History of Minecraft World Map
Minecraft World Map (often shortened to MCWM) was a website for sharing Minecraft worlds. It also had its own game server. The website ran from February 2011 until early 2021, and the game server from 2012 until March 2016. This page tells its story from public sources: web archives, the Internet Archive, old forum and Reddit posts, and the worlds themselves. People appear only by their Minecraft or website names.
On this page:
What Minecraft World Map was
On Minecraft World Map, anyone could upload a Minecraft world. The site drew a map of it, gave it its own page and let other people download it. skeight started the site in February 2011 and ran it, together with a game server where players could join and play together.
It grew large:
- about 4,650 people had uploaded 8,216 worlds by May 2014;
- about 71,000 accounts by 2016;
- about 11,700 forum threads;
- about 16 TB of map pictures by 2017.
Timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| February 2011 | Minecraft World Map starts as a website for sharing worlds and drawing maps of them. |
| 14 February 2012 | The game server opens, with several worlds. |
| September to November 2012 | skeight uploads the 2012 server worlds to the website: Spawn, SpawnV2, PLAY with its Nether and End, CREATIVE (with the Titanic, Maple City and Block City), Hardcore, Mob Arena, Jungle and Captain Amber's World. |
| 26 September 2012 | After the first server closes, moderator Nathangorr opens an unofficial "Minecraft World Map Remake" server. |
| February to May 2013 | An official restart of the server is announced on 19 February and opens to everyone on 28 March. Creative opens on 1 May. |
| October 2013 | larperdoodle and Nathangorr take over running the server. |
| 2 January 2014 | The Creative Archive 1.7 world opens, where each player can claim plots to build on (Minecraft 1.7). |
| May 2014 | The Minecraft Archive Project saves every world uploaded to the website so far. Nothing uploaded after this was ever saved. |
| September 2014 | Weekly UHC (Ultra Hardcore) matches are held on the server. |
| 11 January 2015 | Creative Archive 1.7 closes. Creative carries on in a new world, Creative Archive 1.8. |
| 4 April 2015 | A "Minecraft World Map" guild is founded on the Hypixel server. |
| 6 July 2015 | Creative Archive 1.8 closes. |
| November 2015 | The server still runs Play, Creative and Minigames on Minecraft 1.8 and is getting ready for 1.9. |
| 2016 | The website's account database is broken into in January; the site announces it in October. Nothing from it is part of this archive. |
| March 2016 | The game server closes after what the staff called "a string of massive data loss incidents". It was brought back three more times later, under names that were not recorded. |
| 2016 to 2018 | Nathangorr uploads the server's archived worlds to the website: Creative Archive 1.7 and 1.8, Play Archive 1.7 and 1.8, and the Server Lobby. |
| July to August 2017 | The website moves to new servers, with about 16 TB of map pictures. |
| 16 October 2017 | "New Upload System!" is announced. It is skeight's last public post. |
| 15 January 2019 | Nathangorr steps down as a moderator. In April 2019 Nathangorr writes that "Minecraft World Map's services have not been functional for some time now." |
| March to June 2020 | The website moves again. By June, uploading and map drawing work again. |
| February 2021 | The website goes offline. The last working page was seen on 3 February 2021 and the first error on 9 February 2021. |
| March 2023 | Former admin AustinAuranymph shares the Play survival archives on r/mcworldmap. The links later stop working. |
| 22 October 2026 | Creative Archive 1.8, thought lost, is found again: a copy kept by former staff member Blobbers. |
The game server and its worlds
The server had several worlds at once: Play for survival, Creative for building, and minigames such as Mob Arena, Hardcore and, later, UHC. Its worlds changed over the years:
| Years | Worlds |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Spawn, PLAY (survival) with its Nether and End, CREATIVE, Hardcore, Mob Arena, Jungle and Captain Amber's World. |
| 2013 restart | Survival without mods; Creative from 1 May 2013. |
| 2014-2015 (Minecraft 1.7) | Play Archive 1.7 (survival) and Creative Archive 1.7, a plot world open from 2 January 2014 to 11 January 2015, where about 8,500 players built. |
| 2015 (Minecraft 1.8) | Play Archive 1.8, Creative Archive 1.8 (a plot world, until 6 July 2015) and Minigames. A later Creative world was still running in November 2015. |
| 2016 | The Server Lobby, built by massivetuna, IkePrime and QuantumNova. |
You can download every server world that survives on the Server Worlds page.
