Servers

Installing

Put Hindsight in the server’s mods folder (with Fabric API on Fabric), and give it to your players too. The server records the block history; each player’s game plays timelapses back.

Players without Hindsight can still join and play normally. They just can’t watch timelapses, and they’re left out when someone shares one.

Session replays are separate: they’re recorded in each player’s own game and don’t need anything on the server. See recording replays.

Settings

The settings are in config/hindsight-server.properties, created with the defaults the first time the server starts. Restart the server after editing.

What to record

Setting	Default	What it does
recordPlayers	true	Blocks players place, break and change.
recordExplosions	true	Blocks destroyed by explosions.
recordPistons	true	Blocks moved by pistons.
recordMachines	true	Blocks moved by other mods’ machines, like Create’s contraptions.
recordOther	false	Everything else: fluids, crops, leaves, fire, redstone and other mods. Noisy, and makes the history much bigger.
recordBuilders	true	Where players stand while they build, for ghost builders. A few KB a minute per builder.
ignoreBelowY	-10000	Skip changes below this height. 0, for example, ignores deep cave mining.

Storage

Setting	Default	What it does
retentionDays	0	Deletes history older than this many days. 0 keeps it forever.
maxStorageMb	4096	A cap on each world’s history folder, in MB. The oldest history goes first. 0 means no cap.

History is kept in the world folder under hindsight/. Old history is cleaned up when the server starts and once an hour after that.

Timelapses

Setting	Default	What it does
maxAreaSize	320	The longest side a timelapse area can have.
detectRadius	96	How far from the player the build detection looks.
maxPlaybackChanges	500000	The most changes sent for one timelapse. Beyond this, the oldest are left out.

Sharing

Setting	Default	What it does
allowShared	true	Lets players share timelapses with everyone nearby.
sharedNeedsOp	false	Only operators can share.
sharedRadius	64	How far from the area other players can be to join a shared timelapse.

Commands

Command	Who	What it does
/hindsight	Everyone	A short help message.
/hindsight timelapse	Everyone	The same as the timelapse key.
/hindsight milestone add <name>	Everyone	Marks a milestone here and now.
/hindsight milestone list	Everyone	Lists milestones near you.
/hindsight milestone remove <name>	Everyone	Removes milestones with that name near you.
/hindsight stats	Operators	History size and change count for each dimension, and the timelapses running now.
/hindsight purge <days>	Operators	Deletes history older than that many days, straight away.

“Operators” means permission level 2 or higher, the same level as vanilla commands like /gamemode.

Fair use

A timelapse can only cover an area near the player who starts it (within twice detectRadius), so nobody can read the history of builds on the far side of the map. History lookups are limited to two a second per player and run off the main server thread, so they don’t hold up the game.

Singleplayer

Everything above works the same in singleplayer, where your game is the server. The settings file is in your game’s config folder, and the history is in your world’s save folder, so it’s copied along with the world.