3D Map Models

What it is

Put a filled map in an item frame. Walk up to it, and a dark stone plinth fades in about a block out from the wall — then, over half a second, a 3D scale model of that terrain grows upward out of it, bottom layer first.

It is not a picture of the land. It is built from 256 miniature Minecraft blocks, each exactly one-sixteenth of a real block: real stone, real sand, real gravel, real snow, real oak planks where somebody built a house. Each cube is separated from its neighbours by a thin dark seam, so at arm's length you read individual blocks rather than a painted surface.

What it looks like

• Cliffs are solid and banded — dirt over stone over deepslate — so the model reads as a slab of landscape lifted out of the ground rather than a floating crust.
• Water comes in three depth tones, pale at the shallows through to deep blue in a trench, and a mountain lake sits at its own real altitude instead of being flattened to sea level.
• Forests are raised green plateaus and snowlines stay white.
• The whole thing is lit from the north-west like a relief map, so ridges and valleys pop — and it is self-lit, so it looks identical at midnight in an unlit basement.
• It is world-aligned: the model's east is the world's east whichever wall the frame is on, so when you look up from the model and out the window, the two agree.

Build a map wall

This is the thing the feature exists for. Models are exactly one block wide, and item frames sit exactly one block apart — so framed maps in a grid produce models that abut edge to edge into one continuous relief landscape of your whole region.

Models stay built. Walk out of your map room and back in and it is exactly as you left it — nothing fades out, nothing takes turns being 3D.

Live players on the map

Everyone standing inside the area a map covers appears as their own head, standing on the model, gliding around as they walk. Everyone in the room sees everyone — so a map wall doubles as a live view of where people are.

You also get a red arrow over your own position, which only you can see.

Town borders

Town territory is drawn straight onto the model as a glowing amber outline a layer above the ground, so you can see at a glance where everyone's land begins. An outline rather than a fill, so it marks up the landscape instead of burying it.

It keeps itself up to date

Build something inside an area a map covers and the model rebuilds itself a few seconds later. No punching the map out of the frame and putting it back.

Nothing to install

No mod, no resource pack, no client setup. The models are built out of ordinary display entities, which every vanilla client already knows how to draw. If you can join the server, you can see them.

Privacy

Anything inside a protection stone claim you are not a member of renders as an empty gap on your model — however often it rebuilds. So a framed map cannot be used to watch somebody else build on their own land.

Turning it off

/map3d off stops your own framed maps building models. /map3d hide stops you seeing everyone else's — useful if you are on a laptop and someone has built a big wall at spawn. Models also only appear when somebody is within 16 blocks, and fade away again once everyone leaves.

Map3D never touches your world: no blocks placed, no changes to the item frame, no changes to the map itself.

Commands