Charon's Echo

Death, reimagined. When you die, your items don't scatter — Charon takes them. A soul-fire portal rises where you fell, and your ghost must cross into Charon's Echo, an endless dusk-lit graveyard dimension, to stand at your own grave and settle with the Ferryman. Every death digs a headstone. The graveyard is the history of your server.

Built for the CurseForge Minecraft ModJam 2026 — "Echoes of the Past."

The death loop

You die. Your body lies in state for a minute — friends can kneel and lay a Charon's Obol on you to pay your fare.
You rise as a ghost — invisible but for a wisp of soul-fire, tethered to where you fell, until you walk into the portal.
You arrive at your own grave in Charon's Echo, and touch the stone. Charon offers three ways back:
- Pay the fare — one Charon's Obol (craft: echo shard + gold + soul sand, soul-bound through death; or buy from the Broker's orchard, below).
- Pay the toll — a cut of your XP.
- Take the oath — enlist in the War Below the Moon and pay with time.
Resurrection at the stone — items, XP, and a portal home to where you fell. Beds never mattered.

The world of the dead

Server-side only — vanilla Java clients and Bedrock players (via Geyser) join with no client mod and no resource pack.
A unique graveyard per world — monochrome hills seeded from your world: pale moss, gravel scree, sculk vales, a winding river, hand-built withered trees, and grave fields that spiral outward as the dead accumulate, each behind its own lych gate with a living ledger sign.
The church on the plateau: the Broker sells Stygian Seeds, the Scrivener hands out free books so the dead can write their stories, and the Book of the Dead rests on the lectern.
The crypt grows with the dead — beneath the church, seven day-shelves hold a rolling week of the fallen, and the first death of every month breaks the seal and carves that month's hall. A year-old server has a corridor twelve halls deep.
Grave books and flower tributes — the Scrivener hands out free books; write your death story into your stone. The living shift-click flowers onto graves (one per mourner — the only color in this world), and the most-mourned soul is crowned Death of the Week.
Memorials, not lists — everywhere the dead are recorded, they appear as their own head, with their date, cause, grave location, and flowers. Click a memorial to read their story, or (from within the graveyard) walk straight to their stone.

The Stygian Orchard

Buy a Stygian Seed from the Broker and plant it in the overworld. It grows (in its own time) into a withered tree that hangs Tollfruit from its chains — sculk seals each fruit, then it ripens into glowing amber. Four Tollfruit craft one obol. The tree drops nothing else, ever: felling it (netherite axe, a slow ritual) returns only its seed. Wild elders in the graveyard bear fruit too — the one thing the living may take from the dead's world. And some trees are more than they seem.

The War Below the Moon

An eternal three-sided war, fought at the newest grave field: iron golem and creaking Keepers hold the yards, the risen Restless tear at them, and the Hollow Wind raids both. The war cannot see the living — walk through it untouched. Only the enlisted dead are real to it: take the oath, receive a loaned kit, fight (enemies downed shave your sentence), and serve out your clock for a free resurrection. Enlisted players of opposing banners can fight each other — defeat costs service time, never items. Filled fields become settled ground; the front marches on.

In the works / coming soon

The hand-built crypt — the current stairwell and halls are carved by code; a full hand-built crypt kit (stairwell, week room, month halls, seals) will replace them piece by piece.
Fences and ruins — hand-built fence sections will replace the plain pale-oak fence around grave fields (the system is already wired), and ruins of the folk who came before will join the scattered wilds.
The war leaves marks — contested ground will show who holds it: sculk creeping over Restless-held yards, Keepers cleansing it — and when a field fills, its final state freezes as the war's permanent record.
A moonlit sky — an optional skybox with real moon phases over the eternal night.
More of everything — headstones, trees, gates, and whole style families (sets) grow over time; server builders can author their own in the Studio today.
A Minecraft 26.1.2 build and formal Bedrock/Geyser verification.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.2 (Fabric)
Fabric API — that's it; sgui is bundled inside the jar

Every timer, price, cap, and war knob lives in config/charons-echo.properties, written as a documented manual.

For builders: the Studio

All landmark builds (headstones, trees, gates, the church, crypt pieces) are hand-built structure templates, authored in the Studio — a flat builders-only world:

/charon studio — enter (gamemasters and rostered gravekeepers only; add builders with /charon builder add <player>)
Build inside a plot outline; your build's front faces its label sign. You may dig below grade — coffins, roots, floors, and foundations ship.
/charon plot new <category> <name> stakes a plot, /charon export [name] captures it, /charon place <name> reviews it.
Sets (style families): /charon set new <name> [size], with a trust/approve/reopen lifecycle. Each graveyard region draws from ONE set.

EXPORT = SAVE. Studio builds are just blocks; templates are forever. The Studio self-restores every exported build at server start.

License

MIT