-> External website <- The viewer is available here to use or download.

Mod Purpose:

Pioneer is a tool for rendering biome maps of arbitrary size, scale and position without generating any chunks. These maps are then readable in a web based viewer which can optionally be downloaded for offline use.

Originally designed for use in mod development, primarily for my own use while writing ATG, the previous version for Minecraft 1.6 was also used by the Biomes'O'Plenty crew and updated in-house to evaluate biome distribution in their own world type.

With 2.0 comes a full rewrite providing a richer and more detailed mapping output, improved visualisation of data and better controls.

Instructions:

Pioneer adds a chat command to order the rendering of maps. It requires that you either be in a single player world with cheats on, or the host of a LAN world. It cannot be used on dedicated servers.

The syntax is as follows:

/pioneer <radius>|stop [<scale>] [<centerX> <centerZ>]

Radius or stop: Radius in blocks to render around the origin point. This takes scale into account and rounds up so a map will always show at least this far from the origin. Stop alone cancels a currently running map job. This can take a few seconds as it has to wait for the currently processing tile to finish.
Scale: Optional. This represents a sampling density - every <scale> blocks in each direction will be sampled, such that scale 2 is every other block, or 16 is one sample per chunk. This works with radius, so that doubling scale halves the output dimensions of the resulting map. Defaults to 1, which is minimum.
CenterX and centerZ: Optional. Specifies the origin point around which to render the map. Defaults to the current player position.

Very large maps may take a long time to render, but there's a helpful indicator at the top left to tell you how it's going. Do not pause the game while rendering, as this will pause the render. If you need to switch focus away from Minecraft, another UI such as the inventory, or F3+P to turn off auto-pause on focus loss.

Command examples:

/pioneer 50 - will attempt render a 50 block radius around the player at scale 1. Not very useful. Will round up to a single 128x128 tile.

/pioneer 2000 4 - a 2000 block radius at scale 4. For the sake of the map size this is equivalent to 500. Will render 8x8 tiles, where each 4x4 area represents a chunk.

/pioneer 1000 200 200 - renders a radius 1000 map centred on 200,200. Note that when 3 numbers are given the command assumes that it's coordinates and not scale.

/pioneer 8100 16 0 0 - the most commonly used setting while developing ATG. Renders a 16x16km map where each pixel represents a whole chunk centred at 0,0. Renders 64 tiles.

Once you have a map:

Load it up in the online map viewer. The viewer is also available for download from the main website.

Rendered maps can be found in the /pioneer/ subfolder of the Minecraft installation. If you're using the Curse launcher, you can find the instance folder via its settings, but if not the fastest way is probably through the resource pack menu - navigating up one folder will put you in the main one.

Compatibility:

Unlike the old 1.6 version, Pioneer will no longer crash dedicated servers if present. It will not be loaded by them at all. If you want to get a render of a server world, ask for the seed and settings and generate a local copy of the world instead. This is required because the graphics code which Pioneer relies upon is not loaded on dedicated servers.

The nature of how Pioneer generates its maps means that any biome mod, world type or dimension should work out of the box. The colours chosen for each biome are generated from limited data in-game and may not be representative of the colours which can be seen in-game. 1.8 removed explicit biome colour values so any current solution either requires explicitly defining colours (not good for mod compatibility) or picking colours dynamically (hard, sometimes leads to weird outputs).

Pioneer Terrain Survey