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Quick Start Guide
This guide is aimed at new users that want to get started using Minecraft Overviewer.It is not meant to explain everything, but it should help you generate your first map. For more detailed info, see the Documentation page.
If you are not a new user, but instead want help on upgrading to the DTT branch, see DTT Upgrade Guide.
If you are running Windows, you can download a pre-compiled version of Overviewer on the downloads page. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available.
For other systems (such as Linux or Mac OS X), you will need to download the source and compile it yourself. You can download a source tarball directly here, or you can clone the git repository directly. To compile, see Build Instructions.
CentOS 5 uses an older version of Python, and Overviewer does not run out-of-the-box on CentOS. See the CentOS 5 Install guide for instructions for this system.
Overviewer is a command-line application, and so it needs to be run from the command line. Open a terminal window and navigate to wherever you downloaded Overviewer. For pre-compiled Windows builds, the command is overviewer.exe. For other systems, it's ./overviewer.py.
To generate your map, run
overviewer.exe WorldName path\to\output\ # on windows, or
./overviewer.py WorldName path/to/output/ # on other systems
where WorldName is the name of the world you want to render, and path/to/output is the place where you want to store the rendered world. The first render can take a while, depending on the size of your world. You can, if you want to, provide a path to the world you want to render, instead of providing a world name and having Overviewer auto-discover the world path.
When the render is done, open up index.html in the folder you rendered to. Pretty cool, huh? You can even upload this map to a web server to share with others!
Incremental updates are just as easy, and a lot faster. If you go and change something inside your world, run the command again and Overviewer will automatically rerender only what's needed.
Overviewer uses the terrain.png file that comes with the Minecraft client to render its maps. If you're running on the server, chances are the Minecraft client isn't installed. If Overviewer tells you it can't find terrain.png, either install the client on your server, or extract the terrain.png file from minecraft.jar, and put it in the same directory as Overviewer.
Overviewer has a lot of features beyond generating the simple map we started with. Here's information on two of them.
Overviewer supports many different rendermodes. Run ./overviewer.py --list-rendermodes to get a list. Two of the most popular rendermodes are lighting and night, which draw shadows for the corresponding time of day. To tell Overviewer what rendermode to use, run
./overviewer.py --rendermodes=lighting WorldName output/dir/
You can also specify multiple rendermodes at once, and Overviewer will render them all and let you toggle between them on the generated web page. To get both lighting and night on the same page, run
./overviewer.py --rendermodes=lighting,night WorldName output/dir/
Minecraft Overviewer has support for using the biome info from the Minecraft Biome Extractor. If you run the biome extractor on your world, during the next run Overviewer will automatically recognize the biome info and use it to colorize your grass and leaves appropriately. This will only appear on updated chunks, though; to colorize the entire world you will need to rerender from scratch by deleting the old render.
-Note: If you are using a custom terrian.png the biome information will not be applied if the grass texture is not gray-scale. It will instead simply use the grass texture as presented in the terrian.png file. (Only applies to top of grass, the sides of grass blocks do not get biome information applied)