I figured true death occurs when something changes your natural state to something which cannot survive on it's own.  For example: if you die of old age, or stay in the Death Realm too long, then your natural state is an old person about to die; if you go too close to the crystal, than your body is transmuted, so your natural state might be a big hunk of lead.  In either case, you'd die before you completely revived, so you never show up in either Death Realm or Yliakum.

(I'm not on the settings team, so I'm talking through my hat, but it makes sense...)

A somewhat more definite hint is the experience bar and progression points.  You fill up the experience bar to gain a level and get a progression point.  At higher levels, it takes more experience to fill the bar.  The fact that the level is never displayed anywhere as a number doesn't mean Planeshift is a levelless game.  If you really want a number, use the total number of progression points your character has earned over his/her lifespan.

pretty sure that's changed... I remember getting a message like "You must be at least level n to mine x."  I think gold is level 3.  Pretty sure I can mine tin, but it's not worth much and I'd have to find it first (and since I just leveled up, I get no practice points, so it's a lot of work for little benefit).  Even apple picking is a faster way of earning trias than coal mining.

Cool! Somebody else actually read that book!  Was wondering when that would pop up...

In Riverworld though, there were consequences, and actually those same consequences kinda make sense for Planeshift... There's always a chance a consumer or other critter could find your body before it was disposed of...

Lot's more than 5, and some stuff ain't simple...

Grouped by topic and in decreasing order of simplicity

Techy:
1. switch between windowed / fullscreen and change resolution in game (not just setup program)
2. keep previous map loaded (not all maps, just the last one you were on) and/or preload nearby regions in the background.
3. select items by name ("/target next Apple" or "/target next item Apple")
4. add a command to put items in containers ("/put sack Apple" or "/put sack" to put the targeted item in the sack)
5. loops and conditions for shortcut macros.  I'd have the maximum number of repetitions required for any loop so you don't end up with infinite loops.
Apple picking macro:
/loop 50
  /target next Apple
  /if target_name Apple
    /put Sack
  /else
    /break
  /endif
/endloop
loop at most 50 times, target an apple, if an apple was selected, put it in a sack in your inventory, if an apple wasn't selected (no more apples) break out of the loop
6. crouching / sneaking players should be treated as though they are shorter than when they are standing (so that, for example, players other than dwarves can pass through the tunnel at the bottom of the Laanx dungeon)

NPC:
1. backup quest data and NPC status to the database (see [url href="http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=29306.msg343753#msg343753"]here[/url])
2. cannonicalize user input for NPCs ([url href="http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=29813.msg343510#msg343510"]here[/url])
3. NPCs should sometimes resell the items they buy from players (if someone who normally only sells carp buys apples, they should (sometimes) sell those apples, or something made from them).
 Especially armor and weapons.

Monsters:
1. random descriptions for monsters (generate it when spawned, not when clicked, so that you can identify a specific monster by its description (like, for example, if the same monster kills you repeatedly, you could decide to wait till someone else finally kills it off and it respawns, hopefully weaker))
2. (some) monsters should heal over time like players do
3. have well defended monster generators, not spawn points (like a rats nest, or a thieves' hideout and a recruiter which turns harmless peasants into thieves or whatever, etc).  More realistic than having a creature simply appear out of thin air.  See [url href="http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=29726.msg343761#msg343761"]here[/url].
4. Monsters/NPCs should sometimes fight amongst themselves.
5. monsters should level up if they live long enough (GMs have a command to kill the unkillable already I think...)

Maps:
1. move the region boundary between the sewers and Hydlaa's main map near the outpost back to the broken barrier.  Too easy to switch regions accidentally while fighting rats and fanatics near there and the load time is way too long when heading out and back in.
2. kill monsters (not just players) that fall to the bottom of the Death Realm.  Sometimes, if the server's been running for a while, all the monsters will have fallen to the bottom of the world and just wander about there harmlessly.
3. make Death Realm bottomless. At the moment, you can fall against a supporting pillar and survive, then walk down the pillar to the ground, which then tells you you've fallen to your death.  It would make more sense to have a player fall off the pillar, then pass through an invisible membrane which kills them.  Their body would keep falling, but the player would be dead and transported back to the beginning before it hits the actual bottom of the world.

Items:
1. footstool:  something a player can carry around and stand on to get at something that's too high to reach (like the apples in one of Harnquist's trees)
2. use only one type of tree as apple trees, or have different types of trees produce different types of fruit.  The apple trees around Harnquist's look like they're several different types, but they produce only one type of apple.

Why doesn't the server backup NPC status in the database?  At least then when the server goes down the NPCs won't forget everything (unless you rebuild the database...).

It wouldn't need to constantly query the database whenever someone talks to an NPC:  just load the status info once on startup, then use a background thread to post updates to mysql.