Version 1.4 out now
You walked away. The camera didn't.
You know that moment in a racing game when you put the controller down and the game starts admiring the car for you? Slow orbits, glossy pans, the lens creeping in on a headlight while the sun goes down?
That – but for your Minecraft world.
Step away for a few seconds and AFK Cinema takes the director's chair. The camera lifts off your shoulder, drifts around your character, finds the herd of cows on the hill, follows a villager across the square, lingers on the campfire glow, and pulls back until your base is a speck in the landscape. Letterbox bars slide in, the HUD fades away, a calm soundtrack rises.
Touch the mouse. You're back. Instantly.
1.5 is next: your own music. Drop your .ogg files into a folder and the cinema plays them, on their own or mixed with the vanilla tracks, music discs included.
After that: shots made for the Nether, the End and caves, time of day, a camera that films you fishing – and whatever you ask for in the comments. Half of this list came from there.
Not one spinning camera on a timer – a small film crew with taste.
The slow lens work
Static zoom – the camera rests, the lens breathes in Dolly zoom – the Vertigo shot; the world stretches behind you Pull-away – further and further, until you're part of the scenery Close-up – a portrait, held just a little too long Breathing frame – hand-held stillness, a few centimetres of sway Rise zoom, slide zoom, arc zoom – climbing, gliding, circling while the lens closes in Golden hour – your silhouette against the low sun or moon Tracking – a roadside camera that turns to follow whatever walks past Vista reveal & horizon pan – when the view is worth it, the camera shows you
The classic moves:
Orbit · Push-in / pull-out · Low-angle pan with a touch of dutch angle · Fly-by · Crane up / down · Bird's eye · Over the shoulder
New in 1.4
Sky climb – the camera leaves the ground and keeps going, the lens widening, until your base is a speck and the landscape is the picture. Sometimes it runs the other way and drops out of the sky onto you. Helix – an orbit and a crane at once: around you and climbing, pulling in as it goes. Ground level – the lens down in the grass, looking up at you against the sky, with everything that is normally below the frame in front of it.
And three that are rare on purpose, because they need the right world: Moon – only at night under a clear sky, a long lens that tilts up off your silhouette until the moon fills the frame. Reflection – only where there is open water, the camera skimming a hand's width above the surface. Whip pan – pointed at nothing, then it snaps round onto you, overshoots by a hair and settles.
Every move is eased like a real dolly, cut like a real edit – hard cuts, the occasional fade to black, never the same pattern twice in a row.
Other players building next to you. Villagers on their rounds. Herds, foals, named pets. The zombie creeping up behind you (yes, really). Campfires, lava, beacons, portals, bells, lanterns in the dark – and any machine humming away in your base. The camera scores everything around you, checks the sightlines, and never ends up inside a wall or behind a tree.
Three original ambient pieces – Evening Meadow, Slow Fields, Lantern Light – warm pads, soft kalimba, a slow bass, a long reverb tail. They fade in when the cinema starts and fade out the moment you're back. Vanilla music waits politely. Uses your Music slider, switch it off if you'd rather listen to your own.
Press F9. Or Esc and the AFK Cinema button between Options and Mods, or the Config button next to the mod in the mod list. Tabs, a search box, an explanation under every setting, a Preview now button that starts the camera so you can watch what you just changed, and Reset tab for when you have tuned yourself into a corner. Saved the moment you close it. The file is still there if you prefer it: config/absoluteafkcinema-client.json
Transition – how one shot becomes the next:
| CUT | A hard cut. One frame the cows, the next the village, like a film edit. |
| FADE | Every change goes through black. Calmer, more documentary. |
| MIXED | Mostly cuts, a fade every third shot. The default: all fades gets sleepy, all cuts gets restless. |
Coming back – what happens the moment you touch a key:
| INSTANT | The old behaviour: your view is back on the very next frame. Nothing fancy, nothing in your way. |
| FADE | The picture goes to black, everything is handed back inside that black, and the picture comes back up in your own view. |
| FLY | The camera swings around you on an arc, pulling in as it goes, ends up behind your head and glides slowly forward into your eyes. On the way it turns from whatever it was filming to you, and at the end it is already looking where you are looking. The default. |
| DIVE | The character switch from GTA V: the camera shoots up into the sky, the lens pulls wide, it hangs over the world for a moment – and then drops back down into your head. |
Either flight follows you: start running again and the camera catches up with you instead of landing where you used to be. How long it takes is a slider of its own, from instant to eight seconds.
Every shot has its own slider. New in 1.4: the Shots tab lists all twenty-four camera moves, one dial each. 1.0 leaves a shot as it is, 0 means you never see it again, 2.0 brings it twice as often. Tired of the hand-held sway? Breathing frame to 0 and it is gone. Want nothing but sky climbs? You can do that too.
Everything else lives in the same screen: shot length, letterbox bars and their height, hide HUD, hide chat, dutch angle, zooms, camera distance, how much it prefers zooms over moves, the soundtrack, and a weight per subject category – players, villagers, animals, monsters, blocks, vistas, yourself. Set a weight to 0 and that category is gone.
Fourteen of them: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Not only the labels – the sentence that explains what a setting does is translated as well, so the whole screen reads in one language. Minecraft picks it from your game language on its own, and anything a translation has not caught up with falls back to English instead of going blank.
Every single setting, explained: delinkedde.de/wiki
