The Live Map: What Each Game Shows

Where the map is

Palworld and Valheim are not given a second sidebar entry, 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.

The four 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.

7 Days to Die

The map is built out of the tiles 7 Days to Die writes as players explore.

Map rendering is on by default, so most servers need nothing here. If it has been turned off, nothing renders — and the map page 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 you turned it on has no tile and shows as a gap — 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.

Scroll or use Zoom In and Zoom Out to zoom and drag to pan. Fit Map frames everything, Refresh Players re-reads the player list immediately, and the Detail dropdown 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.

It shows terrain, not players, and it says so. Minecraft gives up no player coordinates without a plugin or a datapack, and this map is built so that neither is needed. The panel states this next to the map rather than 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 are extra. They need Palworld's GameData API, and the map has an Enable GameData API button that restarts the server to switch it on. Once it is up, Show Pals and Show Bases tick boxes appear and the caption counts them.

The map signs in to your server to read any of this, so an admin password has to be set in Settings. If it is not, the map says so and tells you a restart will not help — the password is the fix.

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.

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 is also the only one of the four with 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.

What none of these four maps does

None of them lets you teleport, click a player to act on them, or edit the world.

Three of the four are behind your panel login with no shareable link. Valheim is the exception: its map can issue a read-only public link that 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. For 7 Days to Die, Minecraft and Palworld, a public map is a game-side mod or plugin rather than this. 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.