Run your own Minecraft Java server? Want to make things more unique with custom Minecraft map images? Let me show you how!
Creating the maps and our custom image
To get started with your custom Minecraft map, we’ll generate and place the maps in the world. Ensure these are standard maps and not locator maps. In our example, our maps are 3 wide and 1 high.
While creating your maps, be sure to take note of the ID for each map as we’ll use these in a later step.
Next we’ll create the image for our custom map. The most important thing when creating the image is to ensure we’re using the correct ratio. If our maps are 3 wide and 1 high, we our image should have an aspect ratio of 3:1. For our example, I’ll treat each map as a 500x500px image so my custom image must be 1500x500px. This is the image I’ll be working with:
Converting our image using the map tool
Now it’s time to convert your image to a custom map .dat file. To do this, head to maptool.shantek.io. In the first step, upload the image you created previously.
On step 2, we need to select how many maps our image spans across. In our example, we’re creating a 3 wide and 1 high map so we select 3 horizontal and 1 vertical and click next.
Minecraft maps are only capable of showing certain colours. Step 3 will convert our image to ensure it’s compatible with what the maps are capable of showing. Click Make color adjustments to continue.
On step 4, we need to enter the number of our map we created at the start. In our example, we created 3 maps using the IDs 246, 247 and 248 so entering 246 and clicking Generate files will ensure our .dat files are named correctly.
The map tool will now generate the new .dat files. If we have more than 1 map, this will be served as a .zip ready for us to unzip and upload to our server.
The map tool will now generate the new .dat files. Download the files to your computer. If you are generating a single map, you’ll download the .dat file directly. If you’re downloading multiple map files at once, this will download as a zip file and you’ll need to unzip this file to continue.
Uploading the files to our server
For the last steps, we’ll need to shut down the server – ensure you do this prior to continuing.
With your server shut down, we can now override the .dat files for the maps. You’ll find these in WorldName/data in your control panel. For my example, we’re using a PurPur server with the world name Shantek, so we’ll need to upload our files to Shantek/data. When uploading, it’s fine to override the existing files.
With those files uploaded we can now restart our server and our maps should now be updated with our custom image.
I hope you found this guide useful for creating your custom Minecraft map images. Made something awesome? I’d love to see it, tag @ShantekDev on X!
