Craftplicator: Complete User Guide
This tool opens a Minecraft Java Edition world directly in your browser. You can pan across a top-down map of the terrain, walk through the world in first person, select any area and export it as a schematic, a 3D model or a printable mesh, and you can voxelise your own 3D models and place them on the terrain.
There is no practical file size limit: a three gigabyte world behaves the same as a small one, because only the parts you look at are ever decoded. How data is handled is set out in the privacy policy.
Before you start
Use a copy of your world. Everything in Craftplicator is read-only until you deliberately write region files back, but the habit costs you nothing and protects you from your own mistakes. Copy the world folder somewhere outside your Minecraft directory and work on the copy.
Close Minecraft. If the game is running with the world loaded, it will overwrite anything you write back the next time it saves.
Where your worlds live:
| System | Path |
|---|---|
| Windows | %APPDATA%\.minecraft\saves |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves |
| Linux | ~/.minecraft/saves |
Each world is a folder that contains level.dat and a region subfolder. That folder is what you open, not the saves folder above it.
Browsers. Chrome and Edge support everything. Firefox and Safari can open and export worlds but cannot write files back into a folder; there you use the ZIP download instead. The walkthrough needs WebGL 2, which every current browser has.
1. Open a world
There are three ways in, and they differ in what you can do afterwards.
Choose folder opens the normal folder dialog. Pick the world folder itself. Your browser will ask something like “Upload 2,431 files to this site?” — that is the standard wording of that dialog, and it appears for every site that reads a folder. It is asking whether the page may access those files; the files themselves are read one region at a time, only when needed.
Choose ZIP takes a zipped world. On Windows, right-click the world folder, Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder, then drop the ZIP on the page. This is the easiest route to explain to someone else, because it involves no path navigation. Only the parts actually needed are unpacked, so it stays fast even for large worlds.
Folder with write access is the Chrome-only route that lets Craftplicator put changed region files back by itself. Chrome refuses folders under AppData for this, which is another reason to work on a copy stored elsewhere.
You can also drag a world folder or a ZIP onto the drop area.
Once a world is open, the panel shows the number of region files and the game version, and the Dimension menu lets you switch between Overworld, Nether and End.
Reload from disk throws away everything cached and reads the world again. Use it after you or the game changed the files. A folder opened through the upload dialog hands the browser a snapshot; once the files change, the browser refuses to read them again, and Craftplicator will tell you to pick the folder once more.
2. Find your way around the map
Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. The status bar at the bottom shows the block coordinates under your cursor and the terrain height there.
Surface mode draws the world the way the in-game map does: the top block of each column, shaded by the slope against its northern neighbour, with water tinted by depth.
Slice at Y draws the blocks at one fixed height instead. This is how you find caves, cellars, mineshafts and foundations that the surface hides. Drag the slider and watch the layer change.
Whole world zooms out to everything that exists.
Resource pack replaces the built-in colours with the real textures from your own resource pack or your own client.jar, averaged into one colour per block. The built-in colours are hand-picked approximations, which is why unfamiliar or modded blocks may show up magenta: that is deliberate, so gaps are obvious rather than silently wrong.
3. Walk through the world
Walk through it switches the top-down map for a first-person view of the same world. If you have an area selected, you start looking at it from the south, standing back far enough to see the whole thing.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click the view | Capture the mouse |
| Mouse | Look around |
| W A S D | Move |
| Space / Shift | Up / down |
| Ctrl | Sprint (five times faster) |
+ / − | Base speed |
| Scroll | Zoom the minimap |
| N | Hide or show the minimap |
| M or Esc | Back to the map |
Movement is creative-style flight. There is no collision and no gravity, because neither is needed to look at something and both would be the first dynamic component in an otherwise static view.
The view is static by design: no entities, no block updates, no dynamic lighting. Faces are shaded in the same four steps the game uses, and distance fog hides the edge of the render distance. Distance sets how far you see, from four to twelve chunks. Lower it if the frame rate drops.
