AFK Cinematic

Your idle screen, directed.

Step away from the keyboard and Minecraft stops just standing there. After twenty seconds of no input, music fades in, cinemascope bars slide down, and the camera lifts off your character into a sequence of composed shots — a close three-quarter portrait, a long lens from a distant ridge, a look down through the branches from a nearby treetop. Every few seconds it cuts to a new one.

Touch the mouse and control is yours again instantly, while the camera glides back into your own view behind you.

What makes it different

The camera never moves. No slow drifting orbits, no swooping crane moves that leave you queasy when you glance back at the screen. Each shot is a still, held frame — the camera picks a spot, looks at you, and stays there until the cut. It reads like an edit, not like a screensaver.

Every shot is checked before you see it. A camera dropped blindly into a forest ends up inside a leaf block, behind a trunk, or nose-first against a dirt wall. So each placement is tested twice: once for a clear line of sight to you, once for open air along its own view direction. Eight directions and four distances are tried until one passes. You are visible in the shot, every time.

Each viewpoint has its own lens. A twenty-block shot at normal field of view leaves you an unreadable speck — so the distant ones switch to a telephoto that keeps you legible and compresses the landscape behind you into flat layers. Close shots go wide instead, exaggerating the space around you. This one detail is most of the difference between a screenshot and a shot.

Composed, not centred. You are framed slightly low and off to one side, leaving room for the world above and behind you.

It cuts like an editor. Never the same viewpoint twice in a row, and never two shots of the same size back to back — a close-up never cuts to another close-up.

Features

• 20 viewpoints — over the shoulder, three-quarter, profile, overhead, treetop, distant ridge, and five pure landscape shots that look out at the world rather than at you
• 6 colour grades — Cinematic (teal shadows, warm highlights), Warm, Cold, Vivid, Noir, Off
• Cinemascope bars that slide in, sized to taste
• Your own music — any Ogg Vorbis file
• A soft landing — the camera, the lens and the bars all travel home together when you come back
• Three camera modes — cutting between fixed viewpoints (default), one held viewpoint, or moving shots if you want orbits and crane moves after all
• Clean frame — hotbar, crosshair, chat and even the block-selection outline are hidden while it runs
• Shaderpack aware — detects Iris and stands its own grade down, so you never get two grades stacked

Client-side. Singleplayer by default.

No server install, no server permission, nothing sent to the server and nothing required of it. This mod only changes what your own client draws.

It stays out of the way in multiplayer. By default it does not trigger on servers at all — a camera that takes over while you are stood in the open on someone else's server is a good way to come back dead, and plenty of servers treat idling as a punishable offence. Turn on trigger.onServers if you want it anyway, or just run /afkcinematic start the moment you actually want it.

Coming back

Any real input — mouse, key, click, scroll — returns control instantly. There is no wind-down you have to sit through. The camera then glides from wherever the shot was into your own view over about a third of a second, with the field of view and the letterbox bars travelling with it.

That last part matters more than it sounds: a telephoto shot snapping straight back to normal is the single most jarring thing a mod like this can do.

Prefer a hard cut? Set trigger.returnSeconds to 0.

Commands

• /afkcinematic start — start it right now, no waiting
• /afkcinematic stop — end it
• /afkcinematic status — show the current idle timer

Client-side commands — they never reach the server.

Configuration

All of it lives in config/afkcinematic-client.toml, written on first launch. The ones most people change first:

There is also a title card (visuals.titleCard) showing your name, the track and the shot name — off by default, since it is the one thing that looks like UI rather than film.

Using your own music

The mod plays whatever sits at assets/afkcinematic/sounds/afk_theme.ogg inside the jar. Minecraft only reads Ogg Vorbis, so convert first:

ffmpeg -i yoursong.mp3 -ac 2 -ar 44100 -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 afk_theme.ogg

Replace the file in the jar with a zip tool, and set music.trackTitle so the right name shows if you enable the title card. Only use music you have the right to use.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.0 or newer
• Client only — do not install it on a server, it does nothing there

Works alongside Iris and Sodium. No other dependencies.

Notes

The cinematic ends the moment you move, look around, press a key, click, scroll, or open any screen. That is deliberate: it should never cost you a single moment when you come back. If it is interrupting you while you read something in-game, raise trigger.afkSeconds.

Standing in flowing water or being shoved by a mob will not cut it short — the idle check tolerates small drift, but not real input.