The core loop
Dying does not scatter your gear on the floor. It captures the lot into a soul vault, which can never be dropped and never be duplicated, and puts you in purgatory. A rebirth key returns you and everything you were carrying to the exact spot you fell.
You get one free key per account, ever. After that, no key means the soulmine, a prison-style second game built specifically to catch the players who would otherwise close the game and not come back. The brief was grindy enough to keep playing, rewarding enough that it never feels dry, and the soulmine is where those two pull hardest against each other.
Cross-platform is a design constraint, not a checkbox
Console and mobile players share the world with desktop players. They cannot type command arguments the way a desktop player can, which quietly rules out the interface pattern that most server plugins are built around.
Every interface in the server had to be designed so it works by clicking rather than typing. That constraint reached back into the mechanics themselves, not just the menus.
Built clean-room, and tested like software
None of it is lifted from my earlier plugin work, because that code belongs to a different server. Forty-nine modules covering death, seasons, leaderboards, an economy, NPCs, land claims and staff tooling, with an automated acceptance suite of roughly 2,000 checks so that a change to the economy cannot quietly break the death handler.