Camera Mode

Camera Mode replaces the normal interface with a capture tool. Press F4, or click the camera icon above the dye slots in your inventory, and the game hands the mouse over to framing pictures. While it is open you cannot build or use anything. Picking a hotbar slot with the number keys drops you straight back out, as does Escape.

One limit up front: it can only photograph what your map has already revealed. Unexplored ground comes out as solid black in exactly the way it looks on the minimap, so anything you plan to capture has to be walked past first.

The screenshot button takes a plain picture of the visible window with the interface stripped out. Its resolution follows your window size, so resizing the game changes the output, and it can never show more than what is already on screen.

Snapshots are the reason the mode exists. You define a rectangle and the game renders all of it, including the parts well outside the current view. That is how full base shots and whole biome images get made.

• Pin Frame sets the capture area from two clicks, left for one corner and right for the opposite one. The area shows up outlined in white.
• Set Frame lets you grab the edges of an existing frame and drag them outward.
• Reset Frame clears it entirely.
• Take Snapshot renders whatever is currently framed.

Frames can also be drawn on the map screen, which is far easier for anything bigger than one screen. Open the map with M or through the mode's own map button, then drag your rectangle over the region you want. That is the practical route for a base running several screens wide.

• Image Packing on produces one continuous file, compressed and effectively zoomed out, whenever the capture is larger than the screen. Turned off, you get a folder of tiles at true scale that you assemble yourself in an image editor. That is slower and gives you a 1:1 result, which is what you want if the shot is going anywhere near print or a detailed comparison.
• Capture Entities off strips the player, pets, minions, projectiles, town NPCs and enemies out of the picture. This is the setting for clean build photography.
• Capture Background off gives you a transparent background instead of the sky, for images that are going into something else.
• Biome Pick swaps the background art and water color for any of thirteen biomes. It applies to the whole image regardless of what is really there, so a Crimson base can be shot against Hallow water and pastel trees.

Everything goes to a Captures folder inside your Terraria data directory, and the Open Folder button will take you there, but only while the game is running windowed. In fullscreen the button does nothing useful.

• Windows keeps it under My Games\Terraria\Captures in your documents folder.
• On macOS the path is ~/Library/Application Support/Terraria/Captures, reachable through Finder using Go to Folder.
• On Linux look in $XDG_DATA_HOME/Terraria/Captures, which on most systems resolves to ~/.local/share/Terraria.

Large snapshots can take the game down, and the failure case involves wind. If the captured region holds a lot of tiles that react to it, pylons and relics among them, the render can crash outright. The rough threshold is around nine thousand of those dynamic tiles present at once. If a big capture keeps failing, turn the windy environment setting off first, then split the shot into pieces if it still will not go through.