The minimap in the bottom right follows you and shows your facing as a triangle. Your selection rectangle and the footprint of any model you are placing are drawn on it, and a model that only exists in the preview is drawn there too, since it is not in the world yet and cannot appear in the map tiles.
4. Select an area
Hold Shift and drag a rectangle, or drag with the right mouse button. You can fine-tune X and Z in the panel afterwards.
For the vertical extent there are two modes.
Surface to lowest point is the default and usually what you want. When you release the mouse, the area is measured: the top of the box is the highest surface block in it, the bottom is the lowest. Everything above that would be air and everything below it solid stone, so neither needs to be in the export. On rolling terrain this typically turns a 180-layer box into 15 to 30 layers.
Two settings belong to this mode:
- Extra depth pushes the floor down by a number of blocks, when you want some material under the lowest point.
- Fill caves closes caves and hollows below the surface so the result stands on a flat base. Each pocket is filled with the last solid block underneath it, so caves in stone become stone. Nothing above the surface is touched, so trees and buildings stay as they are.
Manual Y range lets you type the from and to values yourself. Measure again then suggests lowest minus three to highest plus one.
5. Export what you selected
| Format | Use it for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
.schem | Getting the area back into Minecraft | Sponge v2 for WorldEdit and Litematica, or v3 |
.glb | Viewing, rendering, sharing | Vertex colours, one material, greedy-meshed |
.stl | 3D printing | Block size in millimetres, checked for open edges |
Block size in mm only affects the STL. Ten millimetres per block gives a 64×64 selection a footprint of 64 centimetres, so scale it to your printer.
Include plants and decoration should usually stay off for printing. Grass, torches and fences turn into walls thinner than any nozzle can produce. For a render in Blender, turn it on.
The mesh is built with greedy meshing: neighbouring faces of the same block merge into one large quad, and faces between two solid blocks are dropped entirely. On a typical build that removes eighty to ninety-five percent of the triangles a naive cube-per-block exporter would produce, which is the difference between a forty megabyte STL and a three megabyte one.
Files arrive as normal downloads. To pick the folder each time, switch on “Ask where to save each file” in your browser’s download settings.
6. Import a 3D model
You can turn a .glb, .stl, .obj or .ply file into blocks and place it on the terrain, load a zipped OBJ with its materials and textures, turn a picture into a mosaic, or load a .schem schematic that is already blocks.
Images take the middle path. A .png, .jpg or .webp becomes a one block thick mosaic, standing as a wall or lying flat on the ground like map art. Colour matching, block palette and dithering work exactly as they do for a model; sampling, filling and the up axis do not apply. Downsizing averages the pixels in each block rather than picking one, so photographs survive the reduction.
Zipped models need no preparation. A .zip containing an OBJ with its .mtl and a texture folder is opened as it is, and the colours come through. That is the shape a model library download normally has.
Schematics take a shorter path. Their size is fixed by the file and their blocks are already chosen, so the size field, the up-axis buttons and the whole palette, filling and dithering section are switched off. What remains is where it goes and which way it faces. Turn 90° rotates the build and rotates its block states with it, so stairs, logs, signs and fences end up facing the right way. Everything after that — terrain fitting, foundation, preview, and all three ways of putting it into the world — works identically.
If your file is something else — FBX, DAE, 3MF, a Blender file — or if it is an OBJ that keeps its colour in separate .mtl and texture files, run it through the 3D file format converter first. It writes GLB, which carries geometry, colours and textures in a single file and is the format this tool handles best.
Load and position it
Pick the file. Its footprint appears as a rectangle in the middle of the current view, with a small toolbar.
- Drag inside the rectangle to move it.
- Drag a corner to resize. Scaling is uniform, so the model keeps its proportions, and the opposite corner stays where it is.
- The block dimensions are drawn on the edges: X above, Z on the right, Y in the corner. They update live and use exactly the same rounding as the conversion, so what you see is what you get.
