MapLibre Tile
last updated: Jan 26, 2026
MapLibre announces that they have a new tile format, MapLibre Tile (MLT) to replace Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT)
MLT is specifically designed for modern and next-generation graphics APIs to enable high-performance processing and rendering of large (planet-scale) 2D and 2.5 basemaps. This current implementation offers feature parity with MVT1 while delivering on the following:
- Improved compression ratio: up to 6x on large tiles, based on a column-oriented layout with recursively applied (custom) lightweight encodings. This leads to reduced latency, storage, and egress costs and, in particular, improved cache utilization.
- Better decoding performance: fast, lightweight encodings that can be used in combination with SIMD/vectorization instructions.
They can be generated with planetiler or this code that converts MVT to MLT in real time