# The Universe of Discourse

Wed, 10 Oct 2018

Minecraft makes maps in-game, and until now I would hold up the map in the game, take a screenshot, print it out, and annotate the printout.

Now I can do better. I have a utility that takes multiple the map files direcly from the Minecraft data directory and joins them together into a single PNG image that I can then do whatever with. Here's a sample, made by automatically processing the 124(!) maps that exist in my current Minecraft world.

Notice how different part of the result are at different resolutions. That is because Minecraft maps are in five different resolutions, from !!2^{14}!! to !!2^{22}!! square meters in area, and these have been stitched together properly. My current base of operations is a little comma-shaped thingy about halfway down in the middle of the ocean, and on my largest ocean map it is completely invisible. But here it has been interpolated into the correct tiny scrap of that big blue map.

Bonus: If your in-game map is lost or destroyed, the data file still hangs around, and you can recover the map from it.

Source code is on Github. It needs some work:

• You have to manually decompress the map files
• It doesn't show banners or other markers
• I got bored typing in the color table and didn't finish
• Invoking it is kind of heinous
   ./dumpmap  \$(./sortbyscale map_*) | pnmtopng > result.png


Patches welcome!