exit prints visibly on screen.

2. Run /gamerule keepInventory true so you keep your cookies, books, axes, and armor upon respawning.

3. Place a bed right next to your testing area or mob pen and click it to set your spawn point, eliminating long walks back between attempts.

Customizing Killer Names in Solo Play

Combat lines in Death Knell dynamically populate both the <victim> and <killer> placeholders. If you do not have a second player on a multiplayer server to help test generic combat variations or item kills, rename a Name Tag at an anvil and use it on a captured hostile mob. Whenever that mob defeats you, your custom name will appear in the <killer> slot in chat.