The Very Best, Credit Best, Recent Best, and Current poses, as seen in Open/Share Solutions. (Composite image.)
Recent Best is one of four poses that are automatically saved in Foldit. As the name suggests, Recent Best contains the best-scoring recent pose.
Unlike the other automatically saved poses, Current, Credit Best, and Very Best, Recent Best can be saved manually or by a recipe. In the Foldit user interface, there's a Set Recent Best ("Set Rcnt Best") which saves the current pose as the Recent Best. The function recentbest.Save does the same thing in a recipe.
Like the Credit Best and Absolute Best poses, the Recent Best pose can be restored, replacing the current pose. There's a Restore Recent Best ("Restore Rcnt Best") in the Undo menu, or recentbest.Restore in a recipe.
Restoring the Recent Best pose is different than restoring Credit Best or Absolute Best. Foldit automatically compares the current score to the saved Recent Best score. If the current score is higher, the Recent Best pose is not restored. Many recipes rely on this conditional logic to keep track of the best score. The same logic can also be used when hand-folding.
Recent Best and the other automatically saved poses are available in the Open/Share Solutions menu when "show auto and quick saves" is checked.
The term "recentbest" is used in recipes. In the Foldit Lua interface, the recentbest library allows recipes to access the recentbest pose.
The automatically saved poses are saved in ir_solution files, see Foldit file and directory structure for details.