Devlog

Ship your play: the Capture Kit and a generous creator license

A built-in recorder, screenshots, a cinematic camera, an OBS overlay — and a plain-language license that says yes before we have anyone to say yes to.

Devon Aoki — Rendering · 2026-07-20

If you make something beautiful in Cairn, you should be able to show it off in the next five seconds without installing a single thing. That's the promise behind the Capture Kit, and it ships in every copy of 0.9.

What's in the box

The Capture Kit is built into the game, not bolted on. No plugins, no external recorder, no dance with codecs. Here's the whole kit:

• F2 screenshots. One key, a clean full-resolution frame written straight to disk. The oldest muscle memory in the medium, and we honor it.
• One-key clip recorder. Tap a key and Cairn writes a real .mp4 — an actual encoded video file you can drag anywhere, not a proprietary blob you have to convert later.
• A smooth cinematic camera. Detach from your body and glide. Eased motion, no hand-jitter, the kind of drifting shot that makes a plain stone wall look like architecture.
• A ready-made OBS overlay. It reads the game's live state.json, so your stream overlay reflects what's actually happening in the world in real time — no manual wiring, no stale numbers.

On the rendering side, the thing I'm proudest of is that captured frames match what you see. The cinematic camera renders through the same pipeline as normal play, so your clip isn't a lower-fidelity cousin of the game — it's the game, held still enough to admire.

// state.json — a live window into the world, for your overlay
{
  "biome": "Meadow",
  "phase": "Dusk",
  "held": "Cut Stone",
  "blocksMined": 812,
  "recording": true
}

The license: a yes, in plain language

Here's the part that matters more than any feature. Cairn ships with a plain-language creator license, and it says something simple:

You may monetize your Cairn videos and streams freely. Ads, sponsorships, memberships, whatever supports your work — that's yours to keep, no permission required.

No revenue thresholds. No form to submit. No lawyer-grade paragraph you have to decode to find out whether you're allowed to earn a living. If you filmed it in Cairn, you can put it up and get paid for it.

I want to be honest about why we did this now, because the timing looks strange. Cairn is new. We have essentially no audience yet. Writing an expansive creator license today is not us capitalizing on a wave of streamers — there is no wave. It's a promise made before it's convenient.

Why say yes before anyone's asking

We paid attention to how the most-broadcast sandbox games actually got that way. The pattern is consistent and it's not a secret: the ones that became creator engines gave people explicit, generous rights early — a clear, public "yes, go make money off this" long before it was obviously in their interest. Creators build on foundations they trust, and trust is cheapest to establish when you have nothing to lose and hardest to fake once you do.

So we're doing the honest version. Not "we love creators" as a slogan, but a written license you can read in one sitting, granted while we're small enough that it's clearly a value and not a marketing calculation. And you keep your rights across all of it — a free .jar to download, Cairn Plus if you want the cosmetic block skins, Cairn Cabins if you want your worlds backed up on our servers. None of that changes the deal on your videos. The deal is: they're yours.

This license is a promise, not a receipt. We don't have the numbers to prove it paid off. But when you show up, the door will already be open, and it'll have been open the whole time.

Go make something. Then show us.

— Devon