How to make a map in Minecraft
A map fills itself in as you walk, which makes it the only way to see the shape of a world without leaving it. The parts worth knowing are zoom levels, locking, and why your copy stops updating.
Crafting one
Eight paper around one compass in a crafting table gives an empty map. Paper is three sugar cane, and a compass is four iron ingots around one redstone dust.
Nine paper with no compass makes an empty locator map on Bedrock and a plain empty map on Java. The difference is whether your position marker shows, which on Java comes from the compass.
Hold the empty map and use it to fill it in. It captures the area around where you are standing, and that centre point is fixed forever from that moment. On a shared world it is worth agreeing a centre first, which is the sort of thing the SMP servers here tend to organise around a spawn.
Zooming out
A fresh map covers a small area. Put it in a crafting table with eight paper around it to zoom out one level, and repeat up to four times:
Level 0: 128 x 128 blocks
Level 1: 256 x 256
Level 2: 512 x 512
Level 3: 1024 x 1024
Level 4: 2048 x 2048Zooming keeps the original centre, so a map you started at your base stays centred on your base no matter how far out you take it. If you want a different centre, craft a new one where you want the middle to be.
Copying, locking and markers
Put a filled map and an empty map in a crafting table to copy it. Copies share the same map data, so all of them update as any holder explores. That is what makes maps useful on a server: one person walks, everyone's copy fills in.
A glass pane and a map in a cartography table locks it. A locked map never updates again, which is the point for map art and for a snapshot of a world before a big change.
Name a banner in an anvil and place it in the world, then look at it while holding a map, and the banner appears as a labelled marker. It is the only in-game way to put readable place names on a map.
Map walls and map art
Maps in item frames sit flush against a wall and line up edge to edge, so a grid of item frames holding consecutive maps makes one large continuous picture. Line the frames up first and place the maps in order, because a map placed in the wrong frame does not shift.
Map art works by building the picture out of coloured blocks on the ground and capturing it with a locked map. Lock it, or the art stops looking right the moment anything nearby changes.
On a server, a wall of maps is a lot of item frame entities in one place, which has a performance cost in the same way armor stands do. Some servers cap them for that reason, and the creative servers here are the easier place to experiment before committing the resources in survival.