Offline basemap

Point a map at a folder of tiles already on your disk, and the ground under your notes stops needing a network. Everything else already worked offline — the notes, the routes, the photos and their thumbnails are files in your vault — so this is the last piece.

You can keep more than one. A pack is regional, so someone who has one usually has two: the city they live in and the trail they walk. Each gets a name, and the name is how you pick between them.

Advanced Maps does not download tiles. Fetching a provider’s tiles in bulk is theirs to permit, not this plugin’s to do on your behalf. What this does is point at a pack you already have, and read it.

What a tile pack is

A folder of image files in z/x/y order, the way every slippy map addresses them:

tiles/
  6/
    52/
      25.png
      26.png
  7/
    104/
      50.png

Anything that unpacks into that shape works. A single-file .mbtiles or .pmtiles archive does not, yet. .pmtiles is being worked on; what is holding it up is a bug in Obsidian on Android, not the format. Until that lands, unpack the archive into a directory tree once and the result is a tile pack.

Caution

Keep each pack out of the vault’s index — a regional pack is easily a hundred thousand files, and an indexed one slows down search, links and every Base you have. The two layouts below both avoid that cost; choose based on whether your plugin settings sync between devices.

Your settings	Put the pack	And type
Stay on one device	anywhere on that device	an absolute path
Sync between devices	a dot-folder inside the vault	.tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

A path is a single string, so settings that sync hand every device the same one — and an absolute path can only be right on the machine it was typed on. A dot-folder is what gets round that: Obsidian skips a folder whose name begins with a dot, the way it skips .obsidian, so the tiles are never indexed, never searched, never a Base result and never in the file explorer, while one relative path is resolved by each device against its own vault.

If your settings stay put, there is nothing to solve — give each device an absolute path of its own. See On a phone for what that looks like there.

Add a pack

Settings → Community plugins → Advanced Maps → Offline basemap.

Use offline basemaps is the first row, and it starts off unless you had a pack configured before this version. Switch it on first: with it off the packs below it are shown but cannot be typed into, because a pack nothing draws from is a pack the page has no business collecting. Switching it off later keeps every pack exactly as you left it.

Under it, Add tile pack gives you a row with four boxes:

Box	What to put there
Name	What you want to call it — City, Trail. This is what you pick it by
Tile path	/home/you/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png — the shape your files are addressed by
Lowest zoom level	The lowest-numbered folder that pack’s z directories go down to
Highest zoom level	The highest-numbered one

The path may be absolute, or relative to your vault. {z}, {x} and {y} are filled in per tile; {-y} works too, for packs laid out in TMS row order.

Caution

Type a filesystem path, not a URL. The plugin turns it into one when it builds a map, because the prefix that URL needs is regenerated every time Obsidian starts — a URL written down by hand works until the next restart and then stops.

Default background below the list is what every map opens on unless it says otherwise. Leave it at None and your packs stay configured and stay pickable without changing any map until you ask for one.

Give each pack a name of its own. Two packs sharing a name are one pack as far as everything that refers to one is concerned, and the second is left out.

A row says so when nothing can be pointed at it, under the boxes: a name another row already carries, a row with a path and no name, or a path missing one of its three placeholders. Such a row stays where it is, waiting to be corrected, and is offered nowhere until it is.

The two zoom levels

They are the folder names at either end of that pack, and each stops a different kind of failure:

• Highest zoom level bounds the tiles themselves. Zoom in past it and the map keeps drawing, magnifying the deepest tiles you have, instead of asking for files that are not there. Set it too low and you lose sharpness you had; too high and the map quietly issues a failed read for every tile past the end.
• Lowest zoom level bounds the camera. Zoom out towards it and the map stops there rather than going blank, because there is nothing above your lowest level to magnify.

If a pack covers z0–z14, put 0 and 14 in. Each pack carries its own pair, and the map is bounded by whichever pack it is currently drawing.

Pick one from the map

Your packs appear in the map’s own layers button — the stack of squares in the top-right corner, the same menu the Maps plugin lists its own backgrounds in. Each pack is there under the name you gave it, beside them.

