Craftplicator is a browser-based tool for working with Minecraft Java Edition worlds outside the game. It opens a saved world, draws a map of the terrain, lets you walk through the world in first person, and exports any area you select as a schematic, a 3D model or a printable mesh. It also works in the other direction: your own 3D models can be converted into blocks and fitted onto the terrain of an existing world.

The tool is aimed at players, makers, educators and cultural organisations who want to do something with a world that Minecraft itself does not provide. It is not a world editor in the sense of a full building suite, and it is not a replacement for WorldEdit inside the game.

The world folder stays on your computer. Your browser reads the region files directly, decodes the chunk data, and renders it — first as a top-down map, and on request as a three-dimensional view you can move through.

When you select an area, the blocks in that box are collected into a volume and converted into whatever format you asked for: a Sponge schematic that keeps the block states, or a mesh in which neighbouring block faces are merged into larger surfaces. When you import a model, the process runs the other way: the mesh is sampled into a grid of cells, each cell's colour is matched against a palette of Minecraft blocks, and the result is placed on the terrain at the position you chose.

How your data is handled is set out in the privacy policy, which is the page to rely on for that question.

Craftplicator is the tool: it opens your world, exports from it and imports into it.

The gallery is a library of finished builds you can download as schematic files, each with a 3D preview you can open in the browser before downloading anything.

They work together. A gallery build can be pasted into your world with WorldEdit, and anything you make in your own world can be exported with Craftplicator and submitted to the gallery.

No. It does not modify the game, does not install anything, and does not need to be running alongside Minecraft. It reads and writes the files Minecraft saves to disk, which means it works whether or not the game is installed on the machine you use it on.

Because it operates on save files rather than inside the game, Minecraft must be closed when you write changes back. A running game holds the world in memory and will overwrite anything you put there at the next autosave.

There is no account to create and no profile to fill in, so nothing is asked of you before you start.

Everything else about data handling is set out in the privacy policy. That page is written to be precise and is kept current, which is why it rather than this one is the place to check if the answer matters for your situation.

Click Choose folder and select the world folder itself — the folder that contains level.dat and a region subfolder, not the saves folder above it. You can also drag the folder onto the page.

If picking a folder is awkward, zip the world folder instead and use Choose ZIP. Only the parts of the archive actually needed are unpacked, so this stays fast even for large worlds. On a shared or managed computer, and for anyone you are explaining this to over the phone, the ZIP route is the simpler one.

If you are not sure where your worlds are, there is a separate page on finding them, including a shortcut that saves all the clicking.

Each world is a folder inside the saves directory of your Minecraft installation:

• Windows: %AppData%\.minecraft\saves
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves
• Linux: ~/.minecraft/saves

Inside saves you will find one folder per world, and that folder is the one you open. Craftplicator shows the path for your system next to the folder button, with a button to copy it.

Yes, and it is the trick worth knowing: the file dialog has an address bar, and you can paste a path into it.

On Windows press Ctrl + L in the dialog, paste %AppData%\.minecraft\saves and press Enter. Windows expands %AppData% itself, so you do not need to know your user name or where the folder actually sits. On macOS press Cmd + Shift + G and paste ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves, which works even though the Library folder is hidden in Finder. On Linux, Ctrl + L and ~/.minecraft/saves.

The world folder itself — the one containing level.dat. Not the saves folder above it, and not a folder inside the world.

If the tool reports that no region files were found, you are almost certainly one level too high or one level too low.

There is, it just moved. Minecraft 26.1 reorganised the save folder: each dimension's region, entities and poi data now lives under dimensions/<namespace>/<name>/, so the Overworld terrain sits in dimensions/minecraft/overworld/region/. The Nether and the End moved from DIM-1 and DIM1 to dimensions/minecraft/the_nether/ and dimensions/minecraft/the_end/.

The region files themselves are unchanged Anvil .mca. Both layouts are recognised automatically, so select the world folder as usual. One bonus in the new layout: dimensions added by data packs sit beside the vanilla three and appear in the dimension menu by themselves.

Minecraft displays the name you gave a world in game, but the folder on disk keeps the name it had when it was created. Renaming a world in game does not rename its folder, so "Castle Project" may still live in a folder called "New World (3)".

Sort the folder by date modified and the world you played last is at the top. Alternatively, open Singleplayer in Minecraft, select the world and choose Edit, which shows the folder name.

Every Minecraft world contains a file called level.dat, so searching for that file finds every world on the computer.

