Originally posted by haize:

Same thing happened to me twice, but I had alt-F4'd right after I died both times so I was partly to blame. Still, it seems the game saves your player inventory at a different point than it does grave markers / corpses, so in my experience it's absolutely possible to completely lose your corpse due to some kind of bug.

It's not a bug. It's your lack of understanding how the save system functions. And I don't mean that in any kind of insulting way- Please don't take it that way.

Your player inventory is saved constantly. Your world is only saved every 20 some odd minutes or immediately upon logout. (You know that .5-3+ second freeze up that happens every 20 mins? That's the game saving.)

By Alt+F4ing, You're not giving the game a proper shutdown sequence- It doesn't get to save. So, Any world changes since the last save are voided entirely- Which, unfortunately, includes the addition of your gravestone to the world. Your character, however, having been saved when you died and updated to be empty (since it saves constantly), will still reflect that loss.

Keep that in mind going forward. That said, Console commands exist. Add -console to your launch parameters, load into a world, press F5, type 'devcommands' and you can spawn in whatever items you're missing (although some of the naming conventions are a bit daft, imo. You can google a list.)