Minecraft Live Map
A top-down map of your world drawn from its own region files, with live player positions, spawn and world border, on any of the five server types and with nothing installed in your server.
Where it is and what it draws
Open your server and click Live Map in the sidebar.
GameGrid reads your world's own region files and draws one image per region — 512 blocks square, one pixel per block — in the colours Minecraft uses for its own filled maps. A world your players have made a map of in game looks like the same world here.
The map opens fitted to the part of the world that has been explored, and fits again when you switch dimension. North is up, exactly as in game.
Scroll or pinch to zoom, and drag to pan, with a mouse, a trackpad or a finger. The toolbar has − and +, Fit explored, Full screen, Go to spawn and Go to 0, 0, and shows the zoom level and the block X and Z under your pointer. With the map selected you can also use the keyboard: + and − zoom, the arrow keys pan, 0 fits and F toggles full screen.
Nothing to install, nothing to restart
The terrain is drawn from the world files on disk, outside your server process. Nothing is installed in your server and nothing is loaded into it. There is no setting.
It works the same on all five server types. Map plugins and mods do exist per server type (BlueMap, Dynmap, squaremap), but none of them runs on Vanilla and each has to be installed into your server. This map needs neither.
You can look at a world you uploaded through the File Manager before ever starting the server, because the terrain comes from the files rather than the game. Player positions need the server running (see below).
Players on the map
While the map is open, GameGrid asks your server who is online and where they are, every 5 seconds. It uses ordinary Minecraft commands over RCON, the same connection the panel already uses for the shop: list, then data get entity <name> Pos and data get entity <name> Dimension for each player. No plugin, mod or datapack is involved, and nobody's game needs anything.
Each player in the dimension you are looking at is a coloured dot with their name. Hover or tap a dot for their coordinates. The list beside the map shows each player's block X and Z (Y on hover); click a name to centre the map on them.
Players in another dimension are listed separately with their coordinates rather than drawn, because Nether coordinates are one eighth of Overworld ones and plotting them on the same map would put them in the wrong place. Click one to switch to their dimension and centre on them.
A player the server lists but whose position could not be read (they left between the two commands, or their name in the list is a nickname rather than their account name) is shown as online, position unknown.
Up to 50 players are located per refresh; anyone beyond that is listed as online with no position.
If the server is stopped, the map says so and shows terrain only. If it says RCON is not configured, restart the server once: the platform writes the RCON settings into server.properties on every start.
Positions are only read while someone has the map open in a visible browser tab. A tab in the background asks for nothing.
Zooming out
Zoomed in, the map shows one image per region. Zoomed out, it switches to overview images, each covering 2 by 2 regions and, at the widest zoom, 32 by 32 regions, so a large world still loads a handful of images instead of thousands.
Overview images are built on the host from the region images. Until every region under one has been drawn, it shows what is ready and fills in the rest as the host catches up.
Keeping up to date
The map re-reads the list of regions every 20 seconds while the tab is visible. When the server has saved a region since, that region is fetched again and redrawn, and the old picture stays on screen until the new one arrives.
The map is drawn from what the server has actually saved, so a build made in the last few minutes appears after the next autosave, and then within about 20 seconds.
A region image you have already seen, unchanged since, is not downloaded again on your next visit.
Spawn and world border
The world spawn is drawn as a white diamond and the world border as a dashed rectangle, both read from your world's level.dat. Both are drawn on the Overworld. Go to spawn centres the map on the spawn point.
Either can be switched off in the legend. If your world's level.dat does not carry them in a form GameGrid recognises, they are simply not drawn and the legend says so; nothing is guessed.
Dimensions
Buttons across the top switch between Overworld, Nether and The End. Each one is drawn from that dimension's own region files.
The Nether is drawn under its bedrock roof: for each column the map looks below the roof for the first block, so you see the cavern floors and lava seas rather than a flat grey ceiling.
A dimension nobody has visited is greyed out, and hovering it says so — there is nothing on disk to draw.
The count beside the dimension name is how many regions have been explored. One region is 512 by 512 blocks.
What the squares on the map mean
The legend beside the map explains each of these, and its checkboxes switch the players, spawn and border layers on and off. Your choice is remembered in this browser.
Unexplored is the plain dark background: there is no region file there, so there is nothing to draw.
Being drawn is a hatched square, with "drawing N%" when it is large enough to read. The host draws regions a little at a time so it never stalls, and the map checks again every few seconds.
Could not draw is a dark red square. The map retries on its own — after 3 seconds, then waiting longer each time up to 30 seconds, about six times — and if it still fails it tries again at the next 20-second refresh.
When it says there is nothing to show
The page names which of these it is instead of showing an empty canvas.
This server has no world yet. Minecraft creates the world the first time the server starts. Start it once.
The world exists but nothing has been explored. Region files are written as players move around. Join and walk.
The host did not answer in time. Usually momentary; the map asks again at its next refresh.
The world could not be read on the host, or the server's files were not found. Those are ours; open a ticket.
A very new world will also show some regions as still filling in. Chunks are written at whatever stage of generation they reached, and a chunk the server planned but has not yet given terrain to has nothing to draw yet. It appears once the server settles that area — which is normal on a fresh world, not damage.
Things that surprise people
Water is drawn at its surface rather than at the sea floor, so oceans look like oceans. Depth is shaded.
An unrecognised block — most often a modded building block — is drawn as stone grey rather than left as a hole, so a modded world reads as terrain rather than as a map full of gaps.
The rendered images, including the overview images, are cached inside your own server's directory and count against your disk, capped per dimension and pruned automatically.
The other games are different
This map is specific to Minecraft. 7 Days to Die composites tiles the game renders itself, Palworld overlays markers on a fixed island map, and Valheim draws its world from the seed inside the server process.