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Welcome to the AMIDST wiki! This is a collection of various documents to aid in the usage of the "Advanced Minecraft Interface and Data/Structure Tracking" program - aka AMIDST.
AMIDST is meant to be a FAST Minecraft mapper of existing MineCraft worlds and, if given a seed and certain other parameters, will produce a 2D map equal to what the MineCraft world generator would produce with the same information, albeit MineCraft is much, much slower.
Although AMIDST does not modify or add to any Minecraft folders or files, it is NOT a stand-alone program. You must have the Minecraft software stored on the machine you are running AMIDST on. You must have made a profile for the version of Minecraft you wish to use AMIDST with AND you must have run Minecraft with that profile at least once to insure that the Minecraft launcher has downloaded the run time files for that version to your machine so that they are available to AMIDST.
AMIDST uses many of the procedures that exist in the java code of the MineCraft main program that creates a new world. It ONLY uses the initial code that establishes the biomes, their shapes, and the PROBABLE positions of surface structures and the X,Z coordinates of the three strongholds. ie a 2D representation of the world that the seed entered would produce.
At the point that AMIDST gets what it needs to produce a fast 2D map of the MineCraft world that a seed will produce no permanent decisions have been made with regard to the actual existence of the surface structures. This is why sometimes AMIDST indicates a structure location and when the world is actually generated by the MineCraft world generator the structures will not exist. This seems to occur about 10 to 20 percent of the time.
Since all MineCraft worlds have three strongholds positioned in a triangle around coordinates 0,0 and they are underground and not dependent upon surface terrain, the AMIDST coordinates for these complexes are fairly accurate. The position shown is for the stronghold complex NOT the portal room in that complex.
There are some extra options which can be set with command‐line arguments:
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-history— Sets the path and file‐name to seed history file. -
-log— Sets the path and file‐name to the logging file. -
-mcpath— Sets the path to the .minecraft directory. -
-mcjar— Sets the path to the minecraft .jar -
-mcjson— Sets the path to the minecraft .json -
-mclibs— Sets the path to the libraries/ folder
A lot of questions pop up over and over, this section is here to answer some of the common ones.
Many people have asked why AMIDST doesn't show the locations of dungeons.
The positions of dungeons are decided upon much later in the world generation process than the point at which AMIDST gets all the information it needs to produce a 2D map. Going any farther would slow down AMIDST immensely and also even though the dungeon locations are predictable from the world seed, even the MineCraft world generator software doesn't map them until the actual chunks for the world that contain them are created and stored on disk. To ask AMIDST to locate dungeons would be to ask AMIDST to create the entire world which is something that even Minecraft doesn't do. MineCraft delays chunk creation until a player gets within a certain distance of the chunk in question.
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The locations of structures on the surface of the world produced by a given seed are decided by both the seed and the actual terrain of the location. When Amidst is making its map it only uses the biome shape data and does not know what the terrain will actually be. Due to this about 10 to 20 percent of the surface structures predicted by Amidst don't exist in the created world. Skiphs has added code to reduce the number of these false positives and in doing so has caused there to be a VERY few false negatives. That is, when actually playing a created world a player will find a village, temple, or witch hut that isn't shown on the Amidst map. This occurs much less than 1% of the time. Strongholds due to being totally underground are not affected by surface terrain so the positions of the three strongholds in every world are always reported accurately by Amidst. Surface terrain also affects the actual location of the world spawn point especially if the first pass software positions spawn in an ocean. The best way to get a better indication of spawn for a screen capture you wish to share with others is to actually create the world in Minecraft with the seed and world type desired and as soon as you are spawned hit Escape (in Windows) to save the world data files to disk. Then go to File > New > From File or Folder in Amidst and select the Save Folder of the world. If you have Player Icon turned on in Map > Layers a Steve Icon will appear where you were when you saved the data. This will be your spawn point. Note: player spawn is a random location within 10 blocks of the actual world spawn point. To find the exact world spawn location you would need to use an editor that will read and display the data in the level.dat file located in the world save folder such as NBTExplorer.exe for Windows.
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Some of the good AMIDST users have made a biome color legend. Note that in AMIDST 3.5 and onwards you will be able to define your own biome colors, e.g., to make one particular biome stand out more.
To avoid problems, be sure to specifically check the Minecraft profile you wish to use for AMIDST's biome map rendering. Don't use the "(Default)" profile.
Note that AMIDST does not read biome maps from saved worlds, what it does is produce a map of the world that would be created if a particular seed were entered to the version of Minecraft you have told Amidst to use. If you tell Amidst to load a seed from a world file or folder all it does is read the seed value stored in the level.dat file and then display the map of the world that seed will produce using the profile you chose when you started the program.
Currently the only parameters that Amidst uses from the world files is:
- The seed used to produce the world.
- The position(s) of the player(s) in the world at the time of the last save.
If the world that you pointed Amidst at was created with a different world generator than the one in Amidst's current profile Amidst will not display the correct map.
There is no way, currently, to establish what world generator was used to produce a given world. That information is not stored in level.dat. That being said, make sure that you strive to use the same profile for Amidst that was used to create the world with Minecraft.
AMIDST comes with absolutely no warranty. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, which basically means that you're free to make changes to the program and redistribute it, as long as your changes and redistribution is also licensed the same way.