Jacob’s Video Tapes

FINAL ENTRY, 1990: DO NOT WATCH.

Versions: Forge 1.19.2 / 1.20.1 / 1.21.1 – Fabric 1.20.1 / 1.21.1

Author: jacobfromnm

Requires: Fabric API (Fabric only). Cloth Config is optional and adds an in-game settings screen.

This mod was made to pair perfectly with its sibling mod Jacob’s Audio Tapes. With the two installed, they share one tape, so the sound and picture glitch together!

Overview

This mod aims to capture the analog look of the pre-00s era – like watching the kind of footage you’d find on an unlabelled tape found at the back of a closet. Smeared color, rolling tracking errors, a REC timecode in the corner, and a progressively worsening tape.

Features:

• Client-Side Only
• Camcorder Picture: Smeared colour, grain, soft focus, interlacing, head-switch noise and a faded colour grade (with a few other grades to pick from).
• Worn-Out Tape: Tracking errors rolling through the picture, dropouts, skew, signal loss, flashes of the colour-bars test card, and a tape that slowly wears out the more you play a world.
• On-Screen Display: A REC timecode counts your play time, with a 90s date stamp sitting in the corner.
• The Deck: Joining a world plays the tape in from a blue PLAY screen, pausing freezes the frame, sleeping fast-forwards and dying hits STOP.
• Be Kind, Rewind: Hold [ to wind the tape back (up to 10 seconds) and let go to play on from there. Died? The death screen has a Rewind button too. Only you get rewound, not the world, and anything you traded with the world jams the tape so nothing can be duplicated. But every rewind damages the tape in that world for good, so lean on it too much and it stays a mess. Single-player only.
• Handheld Camera: The camera sways in your hands, shakes when you jump, land or get hurt, takes a moment to adjust to the light, hunts for focus, and can zoom with a key (Z by default – you can tweak this in Minecraft’s settings). Prefer a chest-mounted bodycam? There’s a style for that.
• Filters and Photos: Press ] to flip through the camcorder’s filters (black and white, night green, red, negative, poster, neon, and tiled triple and grid shots), and \ to take a photo of the tape without the HUD, saved to screenshots/jacobsvideo.
• Amplified Darkness: Nights and caves are darker, and light sources will dynamically light up the area around you. Light Reach sets how far any light pushes into the dark, so the shadows between torches stay black. If you already use True Darkness or another dynamic lights mod, those will take precedence.
• Escalation: Picture quality gets worse at night, in the dark, underground, at low health and the longer you play, with the occasional sudden spike. All configurable.
• Presets: A few baked in: Subtle, Normal or Cursed (good luck) from the config screen or with /jacobsvideo preset.
• Config File: Customize the effect strength, how calm the tape is on a good day and how bad it can ever get, what makes it worse, every picture/tape/camera effect, the on-screen display (including the date), the darkness, held lights, and how far back (and how costly) the rewind is.

Spoiler / Hints

Warning:

This mod has flickering, rolling and flashing picture glitches, plus handheld camera sway and shake. If you’re sensitive to flashing images or motion sickness, turn those down (or off) in the config before diving in!

Feedback/Suggestions are welcome – thanks for checking it out, I hope it adds to your experience!

Known Bugs:

None known at the time – please report if any are found.

Check Out My Other Mods!

Jacob’s Audio Tapes

It Follows (Inspired by the film “It Follows”)

The Witch

Shh – The Sleep Demon

Click. (Inspired by the film “Hereditary”)

Lisa (Inspired by “P.T.”)

Presence (An Ambient Horror Mod)