Who ran it
skeight founded and owned both the website and the server. Over the years many players helped as moderators, admins, developers and builders. In 2012 the staff included Osiris08, Ahrash2194 and larperdoodle. After the 2013 restart Ahrash2194, larperdoodle, skeight and Amber_1 were admins, and Nathangorr was an admin by July 2013. From October 2013 larperdoodle and Nathangorr ran the server. In January 2015 the team was Nathangorr (Head Admin), larperdoodle (Head Developer), Styyxx (Developer), Ahrash2194 and Tuddsfn (Admins), massivetuna (Builder) and moderators including AustinAuranymph, SporadicRocks, blob0318, cowie124 and Benfa79. In 2015-2016 Nathangorr owned the server, with AustinAuranymph, Benfa79 and cowie124 as admins. On the website, skeight was the administrator and Amber_1 a moderator. See the Staff page for each of them.
Stories from the community
- The Titanic in the 2012 Creative world was built by afguy20041 over several months.
- The server's Jungle world was made from lsouc's public map "The Jungle" (2011), and SkyZone came from Dark_Akarin's "The Sky Zone!" (2012).
- Feed the World (2013, uploaded by Nathangorr) was a private Feed the Beast server on Minecraft 1.4.7 with about 40 mods.
- Skeight's Build Contest ended on 21 September 2013, and its world survives.
- After the server closed, the Hypixel guild "Minecraft World Map" (23 members, founded 4 April 2015) kept part of the community together.
The website
Members uploaded their worlds as zip, RAR, 7z or tar files. The site drew a map of each world and gave it a page with a download. It also had a busy forum.
Deleted uploads were kept "for a few months in case we need to restore them", a moderator wrote in 2017. The game server kept full backups in 2013, but no long-term backup of the website was ever announced. When the site stopped working in 2019, a user whose 4 GB world downloaded empty was told: "it was a goofy map website, not a server archive. Keep your own copies always."
What survives
| What | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| All 8,216 world posts up to May 2014 | The Minecraft Archive Project saved the website once, in May 2014. 8,138 of the posts still have their world file (about 318 GB), kept on the Internet Archive. |
| The 2012 server worlds | Uploaded to the website in 2012 and saved in the same way. |
| Play Archive 1.7 and 1.8 | The server's survival worlds, saved by the staff and shared on r/mcworldmap in 2023. |
| Server Lobby (2017 copy) | Nathangorr's 2017 post on Planet Minecraft, saved by the Minecraft Archive Project. |
| Creative Archive 1.8 (2015) | A copy kept by former staff member Blobbers, found again in October 2026. |
| Staff schematics | The staff's shared folder of saved builds: the lobby, 26 minigame maps and more. |
| Pictures of Creative Archive 1.7 and 1.8 | Small map previews saved by the Wayback Machine in 2016. They are the only pictures of those worlds. |
| About 6,000 forum and page posts | Saved copies of the website on the Wayback Machine and Common Crawl, 2012-2021. |
Not saved anywhere we could find: descriptions and comments of worlds after 2014, the full map pictures, and every world uploaded after 21 May 2014.
What is still lost
- Creative Archive 1.7, the plot Creative world of 2014-2015 (seed
7290889853243018194). - Creative Render 01, a snapshot of a Creative world from May 2015 (seed
2525512635892781014). - The later Creative world that was still running in November 2015.
In October 2026 these were searched for without success in the Wayback Machine and many other web archives, every Minecraft Archive Project collection from 2011 to 2018 (about 86,000 worlds checked), about 22,000 other Minecraft uploads on the Internet Archive, torrent and data sites, Planet Minecraft, Minecraft Forum, Reddit and YouTube. Creative Archive 1.8 was also on that list until a copy turned up on 22 October 2026.
If you have a copy of a lost world, see Still lost on the Server Worlds page.
Sources
- The site's launch thread on Minecraft Forum
- Creative Archive 1.8 page (Wayback Machine copy)
- Nathangorr's uploads (Wayback Machine copy)
- Moderator resignation, 2019 (Wayback Machine copy)
- Moving to new servers, 2020 (Wayback Machine copy)
- New Upload System, 2017 (Wayback Machine copy)
- Server archives post on r/mcworldmap (2023)
- Server listings on r/mcservers: 2014 and 2015
- MCWM Weekly UHC Match #1 (2014)
- The Minecraft Archive Project on the Internet Archive