What do you lose when you die?

[Medina_Rico]

And where does it like to spawn you? The nearest camp? Last camp you touched?

[joridiculous]

your last save where ever that was. If lucky game autosaved where you are
you lose nothing but your dignity

[GlowWorm]

If you are advancing thru the path of a quest, most quests seem to trigger an auto-save when anything interesting happens, and that's the save you will land on when you die. The spot where the auto-save reloads you is typically pretty close to where the auto-save was triggered - for example, in cauldrons there seem to be auto-saves at the beginning of climbing segments, so when you fall to your death you aren't set back too far.

(Speedrunners have found various ways to use auto-saves to bypass segments, by managing to trigger an upcoming auto-save a bit early, and then loading the save to skip past something.)

If you are exploring the open world, it's almost certainly going to be the last time you used fasttravel or hit a campfire, which can sometimes be a long time previously.

[Medina_Rico]

Awesome. Thanks for the info. It'll come in handy.

[Raider Deci]

Time. And maybe a controller , depending on circumstances. Story-missions/cauldrons have some kind of checkpoint-saving going on and out in the wilds you will spawn at the nearest campfire.

[Hydra_360ci]

dying in the open world... most times the game throws you to the closest bonfire, but sometimes it actually uses the bonfire that you last quicksaved to. I have no clue what determines what. In that sometimes I lose about 15 minutes of progress and sometimes I don't lose any progress.

Boss arenas are annoying though... because you often find out after dying that you have the wrong stuff equipped, and the game won't save your changed equipment, it always goes back to the equipment that you first entered the arena with.

And most imporatantly.... do not get all big ego and select ultimate hard mode on ur first playthru... go with very hard maximum. (Ulimate Hard you can't change difficulty, while all the other modes... you can.) Ultimate Hard will one hit instant kill you on what are normally ordinary attacks. Also, you'll shortly discover that all world machines have an invisible leash... and you'll just end up going outside their leash range and just potshot them to death... and then get yourself softlocked in an Arena boss fight, cause you'll have no clue how to acutally fight the thing within it's leash range.

[Thornok]

would have never ever survived any of them games in real life