On Windows, press the Windows key and R, type cmd and press Enter, then:

cd /d %USERPROFILE%
dir level.dat /S /B /A

Each line of output is a world folder. Searching from C:\ instead of your user folder catches worlds outside it, at the cost of taking considerably longer.

On macOS and Linux, open a terminal and run find ~ -name level.dat 2>/dev/null.

Because a name beginning with a dot marks a folder as hidden on macOS and Linux, and Minecraft's own folders are hidden on Windows as well.

In Windows Explorer, open the View tab and switch on Hidden items. In most Linux file managers, press Ctrl + H. In Finder on macOS, press Cmd + Shift + G and paste the path, which works regardless of what is hidden.

Pasting the path into the address bar of the file dialog also sidesteps the problem entirely, which is why that is the route worth learning first.

Multi-instance launchers keep a separate Minecraft directory for every instance, so there is no single path that applies. Each of them has a button that opens the instance folder — right-click the instance and look for Folder, Minecraft Folder or Open Folder — and saves is inside it.

That button is more reliable than any path list, because the layouts change between launcher versions.

That message is the standard wording of the folder selection dialog and appears for every website that reads a folder, regardless of what it then does with the contents. The browser is asking whether the page may access those files at all; files are then opened as they are needed rather than all at once. What happens with them is described in the privacy policy.

Choose folder uses the normal folder dialog. It works in every browser and is the usual route.

Choose ZIP takes a zipped world. It is the easiest to describe to someone else because it avoids navigating file paths, and it works identically everywhere.

Folder with write access uses a newer browser capability available in Chrome and Edge. It allows Craftplicator to write changed region files back into the folder itself, which keeps the whole edit-and-review loop inside the tool. Chrome refuses folders inside the application data directory for this, so the world must be stored somewhere else.

Yes. Reading a world is harmless, but writing region files back modifies save data. Copy the world folder somewhere outside your Minecraft directory and work on the copy.

This is not an inconvenience to be tolerated; it is also what makes the write-back path usable at all, because Chrome refuses write access to folders inside the application data directory.

Click Reload from disk. Region data is cached so that browsing stays fast, and the cache is only discarded when you ask for it or after Craftplicator writes files itself.

If the world was opened through the folder upload dialog, the browser holds a snapshot of those files and refuses to read them again once they change on disk. In that case Craftplicator tells you to select the folder once more.

Java Edition 1.13 through the current release. That span covers three different chunk storage layouts and two different bit-packing schemes, all of which are read, and all of which can be written back in the same format they came from.

Before 1.13, Minecraft stored blocks as numeric identifiers with a separate data value. The 1.13 update — commonly called the flattening — replaced that with named block states, which is what the whole tool is built on.

If you have an older world, open it once in a current Minecraft version. The game converts it on load, and the converted world works.

Not directly, but your world is not stuck. Bedrock stores its chunks in a LevelDB database rather than in Anvil region files, which is a different storage system rather than a variation of the same one.

Convert the world to Java first with Chunker, a free open-source converter funded by Mojang, and then open the result here. It is a one-time step, it takes four clicks, and there is a full walkthrough on the Bedrock worlds page, including how to get a world off a console.

Yes, but consoles have no file export, so it is the awkward case. The route people use is to upload the world to a Realm from the console and download it from that Realm on a PC or a phone, where an ordinary world export becomes available.

A Realms subscription costs money and has a free trial. The Bedrock worlds page has the detail, and Minecraft's own support pages are worth checking first, since Realms features change.

You can, and you should not. Converting Bedrock to Java and back rebuilds the entire world from the converter's internal model rather than patching the part you changed, so anything it does not model is lost everywhere in the world, not just where you worked.

Treat the converted world as a Java copy for looking at, exporting from and experimenting in, and keep playing the Bedrock original. Nothing here touches it, because it never sees it.

Chrome and Edge support every feature, including writing changed files back into a world folder. Firefox and Safari can open worlds, browse them, walk through them and export from them, but cannot write into a folder — there the region files are offered as a ZIP download instead.

The three-dimensional walkthrough requires WebGL 2, which every current desktop browser supports, including on integrated graphics.

Partly. The map, the selection and the exports work with touch input. The walkthrough expects a mouse and a keyboard and is not usable on a touch screen. Selecting a world folder is also awkward on mobile devices, so a zipped world is the better route there.

It depends on what the mods do, and the distinction is simple: mods that add or change blocks are the ones that matter.

Mods that only change how the game looks or behaves — OptiFine, JEI, JourneyMap, minimap and performance mods — have no effect at all. The world on disk contains ordinary blocks and everything works normally.