- Y up / Z up tips the model upright. glTF files are Y-up, while STL and most CAD exports are Z-up. For
.stland.objCraftplicator guesses Z-up when the model would otherwise be lying down. - Turn 90° rotates around the vertical axis.
- The number field sets the longest edge directly, Centre brings the rectangle back to the middle of the view.
The preview inside the rectangle shows the model already converted to Minecraft blocks, from above, and updates after every change.
Choose how it is built
Filling decides between the bare surface and a solid body. For a scanned or photogrammetric model, solid is almost always right.
Wall thickness and Close pinholes exist because a surface voxelisation is exactly one block thin, and wherever the surface passes close to a voxel corner, single cells stay open. In a render you never notice; in game you see daylight through the wall. Thickness grows the shape by extra layers; closing fills cells that are already enclosed on five sides. On a scanned Eiffel Tower at 200 blocks tall, the bare surface leaves 277 such holes, closing brings it to 48, and a wall thickness of two removes them entirely.
Block palette is the set of blocks the colours are matched against. Concrete gives the most saturated result, terracotta the most muted, wool sits in between, and stone adds greys. Click the groups you want. Matching runs in Oklab rather than RGB, because nearest-neighbour in RGB picks visibly wrong blocks for saturated colours. Bear in mind that Minecraft has no bright saturated red full block, so a pure red will land on orange concrete: that is the honest nearest match in the palette that exists.
Dithering trades clean surfaces for smoother gradients. Leave it at zero for solid-coloured models, raise it for photographic textures.
Place it on the ground
Height decides how the model meets uneven terrain: at the lowest point of the footprint, the average, the highest, or a fixed Y value. Sink into ground pushes it in. Foundation fills the gap between the ground and the underside of the model, but only under parts that actually sit on the ground; an arch, a balcony or the gap between the four legs of a tower keeps its opening. Air above clears a few layers over the model so it does not end up inside a hill.
Build preview computes the result and draws it into the rectangle. If you switch to the walkthrough now, the model is drawn in place, tinted, at its real position and size. This is the moment to judge it before anything is written.
7. Put it into the world
Three routes, in ascending order of directness.
Save as .schem is the safest and works with any server. Load the file into WorldEdit or Litematica and paste it where you want it.
Download Region Files rebuilds the affected region files and packs them into a ZIP with a README. The .mca files are already inside a region/ folder, so you extract the archive over a copy of your world and the files land in the right place.
Write into the world folder appears when you opened the world with write access. The changed region files go straight to where they belong and the view reloads afterwards, so the whole loop stays inside the tool.
Whichever route you take: Minecraft must be closed, and you should be working on a copy. The lighting flag on changed chunks is reset so the game relights them on load. Block entities, entities and structure references are left untouched, which means this is a tool for terrain and builds, not for chests and spawners.
What it does not do
Being clear about this up front saves you time:
- Java Edition only, 1.13 and newer. Worlds from before the block flattening use numeric block IDs and are not read. Bedrock worlds use a completely different storage format.
- LZ4-compressed chunks — an option some servers enable on 1.20.5 and newer — are detected and reported but not decompressed.
- Stairs, slabs and fences become full cubes in exports and in the walkthrough. Real block shapes would need the model definitions from a resource pack.
- Water is opaque in the 3D views.
- Writing back needs 1.13 or newer. Everything from 1.13 to the current version is written in the same chunk format it came in.
Rights, privacy and licensing
What you bring. Worlds, models and textures you use here must be yours or something you have permission to use. By using the service you confirm that, and you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use the content you submit and anything produced from it, as set out in the Terms of Use. If your organisation cannot make that confirmation, which is common for museums and archives working with collection material, get in touch first — different terms can be arranged.
Privacy. There is no account to create and nothing to fill in before you start. Beyond that, the privacy policy is the authoritative description of how data is handled; read it there rather than relying on a summary.
Licensing. Craftplicator is free for private, educational and other non-commercial use. Commercial use is available under a separate licence on request. Builds downloaded from the gallery are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0: use, modify and share them with credit for non-commercial purposes, and ask if you need commercial terms.