Overviewer is a program to create maps of your minecraft worlds. In it’s own words “The Minecraft Overviewer is a command-line tool for rendering high-resolution maps of Minecraft worlds. It generates a set of static html and image files and uses Leaflet to display a nice interactive map.”

And it does it nicely. Took a copy of the git repository source code and ran the compile. Compiling required a few extra installs like GCC and numpty but nothing too onerous or difficult. I do like it when code just compiles and works….

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Created a configuration file, again the documentation is more than adequate, and a small script to kick it all off and generate maps of my minecraft game world. My (virtual) world is rather large so the first run of overviewer took about 20hours even on a 3.4GHz i7-6700 quad core[1]. It’s not often the CPU gets upto 50°C [2] But once this first pass is done only the portions that have changed or been added get processed so it becomes much quicker.

One day I’ll take a look at the code and see how it works and if there is an optimisation possible to reduce that long first pass - it seems a bit excessive even for ~1 million tiles. It’s in python and C, both familiar languages to me. Or maybe I’ve lots of other things to do.

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I use the maps to locate items of interest and to plan long distance routes - I have a thing for building highways over long distances that are as straight and level as possible[3] so having a big picture of the terrain is helpful.

[1] not state-of-the-art but no slouch either.

[2] Anything below 70°C is considered within specifications, but I like to run mine cool, they are usually ~30°C

[3] clearly I must have some Roman ancestry.