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Find Your World

Open Craftplicator

Finding Your Minecraft World

Where does Minecraft keep my worlds?

Every world is a folder inside a saves directory. Which saves directory depends on your operating system and on how you launch the game.

The standard locations for Java Edition:

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

Craftplicator shows the correct one for your system next to the folder button, with a button to copy it.

The address bar trick

This is the part most people do not know, and it saves all the clicking.

When you press Choose folder, your operating system opens a file dialog. That dialog has an address bar, and you can paste a path into it and press Enter to jump straight there.

  • Windows: press Ctrl + L in the dialog, or click the address bar at the top, then paste %AppData%\.minecraft\saves and press Enter. Windows expands %AppData% for you, so you do not need to know your user name or where it actually lives.
  • macOS: press Cmd + Shift + G in the dialog, paste ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves and press Enter. This works even though the Library folder is hidden in Finder by default.
  • Linux: press Ctrl + L in the dialog, paste ~/.minecraft/saves and press Enter.

You will then be looking at one folder per world. Select the world you want — not the saves folder above it, and not the region folder inside it.

Which folder do I actually pick?

The world folder itself. You can recognise it because it contains a file called level.dat and a folder called region.

saves/
  My Survival World/        ← pick this one
    level.dat
    region/
    ...
  Creative Flats/
  ...

If the tool reports that no region files were found, you almost certainly selected one level too high — the saves folder — or one level too low, the region folder inside a world.

I do not recognise the world names

Minecraft shows the name you gave a world in game, but the folder on disk keeps the name it had when it was created, and renaming a world in game does not rename the folder. A world you renamed to “Castle Project” may still sit in a folder called “New World (3)”.

Two ways around it:

  • Sort the folder by date modified. The world you played most recently is at the top.
  • In Minecraft, open Singleplayer, select the world and choose Edit. The screen names the folder, and depending on your version it also offers buttons that open a folder in your file manager — from any of those you can navigate to saves and see which folder is which.

I use a launcher other than the official one

Multi-instance launchers keep a separate Minecraft directory per instance, so there is no single path to give you. Every one of them has a button for it, and that button is more reliable than any path I could print here:

  • Prism Launcher and MultiMC: right-click the instance, then Folder or Minecraft Folder. saves is inside.
  • CurseForge: the three-dot menu on a profile, then Open Folder.
  • Modrinth App: the profile’s menu, then Open folder.
  • ATLauncher, GDLauncher and others: look for Open folder or Instance folder in the instance’s context menu.

From the folder that opens, go into saves.

Make a copy first

Before you do anything else, copy the world folder somewhere outside the Minecraft directory — your desktop, a projects folder, anywhere. Work on the copy.

Reading a world does no harm, but the moment you write region files back you are editing save data. A copy costs one drag and removes the entire class of problems where something went wrong and the original was the only version.

There is a second reason on Windows: for the write-back feature, Chrome refuses folders inside AppData, and all of .minecraft is inside it. A copy elsewhere is the only way that feature works at all.

The simpler route: a ZIP file

If navigating to a folder is more trouble than it is worth, zip the world instead:

  • Windows: right-click the world folder → Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder
  • macOS: right-click the world folder → Compress
  • Linux: right-click the world folder → Compress or Create archive

Then drag the resulting .zip onto the page, or use Choose ZIP. Only the parts actually needed are unpacked, so this stays fast even for large worlds.

This is the route to give someone else. It involves no paths, no hidden folders and no dialog tricks, and it works identically on every system.

Close Minecraft first

If the game is running with the world loaded, two things can go wrong. The world on disk may not be up to date, because the game keeps recent changes in memory until it saves. And anything you write back will be overwritten at the next autosave.

Quit to the title screen at minimum, and close the game entirely before writing anything back.

My world is not a Java world

If you play on a console, a phone, a tablet or through the Windows store version, you have Bedrock Edition. It stores worlds in a different format that this viewer does not read, and there is no conversion path that preserves everything.

You can tell them apart by the folder: a Java world contains level.dat and a region folder with .mca files in it. A Bedrock world contains a db folder full of small files.

The folders are hidden

A name beginning with a dot marks a folder as hidden on macOS and Linux, and Windows hides Minecraft’s folders as well. Pasting the path into the address bar works regardless, which is why that is the first thing to try, but if you would rather browse:

  • Windows: in Explorer, open the View tab and switch on Hidden items.
  • Linux: press Ctrl + H in the file manager.
  • macOS: press Cmd + Shift + G and paste the path, which reaches hidden folders without unhiding anything.

Search for it instead

Every Minecraft world contains a file called level.dat. Searching for that file finds every world on the machine, wherever a launcher decided to put it.

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

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

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

In PowerShell the equivalent is:

Get-ChildItem $env:USERPROFILE -Filter level.dat -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object FullName

macOS and Linux. In a terminal:

find ~ -name level.dat 2>/dev/null

Worlds on a server

A Minecraft server keeps its world in the same format, usually in a folder called world next to the server jar, with world_nether and world_the_end beside it. That folder works here like any other.

Copy it to your own machine, or mount the server’s share so it appears as a normal drive in the file dialog. Either is fine, because the tool only ever sees a folder.

Stop the server first. A running server holds chunks in memory and writes them out on its own schedule, so a copy taken while it runs may be incomplete, and anything you write back while it runs will be overwritten.

One thing to check before you start

Whatever you open here has to be yours, or something you have permission to use. For your own worlds that is a formality. It is worth a thought for a world someone sent you, a map you downloaded, or material belonging to an institution, since the Terms of Use ask you to confirm it.

Nothing here worked

One last resort that always works: in Minecraft, create a new world with a name you will recognise, play for a moment, quit, and look for the newest folder in saves. That tells you where worlds live on this particular machine, and after that you know the path for good.