Minecraft’s 15w37a snapshot has brought a new feature to Hardcore mode for the recently deceased. The update allows hardcore players to spectate their world upon death, rather than the world being permanently deleted, encouraging the ghosts of players to explore the world they’ll never be able to set foot in again.
Mojang’s Nathan Adams announced the feature on Twitter, explaining that a new gamerule will allow spectating players to still generate world chunks as they explore. Typically upon death chunks will not generate, but this new rule allows a spectator mode that will continue to allow some limited exploration.
It took *so much* work, but finally there's a gamerule "spectatorsGenerateChunks" (default true). It does what the name implies 🙂
— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) September 10, 2015
With this, Hardcore mode will now turn you into a Spectator (that cannot generate chunks) after you die.
— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) September 10, 2015
The rule can, of course, be altered to turn off the feature, for those with more conservative opinions on how spectator mode should work.
Snapshot 15w37a is live for Minecraft 1.9 now.