Archetect 4.0 — for Minecraft 26.3

Builds keep their detail.

Until now a saved build came back with the right blocks in the right places, but blank signs, plain banners and undecorated pots. Archetect had never stored block entity data anywhere. It does now, from capture through to the file and back onto the screen and the chunk map grew a 3D view you can fly through and select from.

Requires Fabric Loader 0.19.5+, Fabric API, and Java 25. Client-side.

New

Your builds keep their contents. Sign text, decorated-pot sherds, banner patterns, container contents and skull profiles are saved into .archetect files and into the chunk cache, and drawn back in the chunk map. A build rescued from a dead server used to come back stripped of everything that made it that build.

A 3D chunk map. Fly through your cached chunks with spectator-style controls WASD, Space and Shift, mouse look, your own sprint keybind. The camera has no collision and sees through blocks from the inside, so underground builds stay visible from within. Open it with 3D View from the 2D map.

Select and save in 3D. Left and right click set the two corners at normal player reach. Corner 1 draws blue and corner 2 orange the moment each lands, so you can always tell which one is still missing. With both set, press + to save.

Pick chunks on the 2D map and save them. Right-drag a box of chunks, or right-click single ones. Drags add rather than replace, so you can gather separate areas in one go, and a single right-click takes one back out. Save Selection writes them out. A schematic is a box, so the box around your picks is what gets written anything inside it you did not pick is saved as empty rather than filled in with terrain, and the on-screen bar counts those before you save.

Save a region straight out of the cache. Works for a dimension you are not in, or a server you cannot join any more. It does not refuse when chunks are missing: the gaps are listed and written as empty, because refusing outright would make the feature useless for exactly the case it exists for.

The chunk map from the main menu. Options → Archetect Chunk Cache… lets you inspect a server's cache without connecting to it.

Real shapes in the map. Chests (including double chests and every copper oxidation state), decorated pots, bells, banners, shulker boxes, conduits, skulls, copper golem statues and end portals are drawn with their real geometry instead of stand-in cubes.

Improved

• The chunk map opens roughly an order of magnitude faster. Time to first pixel dropped from about 2.5 seconds to under 70 ms, and a full map load from 1.0–2.5 s to 85–96 ms.
• The chunk map button moved out of Settings and into the main Archetect menu, where it belongs browsing cached chunks is something you set out to do, not a setting you adjust.
• The 3D view will not open for the server you are currently connected to. Flying cached terrain live would be x-ray by another name. Singleplayer is unaffected, and any server you are not connected to still opens.

Fixed

The Printer

• It skipped any door, trapdoor or fence gate the schematic wanted open nothing in Minecraft can be placed already open, so the Printer never found a way to place one and passed it over forever. It now places the door shut and clicks it open, the way a player does.
• Boats and minecarts were never saved by an in-world save.

Saving

• Most builds could not be saved as .schematic at all, including blocks the format handles perfectly well.
• A build containing blocks newer than 1.13 failed outright with no way forward when saved as .schematic. It now tells you how many there are and offers to save without them.
• Banner patterns and pot sherds survived a save only if the build came from the chunk cache, not from the world around you.
• Sherds and sign text were silently lost for most cached chunks.

The chunk map

• The cache screen froze the game, worst of all when leaving the 2D map.
• Block entities did not draw at all when the map was opened in game every chest, pot and banner silently vanished.
• The player's hotbar and held item drew on top of the map.
• Opened from the title screen, the map showed empty item frames and minecarts facing the wrong way.
• Water was opaque, grey, and missing around anything with a model of its own.
• Barriers wore another block's texture.
• The 3D camera kept flying while its pause menu was open.
• The selection box and corner markers turned blue when the selection was underwater.
• The dimension button went blank and stopped working after resizing the window.

Ghost blueprints

• Sign text drew in the chunk map but not on ghosts.
• Banners and minecarts looked far more see-through than the blocks around them.
• Waterlogged blocks previewed dry, and waterlogged blocks strobed where their fluid met their own model.
• A ghost of a lake came out as opaque fog with everything inside it buried.
• Ghost water hid whatever was behind it, depending on the angle.

Under the hood, the chunk map and ghost blueprints had grown into two separate renderers that kept drifting apart nine near-identical ways of drawing the same handful of blocks. That is the reason so many of the bugs above came in pairs. They are now one shared path, which is why banners, pots, signs and the rest finally behave the same in both views.

Known limitations

• The Printer cannot create waterlogging. A dry block counts as correctly built against a waterlogged one. The ghost still draws the water so you can see where it needs flooding.
• The Printer cannot fill in sign text, pot sherds or container contents. It only ever acts through real player interaction, and a player cannot force that data onto a placed block.
• The Printer cannot open an iron door or iron trapdoor. They only move on redstone. It places them shut and counts them built.
• Only .archetect stores entities and block entities. .schem, .litematic and .schematic are written the way the tools that created them expect, so files Archetect saves open correctly in WorldEdit, Litematica and MCEdit.
• .schematic cannot store waterlogging, or any block added after 1.13. It is a pre-1.13 format with nowhere to record either.
• Chunks cached before 4.0 carry no block entity data until you visit them again.
• Blocks added by other mods may look wrong in the map opened from the main menu, because the data that describes them only arrives when you join a world. Nothing vanilla is affected.