Mods that add blocks, such as Biomes O' Plenty or any of the large content packs, put their own block names into the world. Those chunks are still read, and the block names are preserved exactly in exported schematics, so a schematic pasted back into a world with the same mods installed comes out correct. What will not be right is their colour: the built-in colour table covers vanilla blocks, so modded blocks fall back to name-based family rules and, failing that, appear magenta.

Loading a resource pack that contains the mod's textures corrects the colours.

Yes, provided you can reach the folder. A server keeps its world in the same Anvil format, usually in a folder named world next to the server jar, with world_nether and world_the_end alongside it.

Copy that folder to your own machine, or mount the server's share so it appears as a normal drive in the file dialog. Both work, because the tool only ever sees a folder.

Stop the server before copying, and stop it again before putting anything back. A running server holds chunks in memory and writes them out on its own schedule, which will overwrite your changes or produce a half-written copy.

Since version 1.20.5, servers can be configured to compress chunk data with LZ4 rather than the usual zlib. Those chunks are detected and reported, but not decompressed.

Single-player worlds do not use this by default. If you encounter it, loading the world once in a normal client rewrites the affected chunks.

Drag to pan and scroll to zoom. The bar at the bottom of the window shows the block coordinates under the cursor and the terrain height at that point.

Switch the view mode from Surface to Slice at Y and use the height slider. Instead of drawing the top block of each column, the map then draws the blocks at one fixed height, which reveals caves, cellars, mineshafts and foundations that the surface hides.

Click Walk through it. Click into the view to capture the mouse, then use W, A, S and D to move, the mouse to look, space and shift to rise and descend, and Ctrl to move faster. Press M or Escape to return to the map.

If an area is selected, the walkthrough starts positioned to look straight at it, standing back far enough to see the whole thing.

The walkthrough is deliberately static. It has no entities, no block updates and no dynamic lighting, and movement is free flight rather than simulated walking.

Collision and gravity would be the first dynamic components in an otherwise static view, and neither helps you judge a build. Flying gets you to the vantage point you want without fighting the terrain.

Lower the Distance setting, which controls how far the view extends, from eight chunks to six or four. The geometry for each chunk is built as you approach it, so flying quickly outruns the preparation; moving more slowly lets it catch up.

Partly. Loading your own resource pack or your own game client file makes Craftplicator read the block textures and average each one into a single colour, which is then used for the map, the exports and the walkthrough.

Full textured rendering is not provided. The built-in colour table exists so that the tool works without any Minecraft assets at all, which is also why no textures are shipped with it.

Magenta marks a block for which the colour table has no entry and no family rule matched. This is usually a modded block or a very recent addition to the game.

The colour is deliberately conspicuous. A wrong colour that looks plausible is harder to notice and more misleading than one that obviously signals a gap.

Hold Shift and drag a rectangle across the map, or drag with the right mouse button. The X and Z values can be adjusted afterwards in the panel.

The vertical extent has two modes. Surface to lowest point measures the selection when you release the mouse and sets the top to the highest surface block and the bottom to the lowest, which excludes the empty air above and the solid stone below. Manual Y range lets you enter both values yourself.

Because most of a full-height selection is material nobody will ever see. On rolling terrain, this mode typically reduces a box of 180 layers to between 15 and 30, which makes the export smaller, faster and easier to handle in whatever you open it with.

For a terrain tile intended for printing it also produces a flat base at the lowest surface point, which is exactly what a printed tile needs to stand on.

It closes caves and hollow spaces below the surface so that the exported result is solid. Each enclosed pocket is filled with the material immediately beneath it, so a cave in stone becomes stone.

Nothing above the surface is affected, so trees, buildings and overhangs remain as they are. The setting exists mainly for 3D printing, where hollow underground spaces produce unnecessary internal geometry and unstable prints.

• .schem — a Sponge schematic in version 2 or 3, for WorldEdit, Litematica and most server tooling. It preserves block states, so pasting it back reproduces the original exactly.
• .glb — a glTF binary file with vertex colours, for viewing, rendering and further 3D work. It opens in Blender and in any glTF viewer without additional setup.
• .stl — a triangle mesh for 3D printing, with the block size specified in millimetres.

Place the file in the schematics folder of your WorldEdit installation, then run //schem load <name> followed by //paste in game. Adding -a to the paste command skips air blocks, which is useful when placing a build into existing terrain.

Litematica keeps its own schematic list but reads the same files, and its projection mode lets you build the schematic by hand rather than pasting it, which is the usual approach in survival play.

