Topographic Maps 3D

Topographic Maps

Put a filled map in an item frame and it stops being a picture of the land and becomes the land — raised into a solid model built out of blocks, wearing the map's own colours.

That is the whole mod. There is no new item, no new recipe, nothing to learn. You craft a map, fill it in and hang it up exactly as you always have. It just stands up now.

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What it does

• The mod records the actual elevation under your map and builds a model from it. Hills rise, valleys sink, cliffs read as cliffs.
• Built out of blocks. The land is made of square columns with flat tops and sheer sides — the same shape a stack of blocks makes, which is what it is modelling. Nothing is smoothed or stretched, so every pixel of the map is drawn at its own size wherever it lands.
• Mountains actually stand taller. Height is measured on one fixed scale shared by every map, so a mountain range visibly out-rises a map of rolling farmland — and the same elevation stands the same height on every map you own.
• It is still your map. The model is skinned with the map's own colours, so it matches the flat map pixel for pixel - the same map, standing up.
• Fills in as you explore. Elevation is recorded alongside the map's colours, at the same pace, so terrain appears exactly where the map has something to show.
• Keeps up with the world. Flatten a hill or dig a canyon and the map catches up on its own.
• Map walls line up. Neighbouring maps agree on the ground they share, so a grid of them reads as one continuous landscape rather than a set of tiles.

Distant Horizons

Optional, and detected automatically - if you do not have it, nothing about the mod changes.

Elevation normally comes from loaded chunks, which is the right rule while a map is filling in but leaves an already explored map flat forever: by the time it is on your wall, the ground it shows is long unloaded and there is nothing left to measure.

With Distant Horizons installed, the mod falls back to its record of terrain you have already seen, so old maps stand up on their own. It is only ever used for ground nothing else can read, and the moment you walk that terrain again the exact measurement replaces it.

One caveat worth knowing: Distant Horizons only knows what it has itself seen or generated. If you explored those maps before installing it, its record is empty too, and the terrain appears once it has generated that area.

Controls

• N - show or hide the relief, leaving the ordinary flat map underneath. Rebindable in Controls, under Miscellaneous.
• A progress bar appears above the hotbar while a map is building, so a map that is merely still filling in is easy to tell from one that has nothing to show.

How to use it

1. Craft and fill a map the normal way.
2. Place it in an item frame.
3. Look at it from an angle - that is where the relief reads best.

Maps already hanging on a wall are picked up too. Stand near them and they fill in by themselves; you do not have to take anything down.

Needed on both sides: the server records the elevation, the client draws it.

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Performance

The model is worked out once per map and rebuilt only when the terrain actually changes, so a finished map on a wall costs nothing to keep looking at - drawing it is pure copying, with no decisions taken per frame.

Neighbouring ground standing at the same height is merged into single large surfaces rather than drawn column by column, which on flat country such as ocean or plains is the difference between thousands of pieces and a handful. The hidden half of every surface is discarded as well, so what reaches the graphics card is roughly half of what is there.

On the world side, elevation is only recorded for maps someone is holding or standing near, only from chunks that are already loaded, and a finished map drops out of the sweep entirely. The mod never forces terrain to generate.

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Feedback and bug reports are genuinely useful at this stage - it is an early release and the rough edges are known ones.

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