Mapcrafter vs Tectonicus

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.

Tectonicus generates a detailed, zoomable map from a Minecraft Java world by building a 3D model and rendering map images. Its stated aim is to make maps resemble what players see in Minecraft. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows; maps can be viewed offline or served from a web server. Setup involves downloading a release, preparing an XML configuration file, and running the program from the command line with Java. Later runs using the same options are quicker after the initial render because only changed tiles are rendered. Players can filter which signs appear, and signs marked with #view can create first-person views with configurable height, angle, field of view, and nighttime rendering. Release 2.31 supports Minecraft 1.21 through 1.21.11, but not Minecraft 26.1. It also adds rectangular world subsets and arm64 LWJGL libraries for M-series Macs and possibly other ARM systems. Generated images can consume gigabytes of disk space depending on world size; WebP or JPG output and closestZoomSize can reduce storage use. Copper golem statues do not work, and shelves render only partially.