Windrose Plus Live Map (Sea Chart) Guide

What the Sea Chart is

The Sea Chart is the second tab of the Windrose Plus dashboard. It draws your world’s terrain as map tiles and puts live player positions, creature positions and point-of-interest markers on top of it.

You reach it the same way you reach the rest of the dashboard: the "Open Dashboard" link on the WindRose Plus tab, which goes through the platform’s HTTPS proxy and opens signed in on your GameGrid account, with no password to type. The dashboard only runs while your server is running. See Windrose Plus RCON Dashboard Guide.

The dashboard also ships an item catalog alongside the map: 840 Windrose items with their category, type, rarity and, for 468 of them, where they drop from.

The Live Map tab in your panel

Your server panel also has a Live Map entry in its sidebar. It draws the chart Windrose Plus generated for your world, inside the panel.

The chart is read from the files Windrose Plus saved on your server, not from the running dashboard, so it shows even while the server is stopped. When a new chart is generated with wp.mapgen, the panel picks it up within about five minutes without a page reload.

Live positions need the server and Windrose Plus to be running. They refresh at your Player Position Interval (see Update intervals below). While the server is stopped the chart stays on screen with a "Server offline, no live positions" notice.

Players linked to a Discord account through a verified link show their Discord name under their character in the player list, and in the details that appear when you hover over or tap their marker.

Controls: drag or swipe to pan; scroll, pinch or use the + and − buttons to zoom; "Fit island" frames the island; "Full screen" fills the screen where your browser supports it. The toolbar shows the world coordinates under your pointer. With the map focused, arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, 0 fits and F toggles full screen.

Use whichever map you prefer. The Sea Chart has more on it, including resource zones, fog and the item browser. The panel map has your Discord names, sits beside the rest of your server tools and still shows the chart while the server is stopped.

What the panel Live Map shows

The panel map draws a layer only when Windrose Plus actually provides its data. The layers you have are listed under Layers beside the map, each with a count and a checkbox. Your choices are remembered in your browser.

Players: one marker per online player with a reported position, while Windrose Plus is answering. A player who has only just connected is listed under "Online, position not reported" until the server samples a position.

Creatures and resource nodes: shown only when Windrose Plus includes them in its live position data. If your version of Windrose Plus does not send them, those layers do not appear, rather than showing an empty or made-up layer.

Points of interest: read from the results of the Windrose Plus POI scanner once it has written them. If the scanner is switched off or has not run yet, there is no points-of-interest layer.

Hover over or tap any marker to see its name, its type and its world coordinates.

Panel Live Map statuses

"Windrose Plus is not switched on": the map needs Windrose Plus. The message links to the WindRose Plus tab, where you can switch it on. Nothing else is requested until you do.

"Could not check whether Windrose Plus is switched on": the panel could not reach GameGrid to ask. This is not the same as Windrose Plus being off.

"This server has no chart yet": Windrose Plus has not generated the terrain. See Building the terrain below.

"The chart on this server could not be read": the chart description Windrose Plus saved is incomplete or damaged. Running wp.mapgen again rewrites it.

"The chart could not be read right now": the game host did not answer. This does not depend on your game server running.

Every one of these retries on its own: first after 5 seconds, then less often, up to once a minute. It pauses while the tab is in the background. You can also press Try again.

If individual chart tiles fail to load, each is retried up to three times. After that the map says some tiles could not be loaded; reloading the page tries them again.

Building the terrain

The live positions work as soon as the map is enabled. The terrain underneath them does not draw itself — it is generated from the world’s landscape data by a command.

Run wp.mapgen from the dashboard console. It exports a heightmap from the landscape actors and reports what it found, for example "Heightmap exported: 4 landscapes, 16384 vertices".

Run it on a fresh server boot, before any mod hot-reload. UE4SS caching stops the landscape being detected after a RestartMod, so a mapgen run later in a session can come back with nothing. If the map is blank, restart the server and run wp.mapgen as the first thing you do.

wp.mapexport is the lower-level version: it writes raw heightfield data to windrose_plus_data/heightmaps/ for the tile generator to process. wp.mapgen is the one to use.

What is on the Sea Chart

Terrain: island outlines and coastlines, rendered as tiles from the heightmap.

Players: a marker per online player, refreshed on the player interval.

Creatures and entities: refreshed on the entity interval, which is slower by default because there are far more of them.

Points of interest: dungeons, camps, forts, shipwrecks, ruins, farms and the rest, from the POI scanner.

Update intervals

Both are on the WindRose Plus tab, in the Live Map section, and both save without a server restart.

Player Position Interval — default 5000 ms, range 1000 to 60000. How often player positions are refreshed. The panel Live Map checks for new positions at this interval too, never more often than once a second.

Entity Position Interval — default 30000 ms, range 5000 to 300000. How often creature and entity positions are refreshed.

Raising them reduces the work the mod does inside the game each cycle, which is the lever to pull if the map is costing you performance. Lowering them makes the map more immediate and costs more. The defaults suit most servers.

Enable Live Map itself is a switch in the same section, on by default. Turning it off stops the position data being written at all.

POI scanner

The POI scanner is the background pass that finds points of interest for the map. It runs every 4 hours by default — "Rescan Interval", 14400 seconds, adjustable between 3600 and 86400 — and can be switched off entirely.

If the map shows terrain and players but no POI markers, check the scanner is enabled and give it a cycle. If you do not use the overlay, turning it off saves the work.

Public map sharing — what it does and does not do today

Windrose Plus has a public-map mode: "Enable Public Map" in the Live Map section, with an optional "Public Map Token". With it on, the dashboard serves a map-only view at /public-map that exposes the map, its tiles and its overlays and nothing else — no console, no configuration, no admin API. With a token set, a visitor must add ?token=<your token>.

It cannot currently be shared with your players, and you should not promise them a link. The dashboard’s HTTP port is firewalled to the game host itself, so the public map is not reachable from the internet directly, and the only other route in is the platform’s proxy, which requires a signed-in GameGrid account with access to that server. Anyone who can already open the full dashboard can open the public map; nobody else can.

Turn the setting on if you want the restricted view for people who have panel access but should not touch the console. If what you want is a map link for your community, that is not available yet — say so rather than handing out a link that will not load.

When the map does not look right

Blank, no terrain: run wp.mapgen after a fresh server restart, before anything else. This is by far the most common cause. The panel Live Map says "This server has no chart yet" in this case.

Terrain but no players: check the server is running, "Enable Live Map" is on, and the player interval has not been set very high. The panel map shows "Server offline, no live positions" while it cannot read positions.

No creature, resource or point-of-interest layer in the panel map: that layer appears only when Windrose Plus provides the data. For points of interest, check the POI scanner is enabled and has completed a scan.

Nothing updating at all: check the server is actually running, and that the Windrose Plus tab does not show the warning about the mod being switched off here while its files are still on the server — a mismatch like that means what is running is not what the panel thinks.

A public map link that will not load: see the section above. That is expected today, not a fault with your server.