Minecraft World Archive

Why I built it#

My friends and I have been playing Minecraft Bedrock for several years. I recently migrated our old world save onto my own server and built this archive site alongside it. The motivation was always the same: the world keeps changing, but nothing was recording it. A house built today might be torn down and rebuilt six months later. A region explored last week could be covered by new construction the next. Screenshots were scattered across devices, and what was built when, and by whom, lived only in memory.

This site is a living archive for that world. Not a static showcase, but a system that grows alongside the world itself.

Server status#

The homepage shows whether the server is online, its current version and player count. A Fastify backend pings the server over RakNet every 15 seconds, and the page polls for the latest result. When the server is down, it says so—no guessing, no stale cache.

Chronicle#

The chronicle is the world’s timeline. Each entry records an event: a building completed, a new region explored, an adventure, a moment worth keeping. Entries run along a vertical axis with photos and text. Photos support a nine-up grid layout and a lightbox for browsing.

Every entry also carries the coordinates where it happened. These are not just metadata—they become markers on the map, and clicking one jumps to the corresponding location.

World map#

/map is a zoomable, pannable interactive map that feels like a mapping application. At the finest level it renders one pixel per block, enough to make out the outline of a single building. The Overworld and Nether each have their own map, with a toggle to switch between them.

The map is not a single image but a pyramid of 256×256 tiles rendered by uNmINeD from the world save. Unexplored areas are transparent, and the viewer never requests tiles that do not exist.

A timeline sits at the bottom of the map. After each nightly world backup, the renderer produces a new tile snapshot. Tiles are stored in a content-addressed object store, so identical tiles are kept only once. Dragging the slider between dates is instant because the browser serves unchanged tiles straight from cache.

Players#

The player roster lists the world’s members with their avatars, join dates and personal tags. Each profile shows how they play and what they have left their mark on in this world.