Two reductions are applied. Faces between two solid blocks are never generated, because they are invisible. Then neighbouring faces of the same block that lie in the same plane are merged into single larger surfaces, a technique called greedy meshing.

Together these typically remove between eighty and ninety-five percent of the triangles that a naive one-cube-per-block export would produce. In practice this is the difference between a file your slicer refuses to open and one it handles comfortably.

Yes. Select an area, set the block size in millimetres, and export it as an STL file. The mesh is checked for open edges and the result is reported before you download, so you know whether the model is watertight before your slicer tells you.

Ten millimetres per block is a useful starting point: a selection of 64 by 64 blocks becomes a square of 64 centimetres, which you then scale to your printer.

Below roughly three millimetres per block, fine detail such as fence posts and torches falls below what most nozzles can produce. Above that, the limiting factor is usually the build volume rather than the detail.

Generally no. Grass, flowers, torches, fences and rails become geometry thinner than a nozzle can extrude, and they add large numbers of triangles for detail that will not survive the print.

Leave the setting on when exporting for a render, where the same detail is worth having.

Because the selection contains exactly what is in the world, and the world contains caves. Enable Fill caves in the selection panel: every hollow below the surface is filled with the surrounding material, and the tile then stands on a solid base.

A slicer is the program that turns a 3D model into instructions for a specific printer: it cuts the model into layers and works out the paths, temperatures and speeds. PrusaSlicer, Cura and Bambu Studio are the common ones, and all are free.

You need one. The STL exported here describes a shape; it says nothing about your printer. The slicer is where the shape meets the machine.

For terrain tiles, usually not. Exported with the surface mode they have a flat base and their overhangs are mostly the small steps between block heights, which print without help.

For buildings and imported models it depends on the shape. Anything overhanging by more than about 45 degrees from vertical needs support, and blocky models produce plenty of those. Your slicer will show you where, and the support material breaks away afterwards.

Printing a build hollow with a low infill saves a great deal of material and time, and for something being displayed rather than handled it makes no visible difference.

Flat on the bed, with the base down. Terrain exported with the surface mode already has a flat underside at the lowest surface point, so it needs no supports and no raft in most cases.

Yes. Load a model file, position and size it on the map, choose which block families its colours should be matched against, and the tool produces a block version that can be exported as a schematic or written directly into the world.

3D models. .glb with vertex colours, base colour factors and embedded textures; .stl in binary and ASCII form, including the colour convention some tools store in the attribute field; .obj; and .ply in ASCII and binary form.

Zipped models. A .zip holding an OBJ with its .mtl and texture folder, which is what a download from a model library usually is. The archive is opened, the material file is matched to the model and the textures are pulled out, so the colours arrive intact without any preparation.

Images. .png, .jpg and .webp become block mosaics.

Block builds. .schem schematics, Sponge version 2 and 3.

Point clouds without faces are rejected, because there is no surface to sample. Such files need to be meshed first.

Anything else — FBX, DAE, 3MF, a Blender file, an OBJ with separate material files — can be converted first with our 3D file format converter, which produces the GLB this tool prefers.

After loading, the model's footprint appears as a rectangle on the map. Drag inside it to move it, drag a corner to resize it. Scaling is uniform, so the proportions are preserved, and the opposite corner stays in place.

The resulting block dimensions are displayed along the edges of the rectangle and update as you drag. They use exactly the same rounding as the conversion itself, so the displayed size is the size you will get.

Use the Z up button in the toolbar. glTF files use Y as the vertical axis, while STL files and most CAD exports use Z. For STL and OBJ files Craftplicator makes an informed guess based on the proportions, but a guess is all it is, and one click corrects it.

Below roughly 30 blocks along the longest edge, fine features disappear. Between 60 and 150 blocks the result is detailed and recognisable. Above that, block counts grow quickly: doubling the size multiplies the count by about four for a surface and about eight for a solid body.

Nothing is being lost in the conversion. A surface voxelisation is exactly one block thick, and wherever the model's surface passes close to the corner of a cell, that single cell is left open. In a rendered preview this is invisible; in game you see daylight through the wall.

Three settings address it. Filling: solid converts the model as a solid body rather than a shell. Wall thickness grows the surface by additional layers. Close pinholes fills cells that are already enclosed on five sides. For a scanned model, solid filling or a wall thickness of two blocks removes the effect entirely.

Yes. Load a Sponge schematic the same way you load a model, and it appears on the map as a footprint you can position and rotate.

