Map Editing (hex)

Map editing in Minecraft is still in it's early stages. Notch has mentioned the possibility of an open file format, but right now many users are working on extracting the file information and making their own levels, map editors and generators using external tools.

The server_level.dat file is where the Minecraft Server keeps the level information. It is stored in a Gzip format and can be extracted into the server_level file. As this file is primarily raw level data, it can be quite large. A regular 256x256x64 sized level is 4 megabytes in size.