Mapcrafter vs Prismarine Viewer

Mapcrafter is free, GPL-licensed software that renders Minecraft worlds as images for viewing in a web browser with Leaflet.js. It offers top-down 2D and isometric 3D views, four world rotations, and day, night, and cave render modes. Overlays can display details such as slime-spawn and nighttime-monster locations, and markers can be generated from world data. Configuration files control which worlds are rendered, the views, and other rendering parameters. Listed capabilities include biome colors, incremental rendering, and multithreading.

Mapcrafter runs on Linux and Unix-like systems such as Mac OS; Windows support is experimental. Building it requires a C++ compiler, CMake, make, and libraries including libpng, libjpeg, and Boost components. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available. It supports offline viewing, server maps, and dimension maps, and requires Anvil world format and Minecraft 1.6 resource packs. The maintainer says new feature development is no longer possible, although issues and pull requests may still be addressed.

Prismarine Viewer is a free, web-based viewer for Minecraft servers and bots, available through API, self-hosted, and web use. Mineflayer mode serves a page showing a bot’s surroundings in first or third person and provides drawing functions; lines and displayed primitives can be replaced or erased by ID. Standalone mode visualizes a world without a bot, while headless mode renders a bot’s view for streaming to a file or over TCP. The project lists Minecraft support from 1.8.8 through 1.21.4; other versions in the same major use textures and models from the closest supported version. Online-mode servers can show wide or slim skins and capes when skin data is sent. Examples connect Mineflayer with proxies, Electron, Python, and WebSocket proxies, and export world areas as screenshots or 3D models. Server maps, live updates, and a 3D map view are supported. Install with `npm install prismarine-viewer`; the repository uses the MIT license. Mineflayer and standalone default to six chunks and port 3000.