The Live Map: What Each Game Shows

Where the map is

A game with a Game Tools page never gets a second sidebar entry as well, so there is only ever one door onto the map.

A live map needs the game itself to give up player positions or world data, and not every game does. Your server's own sidebar is the authority on which of these it has; the game's own guide in the knowledge base describes its map in full.

The maps are genuinely different

There is no shared map component. Each game's map is built from whatever that game actually exposes, which is why they look different and show different things.

Four are compared below. It is a comparison, not a roster: where your game is not in this table, its own guide in the knowledge base describes its map.

One part is the same on every map that shows players: the Players online list, under the layers beside the map. It names everyone on your server, sorted by name, with the grid square or position the map shows for them, and it updates whenever the map's player positions do. Click a name to centre the map on that player and ring their dot; point at a name to ring the dot without moving the map. Players who are online but have no position on the map are listed under their own heading rather than dropped. When nobody is on it says "No players online", and when the players cannot be read it says why instead. A public share link never carries this list: it shows unnamed dots only.

A share link shows those dots only when its own Live player positions tick is on and your server's Show live player positions on share links and public maps switch is on, under Metrics, Settings, Player access. A link that already showed positions before that card existed keeps doing so until you save the card. See Metrics and Your Players' Privacy.

7 Days to Die

The map is built out of the tiles 7 Days to Die writes as players explore, drawn over a world overview: a picture of the whole world — relief, biomes, roads and town streets — drawn from the world's own files. So a server nobody has played on yet still shows its whole world; explored ground appears over it in full detail. It needs no mod, so crossplay is untouched.

Map rendering is switched on every time the server starts, so there is nothing to set up. Only if you turn it off yourself in Settings does it stay off — and the map page then has an Enable Map Rendering button that turns it back on for you.

It needs a restart, and the panel tells you so. The setting is read once when the game starts, so a running server keeps rendering nothing until it is restarted. When that is the case the badge reads Map Rendering: ON (restart pending) and the page says exactly that instead of showing a green light over an empty map.

Tiles are written only while rendering is on. Ground your players explored before it was on has no tile and shows only the world overview — even though their in-game map draws it, because that comes from their own player data and not from these tiles. Travelling back through the area writes it.

Player positions come from the server console and refresh every ten seconds. The Online Players table lists each player's name, entity ID and X, Y and Z. If players are connected and that table stays empty, the platform could not reach the server's Telnet interface — check Telnet is enabled in Settings.

It is laid out like the other maps: a toolbar above, the whole world filling a square frame with a lettered and numbered grid, and a Layers panel beside it with each layer's icon, note and count. Scroll or use − and + to zoom and drag to pan; the map cannot be dragged off the world. Whole world shows everything again, Refresh re-reads the players and the map immediately, and the Detail dropdown in the Layers panel picks which zoom level of tiles to draw.

Full detail: 7 Days to Die Live Map.

Minecraft

The platform reads your world's own region files and draws one image per region, at one pixel per block, in the 62 base colours Minecraft uses for its own filled maps — each at the four brightness levels the game uses to show relief. It looks like a map your players already know how to read, hills and all.

Nothing is installed in your server, nothing is loaded into its process, and no restart is needed. It works identically on Vanilla, Paper, Forge, Fabric and NeoForge.

Buttons across the top switch between Overworld, the Nether and the End. A dimension nobody has visited is greyed out; hovering an available one tells you how many regions have been explored in it. Beside them, Go to 0, 0 re-centres on the world origin and a percentage shows the current zoom.

Players are drawn on it too, refreshed every five seconds. The platform asks the server who is online and where each player is standing over RCON, with vanilla commands, so no plugin, mod or datapack is needed. Up to 50 players are located per refresh. A player in another dimension is listed beside the map rather than drawn at the wrong spot, and one whose position could not be read is listed as online with no position.

RCON is switched on and given a password in the server's settings every time it starts, so there is nothing to set up. If the map says RCON is not configured yet, the server is still running from before that — restart it once. If the server is stopped, the map says that instead of showing an empty player list.

Full detail: Minecraft Live Map.

Palworld

The background is a fixed image of the Palpagos Islands, so there is nothing to render and nothing to wait for. Player markers come from Palworld's own server API and refresh every 30 seconds.

