Grave

A Grave is a type of bones formed by the remains of a dead player. A grave contains the items the player was holding at the time of death, including clothes and any items contained in a backpack or apron which can be removed from the grave.

The name and family history of the deceased character can be seen by mousing over the grave.

Murder Grave
If the player was killed by another player (with either a knife or a bow and arrow), the bones will appear as Murder Grave. Murder graves cannot picked up or moved with a basket like regular graves. However, it turns into a normal grave after 5 minutes.

Baby Bones
Baby Bones are the result of Sudden Infant Death and can be dropped on the ground to get Bone Pile.

Fresh Grave
For all other causes of death, the bones appear as Fresh Grave. After 2 minutes Fresh Grave turns into Grave. Then after 1 hour turns into Old Grave, then finally after another 2 hours disappears from the map.

Using a basket on a grave will get Basket of Bones which can be dropped to get Bone Pile.

Optimal strategy
Since untouched player remains take 182 minutes in total to naturally despawn, it is generally advised to pick them up and move them to speed decay (since Bone Piles disappear after only 120 minutes). A shovel can be used to make a Buried Grave, which further reduces the decay time to 1 hour. However, in most cases the reduced time is not worth the cost of iron. However, burying beloved family members is generally accepted.

Picking up bone piles will reset their decay timer, so it optimal to avoid moving bone piles, as well as Old Graves (which also take 120 minutes to disappear), unless they are in the way.

History

 * v.214 - "New grave-mouse-over feature, which now works for all graves, not just graves for people who died in your lifetime. Family history is now apparent directly inside the game, when you visit the family grave yard. To make this work, the server remembers everyone who ever lived, and keeps a new database of grave positions for each of those people. To prevent this from growing indefinitely, people get "forgotten" after a week, or when the server restarts, and the grave position database is flushed at server startup. But if your family has been around for a while, you will see a lot of family history on the ground."