The modern core can save short, playable reconstructions of server observations for staff investigations. They use a separate recorder and format from the existing deterministic case-check replay. No client mod is required. The first recorder is restricted to native Paper 1.21.11; it is not available in the portable staff adapter, other native releases or Folia. Updating the website alone does not add recording support to an older plugin JAR.
Staff workflow
- Pair the Minecraft server with its website workspace as usual.
- Open Players → a player → Gameplay replays. Retained clips can be watched after logout.
- For an online, unprotected player, a web moderator/admin/owner can choose Save replay snippet and enter a reason. The request saves the available recent buffer and captures a short period after the trigger. Keep the dialog open or return to the list later.
- Open Evidence → Inspect → Watch gameplay replay for a case's automatic snippet, when available.
- Use Play/Pause, the time slider, speed control, Orbit/Top/Player view cameras and event jumps. Player view follows recorded yaw/pitch at a fixed standing eye height; it is not the player's exact camera.
- Read partial-data warnings, timestamps, ping and event details before taking a moderation action. Download replay data saves JSON for the investigation, not a rendered video.
Starting a new capture requires moderate web capability. Watching retained clips requires read.
The relay rechecks membership and capabilities before dispatch, and Minecraft rechecks its own
policy and protected-player rules. Capture requests are audited. Website roles do not grant
Minecraft permissions.
In Minecraft, staff with forgeguard.staff and forgeguard.recordings can open a player's GUI and
choose Save replay snippet. Visual recordings shows retained capture information, and a case
has a Visual recording entry. Use the linked website to watch the 3D reconstruction; playback
inside a Minecraft world is not implemented by this version.
The manual request has a stable recording UUID. If the connection fails, Retry same capture resubmits the original ID and reason. The console keeps that pending request in this tab's session storage. While the original record is retained, an identical request returns it and a different payload under that ID is refused. Do not issue a fresh request simply because the first response was uncertain. Retention is not an indefinite idempotency ledger.
What is captured
- Player position, yaw/pitch, health, ping and on-ground state at up to 5 samples per second.
- Up to 12 nearby entities per sample, including their observed positions and bounding dimensions.
- Nearby loaded block materials, once per second, within a configurable bounded volume. Known air is explicitly recorded; omitted cells mean unknown, unloaded or missed under budget.
- Event markers for findings/manual triggers and supported gameplay events such as swings, attacks, damage, block placement/breakage, teleport, death and disconnect.
- The case association, capture limits, timestamps and partial-data warnings.
The viewer uses simplified coloured blocks and entity shapes. It does not record client textures, resource packs, skins, exact block shapes/states, inventory contents, chat, sound, screen video, private cheat menus or X-ray rendering. Events and poses are sampled, so a fast action may fall between observations. A server-observed attack/damage marker does not reconstruct every client animation or prove an illegal hit. Orbit cameras can reveal captured nearby blocks/entities that were outside the player's visible screen; this does not establish what the player could see.
Interpolation is a display aid between eligible adjacent samples. It is suppressed for gaps, world transitions, large jumps and paths crossing recorded solid or unknown cells. Entity positions remain sampled. The viewer identifies stale/missing world snapshots and never invents unseen terrain. Use event timestamps and original samples for an investigation; visual playback is not a new cheat verdict.
Budgets and configuration
Defaults under recordings: in the modern config.yml:
recordings:
enabled: true
automatic: true
pre-seconds: 10
post-seconds: 5
maximum-players: 16
maximum-pending: 16
radius: 4
vertical-radius: 3
maximum-entities: 12
sample-budget-micros: 3000
maximum-clips: 1000
maximum-disk-mb: 128
retention-days: 7
Changes to these infrastructure settings require a server restart. This preserves one capture contract for each active clip. Pre/post duration accepts 1–10 seconds; player and pending budgets accept 1–16; radius 1–4; vertical radius 1–3; entity count 0–12; cooperative sampling budget 500–5,000 microseconds; retained count 10–1,000; disk budget 8–512 MiB; retention 1–30 days.
web.allow-moderation must also be enabled to start captures from the website. Turning it off
does not remove retained clips or turn off automatic case recording. Recorder health appears in
Server health, including sampling skips, dropped capture triggers and persistence failures.
At defaults, the world volume is at most 9×7×9 cells per snapshot. The rolling buffer covers at most 16 tracked players at once, and up to 16 clips may collect their post-trigger context. This is a bounded first implementation, not continuous full-world recording or a guarantee that every player on a large server is always buffered. Capacity misses are reported; a refused automatic capture does not stop normal anti-cheat evidence collection. A newly tracked player cannot have a complete prior 10 seconds of footage.
The sampling deadline is cooperative: it stops further sampling between API operations. It cannot interrupt one Bukkit call or guarantee a maximum server tick time. World/entity collection runs on Paper's main thread; serialization, reads, atomic writes and retention run on a bounded background worker. No unloaded chunks are deliberately loaded for a recording. Validate the overhead on the actual server workload before increasing any allowed budget.
Each encoded clip is capped at 1.5 MiB, within the web relay's 2 MiB result-body bound. If necessary, whole observations are omitted and the result is marked partial; JSON is never byte-truncated. Recordings use their own retention limits. A case may remain after its visual clip has expired.
Capture state and failure handling
recording means the initial snapshot is committed but post-trigger recording or final persistence
has not completed. ready means the final clip was committed without a recorded completeness loss;
it still has all the inherent sampling and scene limits above. partial means available observations
were saved with explicit completeness warnings. It never means that missing observations were rebuilt.
Short prehistory, disconnects, shutdowns, sampling gaps, missing scene cells, event/byte limits and other capture omissions can produce partial data. After a restart, a committed initial snapshot from an interrupted recording is recovered as partial. A storage failure must be reported rather than shown as successful playback. Keep normal server backups if evidence must be preserved beyond retention.
The website automatically checks pending clips for a bounded period and then offers a manual check. Close a viewer to stop its animation, listeners and pending UI refreshes. A stale response cannot replace a newly opened dialog or another server's investigation.
The public console's examples are labelled synthetic demo throughout. They are generated in the browser, never sent to Minecraft and never used as live evidence. Existing cases with movement-only traces cannot be retroactively converted into world recordings.
See Website integration for the routes and version-1 clip schema.
Verification for this implementation
The September 24, 2026 development build passed 199 Java tests, six universal-source permission contract tests and 224 website/API/renderer tests. Seven isolated native checks ran on Paper 1.21.11 with PacketEvents 2.13.0 and a generated Minecraft client. They verified actual pre/post movement, changing stone/gold/air snapshots, nearby entities, trigger/teleport events, request idempotency, manual-capture policy, automatic case association, deterministic replay compatibility and persistence through a real Paper restart. A second check captured and retrieved a ready clip through the updated persistent local console and confirmed the same-ID retry returned the existing recording.
The native harness is scripts/visual-replay-live-smoke.mjs; it requires the existing local Paper,
dependency and test-client fixtures and creates an isolated loopback server. The exact tested core
SHA256 is 31536a9ee90b3547816891e075afb609ad6e9193097b195772a901308217fa69.
These checks do not qualify other Minecraft versions, large player populations, every gameplay
mechanic or long-running production performance.