Xaero's Drawings
Maps in Minecraft tell you where you are, but they rarely let you say anything back. Xaero's Drawings changes that by turning your Xaero's World Map and Xaero's Minimap into a canvas. Instead of dropping torches or cobblestone towers to remember a spot, you simply paint on the map itself. Route plans, dig sites, base outlines, and the occasional doodle on a friend's roof all become part of the terrain you already navigate every session.
If you have ever wished your map could hold notes the way a real atlas does, this add-on is the missing layer. It is lightweight, client-friendly, and surprisingly deep once you start experimenting with layers and custom stamps.
What Xaero's Drawings Actually Does
At its core, the mod bolts a paint toolkit onto the fullscreen map. Open the map with the default M key, click the paintbrush button in the left button column, and you are drawing. Every stroke is anchored to world coordinates, which means your artwork pans and zooms with the map and even appears on your minimap as you travel. Drawings autosave every 30 seconds, and pressing Esc exits drawing mode without losing your work.
Paint Tools
- Freehand brush with adjustable size from 1 to 64 blocks, typed manually or nudged with the plus and minus buttons
- Eraser plus a color picker that samples painted pixels or any rendered map color, terrain included
- Shapes: lines, rectangles, and ellipses with a live ghost preview, available as outlines or filled, with thickness following brush size
- Stamps: one-click symbols such as arrows, pins, hearts, paws, skulls, pickaxes, and chests, all scaled to brush size
Colors and Layers
Color selection leans on the classic 32-color 8-bit palette known as DB32, and hex input supports both #RRGGBB and #RRGGBBAA, so transparency works exactly as you would expect. Hovering any swatch reveals its hex value. Three independent layers can be toggled on and off individually, which lets you keep routes, resources, and build plans separate instead of smearing everything onto one surface.
Custom Stamps
Stamps are plain PNG files. On first run, the 24 built-in stamps are exported to config/xaeros-drawings/stamps/, where you can edit them, delete them, or drop in your own. Square PNGs between 8 and 32 pixels work best, and transparency is treated as empty space. The selector rescans every time it opens, so no restart is needed after adding new art.
Multiplayer and Data Storage
Install the mod on a dedicated server and drawings become a shared canvas. Strokes appear live for everyone, and new players receive the existing canvas when they join. The server validates and re-rasterizes strokes, and even custom stamps sync because the bitmap travels with the stroke. Without the server mod, everything still works fully client-side, with drawings saved locally per world, per server, and per dimension, right next to your Xaero map data.
Data lives in ordinary PNG tiles under <game dir>/xaeros-drawings/<world>/<dimension>/, which means you can open them in any image editor. Large maps do not lag either: only painted regions consume memory, saving and loading run on a background thread, and off-screen GPU textures are evicted automatically.
Supported Versions and How to Install
Xaero's Drawings for Minecraft currently targets NeoForge 1.21.1 only, and because the mod integrates deeply with Xaero's internals, each release is pinned to exact Xaero's World Map and Minimap versions. Always match the versions listed on the release you download. More loaders and game versions are planned.
To install, first confirm you are running the correct NeoForge build and matching Xaero map versions. Place the mod file in your mods folder, launch the game, open the fullscreen map, and click the paintbrush. That is the entire setup. If you would rather skip manual version matching, the foxygame.net launcher handles it for you: its add-on catalog installs Xaero's Drawings in one click and keeps it aligned with the exact Xaero map builds it depends on, so you never launch into a crash from a mismatched pair.
Quick Install Checklist
- Verify NeoForge 1.21.1 is installed
- Check that Xaero's World Map and Minimap versions match the release notes
- Drop the file into the mods folder
- Launch, press M, and start painting
Final Thoughts
Xaero's Drawings fills a gap that vanilla maps never addressed. It respects your existing map setup, stores everything in readable PNG files, and scales from a solo survival world to a shared multiplayer canvas without demanding a server. Licensed under GPLv3 and fully functional client-side, it is one of those add-ons that quietly becomes essential once you have used it for a single expedition. Download Xaero's Drawings, plan your next route, and let your map finally speak.