While playing I ran into the problem of not being able to find things I had built, after having wandered off my spawn area and gotten killed. I didn’t know about making beds at the time, and it wasn’t until one of my sons showed me the “F3” command that I knew how to find anything at all using direction or coordinates… I had mainly gone by sunrise\/sunset direction and terrain familiarity.<\/p>\n
So armed with F3 I began adding X\/Y\/Z coordinate info to signs in front of hideouts and tunnels.<\/p>\n
I jotted down the coordinates on a piece of paper so I could find them later if I wanted to. As my Minecraft world got bigger, I nerded-out and began plotting a map of my signs on a Visio document. But updating that took time and I began to look for a tool that would look into my Minecraft world and show me where all the signs were. There are some spectacular world utilities out there, but I couldn’t find one that would give me a simple graphic of my signs I could use as a deskside tool while playing the game.<\/p>\n So… off to build my own. I ran across Substrate<\/a>, a .NET library written by Justin Aquadro\u00a0for accessing and manipulating Minecraft worlds. Using Substrate, I was able to build a utility to open my Minecraft world and generate a 2D graphic of the X\/Z coordinates of my signs. The utility can also print a list of all the signs, what they say on them, and their X\/Y\/Z coordinates.<\/p>\n Minecraft Sign Plotter’s first public release can be downloaded here<\/a>. No\u00a0installation\u00a0program, just unzip the files in the archive to a single folder and run it.<\/p>\n Some notes on functionality and the options you’ll see:<\/p>\n 1) Hit the ellipses button to load your LEVEL.DAT file in the Minecraft save area for your world. \u00a0That gets the utility pointed to the right place.<\/p>\n 2) If your plotted results get too cluttered due to proximity, you can use an ID instead, which is just a sequential number corresponding to a found sign on the list you can print.<\/p>\n 3) You can optionally include the display of coordinates on the plot.<\/p>\n 4) I found sometimes I like to use signs for small local notes that I don’t need cluttering up the plot. \u00a0For those, you can make the first character in the sign text something you specify. \u00a0I have it as a pound sign (#) as the default, so in Minecraft I can start a sign’s text with a pound sign to optionally exclude it from the plots.<\/p>\n 5) Top world dimension can be set higher if your world gets huge. \u00a0The default is 1800, which means that signs within X and Z -900 to 900 should appear<\/p>\n Once your options are set, hit the Create Plots button and wait for the operation to finish.<\/p>\n Once done, you have buttons to:<\/p>\n 2) Print Plot : send the plot graphic to a printer. \u00a0Note that the sign plots rotate through a list of eight or nine colors in order to be able to tell them apart easier on a printout. \u00a0 You can get a print preview by clicking on the “Plot Preview” graphic.<\/p>\n 3) Save Plot: saves the plot to your Minecraft world folder (where you loaded LEVEL.DAT)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I have only tested this on my worlds so this is a work in progress for now. \u00a0It helps me keep track of what I am doing and where to go, I hope others will find it useful! \u00a0Thanks to Justin Aquadro for creating Substrate which makes all this doable in a short period of time. \u00a0I plan to include the source code for the sign plotter with the final 1.0 release. Happy mining!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" June 2015 edit: I have updated the included substrate dll in the beta download. \u00a0Substrate does not appear to properly load a Minecraft 1.8 file, but opens world files through Minecraft version 1.7.10. \u00a0I will keep an eye on Substrate … Read more ![\"04-sign\"](\"http:\/\/syntap.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/04-sign-300x178.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"01-mainscreen\"](\"http:\/\/syntap.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/01-mainscreen1-208x300.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"02-maploaded\"](\"http:\/\/syntap.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/02-maploaded1-208x300.png\")
<\/a>1) Print list : send the table of signs, their Minecraft Sign Plotter-generated IDs for that run, and their X-Y-Z coordinates to a printer<\/p>\n