Choosing one draws it, with that pack’s own zoom bounds. Choosing one of the Maps plugin’s backgrounds puts the map on that instead, and it stays there: the choice is yours until you make another one, and nothing later puts the pack back underneath you.

The layers button appears once there is more than one background to choose from. If you have no backgrounds configured in the Maps plugin, one pack is enough to make it appear, and the menu gains a Default background entry — the way back to what the map would draw with no pack at all.

A choice made here lasts as long as the map is on screen, exactly as a background picked from that menu already did. Close the tab and reopen it and the map is back on the background its view names. Nothing is written to a file.

Per map

The Basemap section of a map view’s options has one row, This map opens on, listing every background there is: the plugin default, each background the Maps plugin offers, and each of your packs. So one base file can hold a view on a city pack and another on the network.

Choice	What that view opens on
Follow the plugin default	Whatever Default background names
None — this view’s own background	What the map would draw with no pack at all
A background, or a pack, by name	That one

Your view’s own Map tiles setting is never overwritten. A pack is substituted as the map is built, so choosing None on a view brings back exactly what that view had configured, with nothing to undo.

If a view names a pack you have since renamed or removed — or a base file written in another vault names a background this one does not have — the map falls back to what it would draw with no pack, and the row says so: Trail — no longer configured. Nothing quietly becomes something else.

Inline ![[route.gpx]] maps have no view options of their own, so they follow the plugin default.

Coordinate systems

A local path names no provider, so Auto reads a pack as WGS-84 — right for the OpenStreetMap-derived packs almost every pack is. If yours was unpacked from a Chinese provider it is GCJ-02, and automatic mode cannot tell: say so in Settings → Coordinate system, or in the view’s own Tile coordinate system option. See Coordinates and services.

On a phone

The same settings draw the same packs in the Obsidian mobile app, the same two layouts apply, and the layers button offers them the same way. There is no separate mobile row to fill in.

Settings that stay on the device. Give the phone absolute paths of its own — /sdcard/Download/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png and the like, whatever your file manager shows you. This is the one to reach for on Android: the packs sit where the phone already keeps large downloads, and nothing about them comes near the vault.

Settings that sync. Use .tiles, on every device including this one. A phone handed a desktop’s absolute path draws nothing but your own pins over the background colour — the path resolves, the tiles are simply not there, and no error says so.

Getting a pack onto the phone is the part this plugin has no hand in: a cable, or the sync that already carries your vault.

Measured on Android. The address is asked of the running app rather than assembled from a platform name, so iOS is expected to follow, but it was not tested and this page does not claim it.

When nothing draws

The map goes to the background colour and your pins and routes still show. Check, in order:

1. The path. It has to be the path to the tiles, {z}/{x}/{y} and the file extension included — not the folder above them. ls the path with real numbers substituted; if that file is not there, neither is the tile.
2. The extension. .png, .jpg and .webp are all fine, but it has to be the one your files actually use.
3. The zoom levels. A lowest level higher than where the map is sitting pins the camera; a highest level set to 0 leaves one tile for the whole world.
4. Which pack. The map may be on a different one — open the layers button and see what is checked, or read the view’s This map opens on row.

With it switched off

Off is the state a vault with no pack is in, and it is a real off: nothing of this feature reaches a map. The Maps plugin’s own background button lists exactly what Maps itself has, because the list it is holding is Maps’ own — putting your packs in that menu means handing the button a list this plugin maintains, and a background you add in the Maps settings tab then reaches an open map on its next configuration reload rather than the next time you open the menu. That is the trade this switch exists to let you decline.

A map’s own options lose their This map opens on row too. A Base file that already names a pack keeps the name written in it, unread, and means it again the moment you switch back on.

Switching it on reaches a map that is already open through that row. The background button on that map catches up when you open the map again — a button is handed its list once, when the map is built.

What this touches

Nothing. A pack is opened for reading and never written to, moved or deleted, and no part of this fetches tiles from a provider. Your packs are offered in the Maps plugin’s own menu without being written into its settings. When a map is drawing a pack it makes no tile request to the network at all — see Reference and privacy for what does leave.