Take a snapshot (picture) of Minecraft world every day on linux server

Question

I am looking for a way to take a picture of a part of my Minecraft world automatically every day, server side. Basically my objective is to see a day to day evolution of my town.

Since my town is absolutely not at the spawn point, I would like to configure like that (if possible) :

camera_x -200
camera_y 150
camera_z -2100
focus_x -100
focus_y 75
focus_z -2000

Is there a tool for that? Or should I run a Minecraft client on my server in some way?

Answer 1

I eventually found out a way to do that using overviewer. It is not an exact rendering like the one I was expecting, but still enough to see the evolution of my map.

Here is my configuration:

texturepath = "/[...]/textures.zip"
worlds['myworld'] = '/[...]/minecraft1.10.2/world'
outputdir = '/[...]/www/minecraft'

renders['default'] = {
        'world': 'myworld',
        'title': 'test',
        'crop': (-100, -1800, -400, -2100),
        'rendermode': 'smooth-lighting',
}

I then simply put a cronjob on my server to backup the previous render and render a new map overviewer.py --config [myconfigfile].

Based on a discussion with CounterPillow on freenode#overviewer there is a way to render the map as a PNG file using the following script.