Minecraft wiki entry for Mapping, associated text: You will now have nine zoom-level 3 maps which cover completely the territory shown by the zoom-level 4 overview map. The set of 9 zoom-level 3 maps actually cover 512 blocks beyond the zoom-level 4 map. Each will be centered on the border of the zoom-level 4 map (and four of which will be centered on the corners of the level-4 map). You can, of course, retain any of the intermediate maps by duplicating them before you zoom them. If you don't duplicate before zooming, you won't be able to obtain them again without using server commands (e.g., "/give <player> 358 1 <map#>", where "358" is the data value for a map and 1 is the number of maps to give) or inventory editors.