SCOPENET-MC/docs/map.md

The SCOPENET Map

Every server draws its own world map. There is nothing to install, host or configure besides the plugin or mod you already run: the game server renders its world to small tiles in the background, sends only what changed to the panel, and the launcher and admin panel show them in a fast native map.

What's on it:

• Terrain in the look of a Minecraft map, coloured from the real block textures (modded blocks get a matching colour). The Nether is drawn below its ceiling, so you see caves and lava lakes, not bedrock.
• Guild land as coloured outlines with the guild's icon and name, holes and all.
• Spawn, warps, guild homes, markets and shop points as pins you can click.
• Players online, with their head and facing direction. Click one to open the player panel (profile, teleport request, message in game, invite to your guild).
• Dimensions: Overworld, Nether and End tabs appear as soon as the server has drawn them.

Turn it on

It is on by default for every server. To change it:

1. In the admin panel open Servers → your server → Settings and use the SCOPENET Map switch.
2. In the plugin/mod config: map.enabled (Paper config.yml) or map.enabled=true (Fabric scopenet.properties). The old livemap.enabled key is still read.

The first tiles appear a minute or two after the server starts. The server draws the regions closest to players first, then works through the rest quietly in the background at low priority.

In the launcher

Players with a linked server get a Live Map button on the Home screen. Pan by dragging, zoom with the wheel or the + and − buttons, double click to zoom in. Use the toggles to hide claims, places or players, Online to jump to a player, the crosshair to find yourself and the star to go to spawn. The Guilds → Territory claim painter uses the same tiles.

In the admin panel

Servers → your server shows a map card with the number of tiles, how much space they use, when the server last sent something and the live map itself. Redraw world deletes the stored tiles; the server notices and draws everything again (useful after a world reset or a renderer update).

On your public landing page

Add a Live map section in the landing page builder to show the map to visitors, with only the layers you allow. See discord-and-email.md.

How it works

• The game server reads its region files (region/*.mca), works out the top block of every column, and writes 256 × 256 pixel tiles at one pixel per block. Zoomed-out levels are built from them, keeping real map colours so coastlines and roads stay sharp.
• Tiles are palette PNGs, so a typical tile is a few kilobytes. Only tiles that changed are uploaded, and a region is redrawn at most every 90 seconds while players are building.
• The panel stores tiles under its data folder (map/<server id>/…) and serves them to signed-in players only, with a short-lived key on every address and ETag caching.
• Player positions go up about every two seconds; claims and pins whenever they change.
• A local cache lives next to the plugin (plugins/SCOPENET/map) or mod (config/scopenet/map) so a restart doesn't redraw anything.

Disk use is small: a world of 500 explored regions is roughly 50–150 MB on the panel. Servers using region files compressed with LZ4 (an opt-in setting in recent Minecraft versions) are not drawn; leave region-file-compression on its default.

Troubleshooting

• "Drawing the world…" never ends. The server has to be connected to the panel with a valid token, have map.enabled on, and have its world folder readable by the Minecraft process. The server log says SCOPENET Map is on when it starts drawing.
• A flat grey or missing area. The chunk was never generated, or is saved in an older world format (before Minecraft 1.18).
• Colours look off for a modded block. Unknown blocks get a colour from their name; vanilla blocks use their texture colour.