I'm running a small multiplayer server and I've had trouble with this too. I have the death item timer set to 1 hour instead of the default 10 minutes, but I've had very inconsistent results. Sometimes items stay as long as expected, sometimes they despawn in 10 minutes or less, and sometimes I find very old death piles when traversing chunks that haven't been loaded in a while. I wanted to keep this run vanilla, but I've been wondering if the player corpse mod is the best way to go? I am not sure if it is yet compatible with 1.21.4. I'd like my troops to have a good time and I think losing hard earned items is discouraging them.
