MapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format

Summary

Jan 23, 2026 Today we are happy to announce MapLibre Tile (MLT), a new modern and efficient vector tile format. What is MapLibre Tile? MapLibre Tile (MLT) is a succesor to Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT). It has been redesigned from the ground up to address the challenges of rapidly growing geospatial data volumes and complex next-generation geospatial source formats, as well as to leverage the capabilities of modern hardware and APIs. 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. In addition, MLT was designed to support the following use cases in the future: Improved support for 3D coordinates, i.e. elevation. Improved processing performance, based on storage and in-memory formats that are specifically designed for modern graphics APIs, allowing for efficient processing on both CPU and GPU. The formats are designed to be loaded into GPU buffers with little or no additional processing. Support for linear referencing and m-values to efficiently support the upcoming next-generation source formats such as Overture Maps (GeoParquet). Support complex types, including nested properties, lists and maps. As with any MapLibre project, the future of MLT is decided by the needs of the community. There are a lot of exciting ideas for other future extensions and we welcome contributions to the project. For a more in-depth exploration of MLT have a look at the following slides, watch this talk or read ...