Minecraft wiki entry for Navigation, associated text: Maps can be used to keep track of different locations in the world. Maps are not exactly centered on where they are activated, because they snap to a grid. They also start off with a very small scale, and need to be zoomed out to a reasonable scale after activation. Each zoom level takes 1 paper in a cartography table, and doubles the map scale and clears any current contents. The new map remains centered roughly where the previous map was activated. It takes 3 zooms to match the scale of the pre-1.4 maps; the fourth zoom reaches the maximum scale of one chunk per pixel.