How the 6b6t live map works

Crowd-sourced chunks, renders every few minutes and one pixel per block.

map.carlox.es is an unofficial, community-run map of the spawn area of 6b6t, a Minecraft anarchy server. Nobody surveys the world by hand: the map is drawn from chunks that players send automatically while they walk around, so it grows and changes as the server does.

Where the data comes from

Players install a small open-source Fabric mod. As they move, the mod reads the top surface block of each chunk they load and sends it to this server. A chunk is Minecraft's 16 × 16 block column, so one chunk becomes a 16 × 16 pixel square on the map.

That is all the mod sends. It does not read your inventory, your chat or your coordinates outside the mapped area, and it never reports the location of your base. The code is public on GitHub, and you can switch it off in-game at any time with /webmap. The contribute page has the three-step install.

From chunks to map tiles

1. Storage. Every submitted chunk is stored with its surface blocks and their heights, the player who sent it and when. Earlier versions are kept for a few weeks, so vandalism can be undone.
2. Rendering. Every five minutes, the server redraws the sections that changed. The world is split into a 128 × 128 grid of sections, each one a 512 × 512 pixel image.
3. Tiles. Those images are turned into a tile pyramid. Zoom 6 is the native level, where one pixel equals one block. Lower zooms are built by merging each 2 × 2 group of tiles into one, down to zoom −1, which fits the whole map in a single image.
4. Display. The front page is a Leaflet map that loads those tiles as WebP images. Zooms 7 and 8 are the zoom-6 tiles scaled up in your browser, kept sharp with pixelated rendering.

How much of the world is covered

The grid covers 65,536 × 65,536 blocks centred on spawn, from −32,768 to +32,767 on both the X and Z axes (until September 2026 it was half as wide). That is the area the map can show; how much of it is actually drawn depends on where players have walked. Everything outside that square, and every chunk nobody has visited with the mod, stays black.

The statistics page shows how many chunks have been submitted so far and by how many players.

How often it updates

So "real time" means a few minutes old: walk through a new area now and it appears after the next render, usually within five minutes. Your browser may also hold tiles in cache for a few minutes.

What the map does not show

• Live player positions. The map draws terrain, not people. There are no player markers, so it cannot be used to hunt anyone.
• Anything below the surface. Only the top block of each chunk is recorded, so caves, bases under the ground and interiors are invisible.
• Other dimensions. The Nether and the End are not mapped.
• Unvisited chunks. If no contributor has loaded a chunk, it stays black — that is a gap in coverage, not an empty world.

Credits

Built and maintained by Carlox with the Colonizadores community, and kept alive by every player running the mod. This is a fan project: it is not affiliated with 6b6t or with Mojang.