Map — Minecraft item

Overview

A Filled Map is the drawn version of a blank sheet, and it keeps drawing: carry it and the terrain fills in wherever you walk, permanently, so a map you have taken across a continent is a record nobody else in the world has. The white arrow shows your position and heading as long as the map was crafted with a compass, and it shrinks to a white dot when you step off the edge of the mapped area. Framed maps get a green pointer marker at the frame's location, which is what makes a wall of map-filled item frames work as a live overview of a base — the standard build is a 3×3 or 5×5 grid of level-3 maps in item frames covering thousands of blocks. Banners you place and then click with the map appear on it with their custom name and colour, which is the only in-game labelling system there is. A cartography table copies a map into a synchronised pair, zooms it out one level per operation, or locks it with a glass pane so it stops updating — useful for preserving a map of terrain before you flatten it for a build.

Navigating home without coordinates, building a map wall that shows a whole base region at once, and marking places — a mine, a portal, a village — with named banners.

Map is a miscellaneous item in Minecraft 1.21.4. It stacks to 64. Nothing on the crafting grid is made from it.

How to get it

Use an empty Map to fill it. Cartographer villagers sell explorer maps for 12 to 20 emeralds, and those arrive already filled with a marker on an ocean monument or a woodland mansion.

Tips

A map only updates while it is in your hand, hotbar or an item frame, so a map in a chest records nothing.
Lock a map with a glass pane on a cartography table before terraforming if you want a picture of the old landscape.
Explorer maps from cartographers point to structures you would otherwise spend hours finding; buy them for 12 to 20 emeralds.
Two copies of the same map stay in sync, which makes copies genuinely useful on a shared server rather than duplicates.