Installing / Running

Minecraft X-Ray is a standalone application that's run outside of Minecraft itself. It is not a mod, and you will never make modifications to Minecraft's minecraft.jar to run X-Ray.

Currently, there isn't an installer for X-Ray. You just unzip/untar the package wherever you like and then run the appropriate executable:

  • Windows users should be able to run the program by just doubleclicking on minecraft_xray.exe or minecraft_xray.bat.
  • Linux and OSX users should be able to doubleclick on minecraft_xray.sh or minecraft_xray_osx.command (the files are identical as of 3.3.0).

Default Keys

Movement

Movement: WASD
Fly Upward: SPACE
Fly Downward: Left Shift
Move Faster: Left Control / Left Mouse Button (hold)
Move Slower: Right Shift / Right Mouse Button (hold)

Camera

Warp to Spawnpoint: HOME
Warp to Player Position: END
Cycle Up through Presets: INS
Cycle Down through Presets: DEL
Jump to Arbitrary Position: J
Jump to Nearest Valid Chunk: - (dash, minus)
Jump to next dimension: N
Jump to previous dimension: P
Lock to Vertical Axis: L

Rendering

Highlight Ores: F1 - F10
Toggle Highlight Glow: H
Set Highlight distance: 1 - 7
Toggle Fullbright: F
Toggle Bedrock: B
Toggle Water: T
Increase Lighting Range: + (on numeric keypad)
Decrease Lighting Range: - (on numeric keypad)
Set visibility range: NUMPAD1 - NUMPAD6 (remember numlock)
Toggle "explored" areas: E
Toggle accurate grass sides: G
Toggle Beta 1.9 fences: C
Toggle Silverfish highlighting: V
Toggle Slime Chunk highlighting: M
Toggle Chunk Borders: U

Other

Toggle Fullscreen: BACKSPACE
Toggle Level Info: ` (grave accent)
Toggle Rendering Info: R (on by default)
Reload Map from Disk: =
Open New Map: O
Show large map: TAB
Release Mouse: ESC
Show/Update Key Bindings: Y
Change Block Highlights: ] (right bracket)
Quit: CTRL-Q

Rendering Details

There are three main "sliders" available to control how things are rendered: Visibility range, Highlighting range, and Lighting.

Visibility range specifies how many chunks away from the camera the app will render at any one time. The minimum is 3, the maximum is 8.

Highlighting range specifies how many chunks away from the camera the app will highlight/glow the selected resources that you're looking for. Often (with more common resources) you'll want to keep this value very low. Otherwise it becomes quite difficult to tell where you're actually going. For less common resources (like pumpkins or clay), you'll want to have it set as high as possible, though. Note that this will never be able to highlight ores outside the set visibility range.

Lighting just determines the OpenGL "fog" value. This is useful to have a better sense of scale while moving around. You can toggle into "fullbright" mode with F, which will disable the fog entirely.

In addition to the sliders, there are a few toggles which let you set whether to always draw water and bedrock. Water is on by default, and bedrock is off by default (though it will of course show up if necessary, regardless of this setting). Silverfish highlighting is on by default (they will be tinted red).

The ore highlighting glow can be toggled using the H key. This will cycle between the three states of ore highlighting glow. The default is a rainbow effect which one user has described as "disco." The next selection is a plain white highlighting which was the default until version 3.4.0. Finally, the glow will be turned off entirely. Note that with the glow turned off, every instance of the specified ore will still be rendered onscreen, so this toggle is still quite useful for tracking down ores.

Minecraft Beta 1.9 changed the way fences work slightly, so that they will "connect" up to adjacent solid blocks. X-Ray will now, by default, render fences that way, but you can toggle it with the "C" key, in case you're viewing pre-1.9 maps.

The "Slime Chunk" option will turn on the highlighting of chunks which should be able to spawn Slimes. The highlighting will actually only occur on the bottom part of the map, where the slimes themselves are actually capable of spawning. The equation used to calculate this was taken from minecraftwiki in early October, 2011, when Beta 1.9-pre2 was out. The equation may or may not be valid for earlier or later versions of Minecraft, but should be at least valid for Minecraft Beta 1.6 through Minecraft 1.0. The default key to toggle this highlighting is "M". Note that in Minecraft versions prior to Beta 1.9-pre5, slimes would spawn only under y=16, whereas from that point on, slimes will spawn under y=40. X-Ray will highlight up to y=40 for all maps.

Lastly, there is an "explored" area toggle, which basically just tints any blocks around torches with a green color. This makes it very easy to see where you've explored in underground caves (and is fairly useless above ground). It does this in a 7x7x7 cube centered around the torches, so the highlighting can easily "bleed over" into adjacent tunnels where you might not have actually explored, but it's usually very easy to tell when that's happened.

The rendering information popup can be toggled with "R" and is on by default. This will let you know what these various settings are set to.

Camera Options

For singleplayer worlds, there will be two camera presets: the spawnpoint, and the location of the player. In this case, INS/DEL isn't really any different than using HOME/END to jump directly to those presets. If you use X-Ray to load a multiplayer world, though, there will also be a camera preset for each multiplayer user discovered in the world folder, which you can then cycle through using INS/DEL. If you've imported a multiplayer map into singleplayer, the app should create presets for the singleplayer character AND any multiplayer users still found in the players directory.

If your world contains a Nether subdirectory, you can warp back and forth between them with the "N" key. The app will attempt to automatically translate your position based on where you'd go if you had just used a portal, though this should only be considered a rough estimate. Note that especially when in the Nether, it's possible to warp back to the Overworld at a location where there isn't actually any map data. Eventually I'll try to check for this and make sure that you don't warp outside of the map, but for now just use the camera presets to get back into known territory if that happens to you.

By default, if you move forward, X-Ray will move directly towards the point you're looking at, including up/down. If you want to "lock" the camera to the vertical axis, you can do so with "L," at which time moving forward/back will only move the camera horizontally. You can still move the camera up and down manually, of course.