How to Use a Cartography Table in Minecraft to Zoom Maps

A cartography table edits maps. Put a filled map in the top slot, then add a second item in the bottom slot: paper zooms the map out, an empty map makes a copy, and a glass pane locks it. Take the result from the output slot on the right. It also turns an unemployed villager into a cartographer.

Crafting one

Put 2 paper side by side in the top row of a crafting table and 4 planks in a 2x2 square underneath. Any planks work. You get 1 cartography table.

The three main jobs

Top slot	Bottom slot	Result
Filled map	Paper	Zoomed-out map, one level bigger
Filled map	Empty map	Two copies of the map
Filled map	Glass pane	Locked map

Zooming out

A fresh map covers 128x128 blocks. Each zoom doubles the width and height, up to four times, for a final 2048x2048-block map. The zoomed map is centered on a fixed grid, not on you, so the area you care about may end up near an edge. What the old map already showed carries over, scaled down; the new area around it starts blank and fills in as you travel.

On a crafting table, zooming takes 8 paper per level. The cartography table needs just 1, which is the main reason to own one.

Explorer maps and buried treasure maps can’t be zoomed at all since Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.50. Copy them instead if you want a spare.

Copying

Copies stay linked. Explore with one and every copy fills in the same area. That’s handy on a server: hand copies to your friends, or frame one on your base wall as a live overview.

Locking

A locked map stops updating. Use it to keep a snapshot of a region before you change it, like a “before” of a city build. Lock with a glass pane. Once locked, you can still copy it, but you can’t zoom it.

Extra options in Bedrock

Bedrock’s cartography table does more:

• Paper alone makes an empty map.
• Paper plus a compass makes an empty locator map, which shows your position.
• A map plus a compass adds a location pointer to an existing map.
• A name field lets you rename maps without an anvil and without spending XP.

Java doesn’t have these; there you make maps on a crafting table, as covered in our map guide.

The cartographer job

Place the table next to an unemployed villager and it becomes a cartographer. Cartographers buy paper and glass panes and sell explorer maps that point to ocean monuments, woodland mansions and, in recent versions, other structures such as trial chambers. In 2026 these were renamed after their targets, so the woodland explorer map is now the woodland mansion map. They also sell banner patterns like the globe. See the villager jobs list for the other workstations, or browse more guides from the guides hub.