Coordinates

The Minetest world is a large cube. And because of this, a position in the world can be easily expressed with Cartesian coordinates. That is, for each position in the world, there are 3 values X, Y and Z.

Notation

Coordinates are expressed like this: (5, 45, -12)

This refers to the position where X=5, Y=45 and Z=-12. The 3 letters are called “axes”: Y is for the height. X and Z are for the horizontal position.

Orientation

The values for X, Y and Z work like this:

• If you go up, Y increases
• If you go down, Y decreases
• If you follow the sun, X increases
• If you go to the reverse direction, X decreases
• Look to the sun's direction, then turn 90° to the right and go forwards: Z increases
• Look to the sun's direction, then turn 90° to the left and go forwards: Z decreases
• The side length of a full cube is 1

Finding your coordinates

Debug screen

You usually can view your coordinates is by using the debug screen (open with F5).

However, some games or servers can hide the coordinates in the debug screen. Maybe the game wants you to “earn” the right to see the coordinates first (like with a special item), or it wants to hide them completely to make the game more difficult.

Mods

There are also mods which add tools which, when you carry then, show you the coordinates:

• Orienteering [orienteering]
• Compass GPS [compassgps]

While the debug screen is still available to you, note that the appeal of these mods is that you have to earn the ability to view your coordinates through gameplay first. You can manually disable the disable the debug screen (to avoid accidentally showing the coordinates) with this line in minetest.conf:

keymap_toggle_debug =

This disables the key for the debug screen entirely. If you need to enable this key again, just remove this line.