Pals and base camps come from Palworld's GameData API, which GameGrid switches on every time the server starts, so there is nothing to enable. Once it is answering, Show Pals and Show Bases tick boxes appear and the caption counts them. Only a server still running from before that shows an Enable GameData API button, which restarts it.

The map signs in to your server with its admin password. GameGrid turns the REST API on and sets that password every time the server starts — it generates one when the field is empty and keeps yours if you set one — so there is nothing to fill in. If the map says it cannot sign in yet, the server has not started since it was created: start it. If it says the password was rejected, the password was changed while the server was running, and a restart brings the two back in line.

Mouse wheel zooms from 1x to 8x about the cursor; click and drag pans.

Full detail: Palworld Game Tools.

Valheim

Valheim ships no map tiles, so the GameGrid Bridge plugin asks the running server what its own world looks like and draws it. The first load on a new world shows a progress bar while that happens; it is cached afterwards and instant from then on.

The plugin is installed, and its settings checked, before every start, so there is nothing to set up. If its settings were changed in a way that stops the panel reaching it, GameGrid puts them back at the next start.

Player markers refresh every five seconds. That is as fast as it goes, on purpose: the bridge reads positions on the game's own main thread, so polling harder would cost your server frame time to move a marker that travels at walking pace.

Valheim has a per-player privacy setting and this map honours it. A player who has not ticked "visible to other players" on their in-game map is listed as online with no position rather than being hidden. That tick is off by default and resets each session, so most of your players will be in that state.

To see everyone on your own panel anyway, turn on Show All Players on the Admin Map in the server's Settings, under the Game Tools category. The panel marks it as needing a restart, but GameGrid also pushes the change straight to a running server, so it usually takes effect within seconds — restart if it does not.

Positions revealed that way are drawn as hollow markers and labelled, so an overridden position is never presented as a volunteered one. It changes nothing in the game: other players' in-game maps still follow their own setting.

Three terrain styles — shaded, topographic and an old chart. Each is drawn separately by your server, and a style is drawn on demand the first time you use it, so the first view of one takes a moment.

It is the one map here with fog of war: only ground somebody has actually walked is drawn, and a cartography table your players write to makes it fill in faster. Layers for bases, ships, portals, graves, wards, beds, dungeons, activity and an hourly timelapse sit above it, nearly all off by default — a layer nobody has asked for in five minutes stops being scanned, so leaving the ones you do not use switched off saves your game server real work.

It also has a public share link. What a stranger sees is terrain, the server name and day, and spawn and Haldor’s locations — nothing else, and only the ground your players have explored.

A per-wipe leaderboard sits on its own tab beside the map: playtime, deaths, walked distance and boss progress, keyed on the world seed so a new seed starts a new board.

Full detail: Valheim Live Map. For the dashboard, chat and events tabs beside it, see Valheim Game Tools.

Metrics layers on every map

When player statistics are switched on for your server, every map above also offers three Metrics layers in its own layer list: Density (where players spend time), Trails (the paths they took) and Deaths / Kills. They are off until you tick them, they are drawn by the map itself under its markers, and they are only ever shown to you in your panel: no public share link carries them. On the map that has its own Activity heat, Density takes its place while player statistics are on. The Travel and Places tabs in Metrics use the same map with a range of your choosing, a player picker and a replay. See Metrics: Your Server's History.

What none of these four maps does

Still the four in the table above, and still a comparison rather than a rule for every game: none of these four lets you teleport, click a player to act on them, or edit the world. A map that does offer that says so on the map itself, and its own guide covers it.

Each of the four can issue a read-only public link, and each link carries only what that game has to show. Valheim’s shows terrain, the server name and day, and spawn and Haldor’s locations, over only the ground your players have explored. Bases, dungeons, the leaderboard, notes and every other layer are absent from it, and only the account owner and admins can issue one. On the other three a link shows the server name, how many players are online, the map and an unnamed dot per online player. A 7 Days to Die link can also carry the world overview — the picture of the whole world drawn from its own files, including ground nobody on your server has explored yet — but only when you tick Whole world, including unexplored ground as you create the link. It is off on every link unless you do, including links made before the option existed. Windrose Plus has a public-map mode of its own; see Windrose Plus Live Map for what it can and cannot do today.

None of them shows a player who is not connected, and none keeps a movement history for an individual. Valheim's timelapse and activity map are the only history any of them holds, and both are of the world rather than of a person: the timelapse carries no positions and no names, and the activity map is folded into 164-metre cells with no trail kept.