Pixelmon: Cinematic Camera

“I’m too lazy to move my mouse during battles, do it for me. With style.” 😎

A side-mod for Pixelmon that replaces the stiff, player-controlled battle camera with one that actually directs itself.

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⭐ So what does it do? 🤔

|| _I’m realizing now my footage for these gifs was TERRIBLE and isn’t doing the mod justice, whoopsies._ ||

Pixelmon’s normal battle camera just sits wherever you left it, or you’re the one dragging it around with your mouse trying to get a decent angle while your Pokémon is getting hit. This mod throws that out and puts a real camera director in charge instead.

It watches the battle and moves on its own. Idle moments get a slow orbit around the fight. Picking a move gets an over-the-shoulder shot looking at your opponent. Attacks get the camera sweeping in behind your Pokémon and tracking the hit. Crits and big damage get a punch-in with some screen shake. Nothing is you fighting with the camera anymore, it just happens.

Singleplayer or server-side, it needs zero setup, and if you ever want the old camera back, one config toggle switches it off.

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🎥 The idle camera actually moves 🎬

|| _Seriously, how did I not realize my sample footage was this garbage?!_ ||

No more staring at one frozen angle for the whole fight. When nothing’s happening, the camera slowly orbits the battle, and every so often it cuts to a different shot, sometimes a wide view of both Pokémon, sometimes it swings in on yours, sometimes it swings over to the opponent’s.

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🎯 Over-the-shoulder when you’re picking a move 📸

Open up the move menu and the camera settles in behind your Pokémon, looking past it at whatever you’re about to fight. Feels like you’re actually standing there deciding what to do instead of watching two sprites from a random angle.

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🥊 The camera follows the hit 💥

Once a move actually goes off, the camera sweeps from behind your attacker toward the target and settles in close for a second. Landed something big? Crit, super effective, the works? You get a screen shake and a quick zoom punch to sell it.

Every hit type has its own shake strength in the config: normal hits are subtle, crits and 4x weaknesses hit harder, status effects just get a light wobble. Faints, mega evolutions, and dynamaxing all get their own dramatic framing too, because those moments deserve more than a static camera.

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📺 Your Pokémon isn’t hiding behind the HUD anymore 🖼️

This one’s small but it bugged me enough to fix properly. Pixelmon’s battle HUD eats the bottom chunk of your screen, so a camera aimed at dead-center puts your Pokémon half behind it. This mod actually measures where that HUD sits and lifts the framing so your Pokémon lands in the open space above it instead. It adjusts on the fly to your GUI Scale too, so it’s not just eyeballed for one resolution.

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🔧 Config for basically everything 🔨

Pretty much every number this mod uses is exposed and tweakable.

From there you can:

_1. Turn the whole thing off and fall back to the vanilla camera_

_2. Adjust orbit speed, radius, and how often the idle camera cuts_

_3. Change FOV for each phase, command select, attack sweeps, impacts, battle end_

_4. Tune shake intensity per hit type_

_5. Set how long the camera holds a shot before it’s allowed to switch_

_6. Adjust how long glides and returns take_

You don’t need to touch any of it. The defaults are already set up to feel right out of the box.

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🗃️ Versions, Compatibility and Other Nerd Stuff 🛢️

• Made for Minecraft: 1.21.1 on NeoForge. If you’re on an older Pixelmon version, this isn’t ported for that, but the code’s open source if you want to take a shot at it yourself.
• Requires Pixelmon 9.3.16. Current version as I write this, I’ll try to keep this page updated as Pixelmon moves on.
• You need to actually be in Camera perspective for this to do anything, Pixelmon already lets you cycle your battle view between Player, Pokémon, and Camera, this mod just takes over once you’re in Camera mode.
• Works fine alongside my MANY, I REPEAT MANY, other Pixelmon side-mods.

The camera itself only needs to be on the client. For the full experience though, crit and super-effective shake specifically needs the mod on the server too, since that’s where the hit actually gets detected before it’s sent to your client. Singleplayer doesn’t need to worry about any of this, it’s all one process anyway.

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🪲 Bugs and questions 🙌

Run into something broken, a weird camera angle, or just have a suggestion? Open an issue on GitHub and I’ll take a look.

• GitHub: github.com/ccdelic1
• My other mods: modrinth.com/user/ccdelic

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❤️ Thanks to the Pixelmon team 😁

None of this exists without Pixelmon. This mod is just repainting a camera inside a game the Pixelmon team spent years designing, building, and keeping alive. Genuine thanks to everyone on the Pixelmon dev team for the work they’ve put into it and for still supporting it this far in. Go check out the base mod, it’s the reason any of this is possible.

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Made for the Pixelmon community by CCDelic.