Prismarine Viewer vs The Explorer's Friend

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.

The Explorer's Friend renders a live topographic map of a Minecraft world and serves it from an embedded web server. It runs on a server using Fabric, Quilt, NeoForge, Spigot or Paper, with different builds depending on the platform and Minecraft version. Explored chunks appear as players move through the world; full renders read region files on worker threads without loading chunks. Players can open the map in a browser using vanilla Minecraft clients, without installing a client mod. Separate layers show claims, player positions, markers and Waystones. Claim data can connect to several protection systems or be imported from JSON. Server administrators can disable or round player positions; invisible players and spectators are hidden by default. The server binds to 127.0.0.1 by default and has no built-in account system, so the project recommends a reverse proxy for public maps. Its optional outbound connection downloads the official vanilla client JAR once and verifies it by SHA-1. The MIT-licensed project is free, with live updates, dimension maps and read-only HTTP endpoints.