A schematic is already blocks, which makes it simpler than a mesh: there is nothing to sample, nothing to scale and no colour to match. The size comes from the file and cannot be changed, so the size, palette, filling and dithering controls are switched off. Block states come through unchanged, so stairs stay stairs and a build pastes back exactly as it was saved.

Yes, and that is now the normal way round. The preview is live: as you move the rectangle, resize it, rotate it or change the height settings, the placement is recomputed against the real terrain and drawn into the footprint.

Switch to the walkthrough and it appears there too, semi-transparent, at its real position and height. That is the check the top-down map cannot give you, because from above you cannot see whether the base sits on the ground or two blocks into a slope.

It confirms what the preview is showing. The build is rebuilt at full resolution, the ghost turns solid, the corner handles disappear and the map goes back to normal panning and selecting. The export buttons only become available once it is frozen, so nothing can be written that you have not looked at.

Adjust unfreezes it, Remove clears it entirely.

Because it is rebuilt on every change, and a converted mesh is capped at 64 blocks along its longest edge while you are still positioning it. At that size the difference is not visible in a ghost, and it keeps the preview responsive while you drag.

Freezing rebuilds it at the size you actually asked for.

Yes, in 90 degree steps with Turn 90°. The block states rotate with the volume, so stairs, logs, signs, fences and walls all end up facing the right way rather than pointing where they used to.

Free angles are not offered. Rotating a block grid by anything other than a quarter turn produces stepped edges and destroys exactly the alignment that makes a build look built.

.schem, the Sponge format written by current WorldEdit, Litematica and by this tool. Both version 2 and version 3 are read.

.schematic, the older MCEdit format that most builds downloaded from the internet still use. These store blocks as numeric ids from before Minecraft 1.13, and those are translated back into named block states on load, including wood and stone variants, the sixteen dye colours, stair facing, slab halves and log axes. Anything the translation does not recognise is placed as stone and reported, so you know what to look for.

Two related formats are refused with an explanation rather than a generic error. Litematica's own .litematic needs to be exported as .schem from within Litematica. Structure block .nbt files are a different format again and convert through WorldEdit.

Because you can see where it lands first. The footprint sits on the map where you drag it, the terrain height under it is measured, and the foundation and clearance settings apply to it exactly as they do to a converted model. Switching to the walkthrough shows it standing in place before anything is written.

WorldEdit remains the better tool when you are already in game and know where you want it. This route is for the case where you are deciding.

Three different causes, and the file format tells you which one you have.

STL files carry no colour at all. The format has no way to store it, apart from a non-standard convention some tools use, which is read where present. A grey result from an STL is the format working as designed.

OBJ files usually keep their colour in separate .mtl and image files, and those are not read here. An OBJ with colours stored per vertex works; one that relies on a material file will come out plain.

GLB is the format to use when colour matters. It carries geometry, vertex colours, materials and textures in one file, which is why it is the recommended format for anything colourful.

If your model is an OBJ with .mtl and texture files beside it, run it through our 3D file format converter first. It folds the materials and textures into a single GLB, and the colours then arrive intact.

Convert it. Our 3D file format converter reads the common exchange formats and writes GLB, which is the format this tool handles best because geometry, colours and textures all travel in one file.

That is also the answer when a supported format arrives without its colour: an OBJ that keeps its materials in separate files, or a model whose textures did not come along.

Not directly, and the route through GLB is the one most people end up taking anyway.

IFC is a large specification, and reading it in a browser realistically means pulling in a WebAssembly library such as web-ifc. That is a heavy dependency for a format that converts cleanly outside the browser, so the conversion happens before the import rather than inside it.

Two free routes, both reliable:

• IfcConvert, the command line tool from IfcOpenShell. Recent versions write glTF directly; older ones write OBJ or DAE, which our 3D file format converter turns into GLB.
• Bonsai, the Blender add-on formerly called BlenderBIM. Open the IFC in Blender, delete what you do not need, export GLB. Slower than the command line and much easier to control.

Revit, ArchiCAD and SketchUp all export either IFC or a format the converter reads, so the same path applies.

Everything that will not survive being turned into blocks, which in a BIM model is most of the file.

Building services — pipes, ducts, cable trays, sprinklers — are invisible at block resolution and add enormous geometry. Furniture and fittings turn into speckle. Door and window frames modelled at centimetre thickness disappear. What survives is the shell: walls, floors, roof, stairs, and the large openings.

Deleting those layers before export usually reduces the file by an order of magnitude and improves the result, because the voxelisation then has nothing to trip over.

