Death

Health reaches zero, the screen prints a line drawn from a large pool of death messages, and a Tombstone is thrown out from where you fell. It tumbles until it finds a flat two by two gap, then plants itself with your death message and the date written into it. If there is no flat space, it gets wedged and sits there until it despawns, which is worth remembering before you go hunting for one in a cramped cave system.

On current versions a cross also appears on the minimap at your most recent death location, and the respawn countdown and the amount of coins you dropped are printed under the death text.

You respawn at world spawn, or at the last Bed you claimed, holding half your maximum health or 100, whichever is higher. Mana comes back at whatever it was when you died, since it stops regenerating for a corpse. PvP deaths break the pattern and return you at full health and mana, and that includes killing yourself with your own explosives.

The respawn timer keeps running while you are away. Quit the world and the remaining time is saved, then compared against the real-world clock when you load back in, so a few minutes elsewhere puts you straight back on your feet. There is also a genuine edge case worth knowing: recall items reuse the respawn code, so if a teleport home resolves on the exact tick you die, you skip the timer entirely.

• Classic drops coins only, and it counts each inventory slot on its own, rounding up. Forty copper spread one per slot drops all forty, because half of a single coin rounds up to one. Stack your money before a risky trip.
• Mediumcore drops the whole inventory including ammo and money, but your maximum health and mana stay where you built them.
• Hardcore drops everything and then deletes the character permanently. You become a ghost that can move, watch and chat, but cannot touch anything in the world.

Nothing in storage is ever affected. A Piggy Bank, Safe or Void Vault keeps its contents through any death in any mode, so the real answer to coin loss is to stop carrying coins at all.

• Trying to escape the Wall of Flesh by teleport once it has caught you. Horrified is not survivable, and a Magic Mirror or Recall Potion becomes the thing that kills you rather than the thing that saves you.
• Blinking again with the Rod of Discord while Chaos State is still up. Each use takes a flat chunk of health and it will finish you off without warning.
• Paladin's Shield in multiplayer, which routes part of a teammate's incoming damage into you, and the Companion Cube, which stabs its owner on its own schedule.
• Smashing an altar at 1 health. Every swing costs health, and the game will not stop you from taking the last one.
• Touching the bottom of the world, or in a Remix world, rising off the top of it.

In a group boss fight, the last player standing should stop attacking and start running. Bosses despawn when nobody is close to them, and a full wipe throws away the entire attempt including whatever summoning item paid for it. Thirty seconds of pure evasion while your team respawns is worth far more than the damage you would have squeezed in.

When you come back, check the minimap before you re-engage. In Expert Mode, enemies that picked up your dropped silver and then despawned leave a coin marker showing exactly how much is sitting at that spot, so you can collect on the way in rather than making a second trip.

Dig for the tombstone, not for the loot. It lands near where you went down and your dropped items land with it, so it is the fastest marker you have on the ground. The minimap cross only tracks the most recent death, so if you die again on the way back you have lost the original location for good.

On Mediumcore and Hardcore, treat the recovery run as its own trip. Keep a spare set of gear in a chest at home, equip it, and then go, rather than sprinting back unarmed past whatever killed you the first time.

• Carrying more than 10 gold at the moment of death spawns one of five golden tombstones instead of the ordinary one.
• A projectile kill names the projectile, not the thing that fired it, which is why the log occasionally claims greek fire killed you rather than the enemy that threw it.
• Falls, drownings and lava deaths each pull from their own message pool, so the line you get is a readable clue about the cause even when you were not watching.