Making a timelapse

Open a timelapse of the build you're standing in, frame it, choose how long it lasts and who watches. Plus what Hindsight records, and what it doesn't.

Build timelapses need Hindsight on the server as well as in your game. In singleplayer, your game is all it needs.

From the moment Hindsight is installed, it records every block change in the background. There’s nothing to set up and no recorder block to place. When you want to see a build come together, you stand in it and press one key.

Open it

A cottage rebuilding itself, with the people who built it at work.

Stand in or next to the build and press ’, or type /hindsight timelapse.

The key is the one just right of ;: the apostrophe on UK and US keyboards, Ä on German ones and ù on French ones. To change it, go to Options > Controls > Key Binds and look for Timelapse this build under Hindsight.

Hindsight looks for recorded changes up to about 96 blocks around you and picks out the build closest to you. Blocks only a few blocks apart are joined into one build, so a walled courtyard counts as one: the walls connect it. A separate build down the road, like a tower or a windmill, isn’t pulled in. If you want both, push the sides out to take it in.

If nothing has been built near you since Hindsight was installed, chat says so.

Frame it

The outline around the build, a side moved out, and the length picked.

A glowing outline shows the area, and a panel on the right shows its size, how many block changes it holds and who built it.

West, East, Bottom, Top, North and South: - pulls that side in, + pushes it out.
Move sides by switches between moving sides 1 block or 8 blocks at a time. Use 8 for big builds.

The numbers update a moment after you stop clicking. An area can be up to 320 blocks along each side (servers can change this).

Choose how to watch

Watch: just me, or Watch: everyone nearby to show it to the players around you. See watching together. If the server has sharing turned off, the panel says so.
Length is how long the whole timelapse takes, from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. A build that took a month and one that took an afternoon both fit the length you pick. Long breaks between building sessions are skipped, so the timelapse never sits still while nobody was building.

Press Start. The area clears back to how it was before anyone built there, then rebuilds itself. Cancel or Esc closes the panel without starting.

To learn the controls while it plays, see watching a timelapse.

Only your view changes

Leaving a timelapse half-way: the real build is back at once.

The blocks in the area are swapped on your screen alone. The world, the server and other players are never touched, and the real blocks come back the moment you leave.

You stay where you were while it plays. Even if the floor under you hadn’t been built yet, you won’t fall.

What gets recorded

Players placing, breaking and changing blocks: building, digging, buckets, opening doors, lighting fires and anything else a player does to a block directly. Anything that drops off as a result, like a torch on a wall you break, counts too. Each change remembers who made it.
Explosions. When a player caused one (TNT they lit, for example), the changes are credited to them.
Pistons, including where pushed blocks land, so piston doors and flying machines replay properly. In the timelapse, the blocks slide into place.
Create contraptions and the blocks they move.
Where builders stand. While a player is building (and for 20 seconds after their last block), where they stand and look is saved, so timelapses can show them at work as ghost builders. Nothing is saved while they’re just walking around.

Hindsight works with modded blocks too: they’re recorded and rebuilt like any other block.

Not recorded, unless the server turns it on

Water and lava flowing on their own (the source block a player placed is recorded).
Crops and trees growing, leaves decaying, fire spreading, snow, ice and other natural changes.
Redstone and other mods changing blocks on their own.

Server owners can record all of these with recordOther. It’s noisy and makes the history much bigger, so it’s off. Entities such as item frames, armour stands, paintings and mobs aren’t part of timelapses. See servers for every setting.

Where the history is kept

History lives in the world folder, under hindsight/, compressed. Even a big build with 100,000 changes takes only a megabyte or two. By default it’s kept forever, with a cap of 4 GB per world; when the cap is reached, the oldest history goes first. Servers can change both.

In singleplayer the history is in your save folder, so it goes wherever the world goes.

A very busy area shows its latest 500,000 changes (servers can change this). Chat tells you if older ones were left out.