IFC and most BIM models are in metres, so one block per metre is the natural mapping, and it happens to match the way people build in Minecraft: a two-storey house lands at around eight blocks tall, which looks right in game.

For a landmark you want more. Two or three blocks per metre keeps window openings, string courses and roof detail legible, at the cost of a much larger build. The block dimensions shown on the placement rectangle tell you which side of that trade you are on before you commit.

Expect grey. IFC materials are frequently left unspecified, so a converted building often arrives with no colour information at all. Assign materials in Blender before exporting, or accept the result and let the stone and concrete families carry it.

It depends on whether the people who need it turn up. Direct support is a question of demand rather than of difficulty: the library exists, and the work is real but bounded.

If your organisation would use it regularly, say so. That is the kind of thing that decides what gets built next.

Yes. Load a .png, .jpg or .webp and it becomes a mosaic, either standing up as a wall or lying flat on the ground in the style of in-game map art.

The picture goes through the same colour matching as a 3D model: the same block families, the same Oklab matching and the same dithering. Set the width in blocks by dragging the corners of the rectangle on the map; the height follows from the aspect ratio of the image.

Downsizing averages the pixels that fall into each block rather than picking one of them, so a photograph reduced to 64 blocks keeps its subject instead of its noise. Transparent areas of a PNG stay empty, which turns a logo into a cut-out shape rather than a rectangle with a background.

A wall reads better from a distance and is the right choice for a portrait, a logo or a poster. Standing at ground level you see the whole thing at once.

Flat on the ground suits maps, floor patterns and anything meant to be seen from above, and it is what in-game map art does. It needs a large flat area, and the result is invisible from the ground, so plan a viewing point.

Between 64 and 128 blocks wide is the useful range for a photograph. Below about 48 a face stops being recognisable; above 150 the block count grows faster than the detail does, and a wall taller than the world allows is not a wall.

Simple graphics with flat colours work at much smaller sizes. A logo at 32 blocks can be perfectly clear where a photograph at the same size is mud.

No, drop the zip in as it is. The archive is opened, the model is found inside it, the material file is matched to it and the textures are read out of the same archive.

That is the case a download from a model library actually produces, and separately none of those files mean anything: geometry without its material is grey, and a material file without its textures is a list of names.

For printable objects, Printables, Thingiverse and MyMiniFactory carry large free libraries. For scanned real-world objects, Scan the World and the Smithsonian Open Access collection are both extensive and generous with licensing. Sketchfab has a filter for downloadable models and a great deal of high-quality work.

Check the licence on anything you download, particularly if the result is going anywhere public.

The other option is to scan the object yourself. A turntable scan produces exactly the kind of file this tool consumes, and it is the only route that gets your object rather than someone else's approximation of it.

Single recognisable objects work best: landmarks, statues, vehicles, animals, buildings. They have a clear silhouette that survives being reduced to blocks, which is what decides whether the result reads at a distance.

Things that work poorly: very thin structures such as railings and wires, which disappear or turn into speckle; models that rely on fine surface texture rather than shape; and anything whose appeal is in its smoothness, since blocks are the opposite of smooth.

If you are unsure, try it at 48 blocks first. It takes seconds, and the preview tells you whether the shape survives before you commit to a large build.

Reduce the footprint. Scaling is uniform, so making the base smaller shrinks the height in the same proportion, and the block dimensions displayed on the placement rectangle show exactly what you will get before you build it.

Blocks that would end up above the world's build height are dropped and reported rather than being placed in a section the game would reject. On worlds from 1.18 onwards there is considerably more room than the 256 blocks older versions allowed.

Not necessarily, and this is worth understanding because the instinct is wrong.

A larger palette gives a closer match for each individual cell, but adjacent cells then land on different blocks, and the result looks speckled from a distance. A smaller palette with good separation between its colours produces flatter, cleaner areas that read better as a build.

Start with one or two families. Add more only if the result looks too flat, rather than starting with everything switched on and wondering why the surface is noisy.

Surface only converts the outer skin of the model, which suits objects that are already hollow or that you intend to build as a shell.

Solid additionally fills everything the outside cannot reach, which is the right choice for scans and photogrammetry. On a typical scanned object it roughly doubles the block count and eliminates almost all pinholes.

Whichever families you enable: concrete, wool, terracotta, stone, wood, metal, natural blocks, Nether blocks or a set of bright blocks. Concrete produces the most saturated result, terracotta the most muted, and stone the widest range of greys.

