# World Snapshots When Recap starts a recording, it also takes a copy of the blocks around the player. That copy is what makes a replay look right: the arena, the crater, the half-built castle all come back with the footage. Most of the time you never think about this. Play a recording and the scenery paints itself in around the NPCs, then disappears when they do. It works even in a completely empty world, and it never touches a real block, because everything is drawn just for the people watching. The commands below are for when you want to look at a snapshot on its own. ## How it gets captured Automatically, with every recording, out to 16 blocks. Change that per recording: ``` /recap start arena-take @a --radius 32 ``` The number is how far out from the player to capture, up to 128. `0` turns it off and records the player alone. The same setting decides how many nearby mobs come along. See [[Recap/Server Owners/Features/Recording]]. Snapshots are saved next to the recording in `plugins/Recap/recordings/`. They're compressed, and since most of what's captured is air, they're usually small: a 32-block cube is a few hundred kilobytes. ## Painting one back yourself ``` /recap world apply finals-round-3 ``` The blocks from that recording appear around you. Only you see them. Everyone else sees the world as it actually is, and the real world is untouched. To put your view back: ``` /recap world restore ``` ## What people use it for **Arena replays.** Record a match, then replay it later with all the same craters and broken walls in place, even though the arena has long since reset. **Build cinematics.** Capture a finished build, tear it down for real, and still be able to show it to people afterwards. **Previewing a reset.** Show players what a regenerated mine is going to look like before you actually commit to it. ## See Also - [[Recap/Server Owners/Features/Recording]], where snapshots come from - [[Recap/Server Owners/Commands]], the `/recap world` commands