Running Overviewer on a Server

Running Overviewer on a server poses some special challenges, and this page documents them. If you're just looking for how to run Overviewer normally, see the Quick Start Guide.

Getting terrain.png

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 full support for texture packs, so if you want to, you can download the terrain.png from your favorite texture pack and use that instead.

Running Overviewer on a Live Map

Minecraft doesn't really like it when other programs go snooping around in a live world, so running Overviewer on a live world usually creates a few errors, usually "corrupt chunk" errors. You can do this, but it's not a supported way of running Overviewer.

To get around this, you can copy your live world somewhere else, and render the copied world instead. If you're already making backups of your world, you can use the backups to make the render. Many people even use their backups to run Overviewer on a different machine than the one running the Minecraft server.

There used to be a few things to be careful about, but right now there's only one important thing left.

Preserving Modification Times

The important thing to be careful about is file modification times, which Overviewer uses to figure out what parts of the map need updating. If you do a straight copy, usually this will update the modification times on all the copied files, causing Overviewer to re-render the entire map. To copy files on Unix, while keeping these modification times intact, use cp -p. For people who render from backups, GNU tar automatically handles modification times correctly. If you use some other tool, you'll have to figure out how to do this yourself.