Colour matching runs in the Oklab colour space rather than in RGB, because numeric proximity in RGB does not correspond well to perceived similarity and produces visibly wrong choices for saturated colours.

Because Minecraft has no bright, saturated red full block. Red concrete is a dark, deep red and red wool is darker still, so a pure bright red really is perceptually closer to orange concrete than to anything named red.

Enabling more block families gives the matcher more options, but the underlying limit is the palette the game provides.

It mixes neighbouring block colours in a regular pattern so that gradients appear smoother when viewed from a distance, at the cost of a noisier surface up close.

Leave it at zero for models with flat colours, and raise it for photographic textures and smooth gradients.

The footprint you positioned determines where it goes, and the world's own height data determines how high. You can anchor it at the lowest point of its footprint, the average, the highest point, or a fixed height, and you can sink it into the ground.

An automatic foundation fills the gap between the ground and the underside of the model, but only under parts that actually rest on the ground. A column whose lowest block begins well above the base of the model is treated as an overhang, so arches, balconies and the space between the legs of a tower keep their openings.

Yes, and it is worth doing. Build preview computes the placement and draws the result into the footprint rectangle from above. Switching to the walkthrough shows the model in place at its real position and size, tinted so it is distinguishable from the surrounding world.

Nothing is written to any file until you explicitly ask for it.

Three routes are available, in ascending order of directness:

• Export a .schem and paste it with WorldEdit or Litematica. This is the safest route and the only one that works on a server you do not control.
• Download the region files as a ZIP archive, which you extract over a copy of your world. The files are already inside the correct folder structure.
• Write into the world folder directly, available when the world was opened with write access. The changed region files are saved in place and the view reloads afterwards.

It is safe if you work on a copy and Minecraft is closed. Chunks are rewritten in the same format they were read in, block entities and entities are left untouched, and the lighting flag is reset so the game recalculates lighting when the chunk is next loaded.

That said, save data is save data. Keep the original, and treat the write-back path as something you use deliberately rather than casually.

The running game holds the world in memory and writes it out again at the next autosave, which would overwrite anything placed there in the meantime. Closing the game before writing, and reopening it afterwards, avoids the conflict entirely.

Chrome blocks folders inside the application data directory for the file system access it uses, and the entire Minecraft directory lies inside it.

Copy the world somewhere else — a projects folder, the desktop — and open the copy. Since working on a copy is the correct practice anyway, this restriction mostly enforces good habits.

Only the region files that actually changed, already placed inside a region folder — or DIM-1/region for the Nether — together with a text file recording the world name, dimension, target coordinates and the list of files.

Extract the archive over a copy of your world so that the files replace the existing ones of the same name.

Chunks that have never been generated, chunks belonging to a region file that does not exist, and chunks in a format that cannot be written. Each case is reported rather than silently ignored, and everything that can be written still is.

If no chunk at all could be written, the operation fails with an explanation and produces no file, so you never receive an archive that appears complete and is empty.

Finished builds you can download and place in your own world: landmarks, terrain tiles prepared for printing, small kits made for classroom activities, and pieces produced together with museums and other institutions.

Every entry states its dimensions, its block count, the block families used and the Minecraft version it was made in, because those are the things you need to know before downloading anything.

We do. The gallery is produced in house rather than assembled from submissions, which means every entry has been opened in a world, checked that it pastes cleanly, and documented with the settings that produced it.

That is slower than accepting contributions, and it is the reason the entries are consistent: the same metadata on every page, the same file formats, and a note on how each one was made so you can reproduce or improve it.

Yes. Each entry appears as a thumbnail in the gallery grid, and opening it shows the build in a viewer you can rotate and inspect in the browser. The download links sit alongside it, so you can decide whether a build suits your world before taking the file.

Once downloaded, a gallery schematic can be loaded straight into Craftplicator, positioned on your own terrain and written into your world without WorldEdit.

Gallery builds are published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may download, use, modify and share them for private, educational and other non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the source.

Commercial use is not covered by that licence, but it is available: commercial licences can be requested, and are granted case by case.

Roughly, anything where the build is part of something people pay for or that promotes a paid product: a monetised video series built around the files, a paid server that advertises them as a feature, merchandise or printed models offered for sale, or a commercial exhibit.

Using a build in a school lesson, in a library programme, on a private server, in a personal video, or for your own printing is not commercial use and needs no permission beyond the licence.

If your case sits somewhere in between — and plenty do — ask before you build a project on it. A short question in advance is easier for both sides than a licence dispute afterwards.

Get in touch and describe what you want to do: which builds, in what context, and at what scale. Requests are answered individually, and educational and cultural uses are treated generously.

