The Map Book is a single item that holds an arbitrary number of maps. Open it and you get a full-screen atlas, not a paused screen: every map is drawn at its true world position, largest scale first, and you pan and zoom across the whole thing.
Right-click with nothing relevant in the off hand and the first empty map in your inventory becomes a new map centred on you. Hotbar maps become scale 2, inventory maps become scale 4.
Right-click with an empty map in the off hand and you get a scale 0 map centred on you, consuming that map.
Right-click with a filled map in the off hand and it is added to the book. Duplicates are rejected.
Right-click a banner to toggle that banner's marker on the nearest map in the book.
Shears in the off hand tear out the map covering your position and hand it back as a normal filled map, damaging the shears by one. You need at least two maps in the book to do this.
Pan by dragging with either mouse button. Scroll to zoom. The world X and Z under your cursor are shown near the bottom.
Structure and banner icons carry their custom names on a small plate, so a well-labelled world reads like an actual map rather than a field of identical markers.
While you are in the Nether, overworld maps render at one-eighth scale so that landmarks line up with Nether coordinates. Walking a portal tunnel and reading the overworld above it finally works.
Put a Map Book and a book into a cartography table and you get two books sharing the same id. Everyone holding a copy sees the same maps, the same markers, and each other.
- Shift + left click plants a red X visible to every holder. Shift-click it again to clear it.
- Other holders appear as rotating labelled icons in their team colour.
- The book pushes its map list, holder list and marker to every holder each server tick.
The locator bar changes behaviour while you hold a map or Map Book: instead of player dots it shows one dot per map decoration in range, within 60 degrees of your view, plus the shared marker and any styled waypoints.
The Map Book goes in chiseled bookshelves. It accepts Curse of Vanishing. It renders in your hand as the map covering your current position. Its tooltip shows the book id and map count instead of the vanilla map-id line.
