How to find where you died in Minecraft easily

It's Minecraft's near-unavoidable fact; at some point, if you're playing Survival Mode, there is a good chance you're going to die.

It's frustrating, even more so when it happens at the wrong time. In vanilla Survival Mode, players lose all their items upon death. Depending on how nice those items are, death can be significantly more or less problematic. Dying and losing a few starter items is a lot less of a headache than dying in a Nether Fortress or The End with all of your enchanted weapons and armor laying at a risk of de-spawning.

Players attempting to find their way back to their items after death have a few methods at their disposal.

Minecraft: The main ways to find items after death

In vanilla Minecraft, finding one's items after death is a straightforward pursuit, albeit being different degrees of complexity depending on the circumstances. If a player dies in a remote area, it's likely much tougher to get back to their items before the five-minute de-spawn timer is up. Without mods or chat coordinates, vanilla Minecraft players will have to rely on their memory of the surroundings to find their items.

Here are some tips to help remember surroundings and find a player's death location:

When venturing away from your shelter, mark the path as you go with something simple such as torchest or distinguishable blocks such as dyed wool.
If there are nearby structures such as villages or temples, make a mental or even physical note of where it is relative to the player's position before death. Finding the structure can still be tricky, but it at least gives some bearing to the player if they do manage to spot it.
If there are indeed structures near where the player has died, crafting a map may be beneficial. A large enough map will point out structures in the seed, whether player-made or automatically generated by Minecraft's engine.
If the player has their F3 menu open on Java Edition, the coordinates will remain on the screen after the death screen appears. This can allow players to write down their coordinates and backtrack to them if needed.
When all else fails and the player has died in the open, it doesn't hurt to stand on the tallest height they can find and looking around with view distance turned up as high as their hardware can handle.

In addition to these tips, there is a large selection of mods that document where a player has died. Either by placing a beacon or tombstone in the world, marking their map or giving them coordinates in their in-game chat.

Minecraft mods that help players find their way back to their items include:

Death Finder
Death Beacon
Corpse Mod
Death Point
Corail Tombstone

These mods take some figuring out to implement them into single-player or multiplayer servers, but they are invaluable when it comes to finding your precious items before they are lost to the Minecraft abyss forever.