Craftplicator is free for private, educational and other non-commercial use. Commercial use — inside a paid product or service, or as part of a commercial exhibit — is available under a separate licence on request.

If you are unsure which side of the line a project falls on, ask. It costs one email and settles the question before work starts.

There is no account system, so no user profile is created.

The privacy policy sets out how data is handled across the site, including any analytics on the surrounding pages. Treat that page as the binding description rather than any summary elsewhere, and check it directly if you need certainty for a particular deployment.

Yes. Worlds, models, textures and anything else you bring to the service must be yours, or something you have permission to use. This matters most with downloaded models, where a licence travels with the file and is easy to overlook.

By using the service you confirm that you hold the necessary rights. If you cannot make that confirmation for a particular file, do not use it here.

By submitting content you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use it and anything produced from it in connection with the service. The Terms of Use define the scope precisely and are the binding text; this answer is a summary of it.

This is a deliberate simplification on our side rather than a plan for your files: tracking different rights for different submissions is not something we are set up to do, so the terms are the same for everyone.

Get in touch before you use the service. Museums, archives and schools frequently work with material whose rights sit elsewhere, and a blanket confirmation is exactly the thing their legal department will refuse.

Different terms can be arranged for that case. It is a short conversation, and it is far easier to have before a project starts than after something has been submitted.

There is nothing to install and no account to create, so no student or visitor identities are created or managed, and a session needs no login.

For a formal data protection assessment, work from the privacy policy rather than from this page. If your institution needs specific written assurances about how data is handled, ask and we will address them directly; that is a better basis for a deployment decision than a general description.

No practical one. Only the region files you actually look at are decoded, so a world of several gigabytes opens as quickly as a small one.

The size that matters is the area you select for export, not the size of the world it came from.

Java Edition stores terrain in Anvil region files, named r.<x>.<z>.mca, each covering 32 by 32 chunks. A region file begins with a 4 KiB table of sector offsets, followed by chunk payloads that are compressed with zlib and encoded as NBT, Minecraft's own binary tag format.

Within a chunk, blocks are grouped into sections of 16 by 16 by 16, each holding a palette of block states and an index per block packed into 64-bit values.

By never reading all of it. A region file is opened by reading its 8 KiB header, and only the sectors containing the chunks actually needed are read afterwards. The same principle applies inside a ZIP archive, where the central directory is parsed so that individual entries can be extracted on demand.

It uses the height data every chunk already stores. For each column, only the one section containing the surface block is unpacked, rather than the entire column. Each region is rendered in a background thread and returned as a finished image, which keeps the interface responsive while the map fills in.

Oklab is a perceptual colour space in which equal numeric distances correspond much more closely to equal perceived differences than they do in RGB.

Matching a model's colours to Minecraft blocks is a nearest-neighbour search, and performing that search in RGB produces choices that are numerically close but visibly wrong, particularly for saturated colours. In Oklab the same search produces choices that look correct.

No. The walkthrough draws vertex-coloured geometry with no textures, no shadows and no post-processing, which any graphics hardware from the past decade handles, including integrated chips.

Check that JavaScript is enabled and that the page is served over HTTPS. Several of the browser capabilities used here — folder selection with write access in particular — require a secure connection and are unavailable over plain HTTP.

The selected folder is probably one level too high or too low. Select the world folder itself, the one containing level.dat and a region subfolder, rather than the saves folder above it or the region folder within it.

Those chunks have never been generated. The world only contains terrain where a player has been. Visiting the area once in game creates the chunks, after which they appear.

This should not occur; files are only offered once they are complete. If it happens, the status bar at the bottom of the window carries the actual error, and the browser console holds the details. That message is the useful thing to report.

The size is controlled by the longest-edge value in the toolbar on the map and by dragging the corners of the footprint rectangle. The block dimensions displayed along the rectangle's edges show exactly what will be produced, so adjust until those numbers look right rather than judging by the rectangle alone.

Change the Height setting. Anchoring at the lowest point plants the model on the lowest ground within its footprint and lets the foundation bridge the difference, which is normally what you want on a slope. Anchoring at the highest point lifts it clear of everything. Sink into ground pushes it further in, and Air above clears space over it.

Use the contact form for questions, problems and commercial licence requests. A message that says what you did, what you expected and what happened instead gets a useful answer considerably faster than one that says it did not work.

For a bug, the status line at the bottom of the window and the browser console usually contain the actual error. Those two lines are the most useful thing you can send.

Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.