Let Me Despawn

Let Me Despawn (LMD) fixes one specific and common cause of entity lag: a mob that picks up or equips an item from the ground stops despawning naturally, sometimes for good. LMD restores the normal despawn check for those mobs and drops the item back on the ground first, so nothing is lost. A mob a player has named with a name tag stays protected from despawning, exactly as it does in vanilla.

Two builds share the Let Me Despawn name

Let Me Despawn exists as two separately maintained builds under one project. The original plugin for Bukkit, Paper, and Purpur has not been updated since 24 November 2022 and stops at Minecraft 1.19.3. A newer line ships as a server-side mod for Fabric, NeoForge, and Quilt, most recently updated on 3 September 2026 with a build that reaches Minecraft 26.2 and covers 26.3 snapshot testing. A server on current Paper or Purpur cannot use the plugin build at all; only the mod line supports modern versions.

What Let Me Despawn changes

In vanilla Minecraft, any mob that picks up or equips an item from the ground becomes persistent and will not despawn on its own, even far from every player. On a survival server, or a modded world with heavier mob spawning, these persistent mobs build up over time and add to entity-related lag. Let Me Despawn removes that persistence flag for mobs that gained an item this way, letting the normal despawn timer apply again. The picked-up or equipped item drops back to the ground when the mob despawns, so a mob that grabbed a player's dropped gear does not permanently remove it from the world.

Installing Let Me Despawn and the Almanac dependency

Every build of Let Me Despawn requires Almanac, a shared utility dependency from the same creator, installed alongside it on the server. For the legacy Bukkit build, install it the same way as any other Paper or Spigot plugin. Let Me Despawn is server-side only. Nothing needs to go on the client, and Modrinth marks client-side support as unsupported.

• On the current Fabric, NeoForge, and Quilt build (version 1.2.1 and later), settings live in config/letmedespawn.json.
• Reload that config without restarting the server using /almanac reload.
• /letmedespawn add <mobName> excludes a mob type, so it keeps vanilla persistent behavior.
• /letmedespawn remove <mobName> removes a mob type from that exclusion list.

Compatibility with similarly named projects

Two similarly scoped projects are not Let Me Despawn and should not be confused with it. LetThemDespawn, distributed on Hangar by a different creator, karmuss, has no connection to Let Me Despawn (LMD) by frikinjay beyond a similar name and a similar goal. Despawn Tweaks, a separate Fabric, Forge, and NeoForge mod by another creator, Txni, fixes several broader cases where mobs are wrongly prevented from despawning; Let Me Despawn covers one narrower case, a mob that picked up or equipped an item. The two were not built to run together, but nothing about either one rules that out.

Server owners chasing entity lag more broadly often pair Let Me Despawn with mods that target a different part of the same problem, such as Clumps for merging experience orbs into fewer entities, Lithium for faster mob AI and tick processing, or the spark profiler for finding which entities or plugins are actually causing the lag.

Let Me Despawn in a plugin showcase

Mini plugin showcase of Let Me Despawn

Watch on YouTube