Photo mode

F2 takes a picture of the world and downloads it as a PNG, named for the game and the moment it was taken - pilot-matter-20260824-050709.png - so a folder of them is in the order they were flown.

Every overlay comes off for the one frame the picture is taken in: the instruments, the artificial horizon, the minimap, the menus, the warnings, and the settings panel if it was open, whether or not they were showing a moment before. They were never in the picture to begin with - a rendered frame holds the world and nothing that sits over it on the page - but a photo mode whose screen still carried a HUD would be one that quietly lied about the file it wrote. The screen comes back on the next frame.

The key works from the flight, from a paused flight, from the settings panel, and from the start screen, because a picture is of the world whatever happens to be over it. The frame is read back inside the same pass that drew it, since a browser clears a drawing buffer once its frame has been composited; a picture the browser then refuses to download costs the pilot the picture and nothing else.