Why does my data lose precision or resolution at high zoom levels?
Data simplification and zoom level limiting make your map load faster and limit the file size of the resulting tileset. The Mapbox Uploads API, which is also used behind the scenes when uploading data through Studio, is an opinionated tool that automatically makes decisions about certain presentation details like simplification, minimum zoom, and maximum zoom based on the data you are uploading. Visually, this can result in:
- Vector data being simplified at higher zoom levels
- Raster data using a lower resolution than intended at higher zoom levels
You can resolve this issue by using MTS or Tippecanoe.
MTS
We suggest using MTS to adjust the maximum zoom level for vector data. You can use Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS) to set or update a tileset's zoom extent in its tileset recipe. Do this using the Tilesets CLI or by using MTS directly. For more information on zoom level configuration in tileset recipes, see the Tileset recipe reference and the Basic recipe using zoom levels example.
Tippecanoe
You can use Tippecanoe to adjust the maximum zoom level for raster or vector data by creating the tileset with Tippecanoe’s zoom level options. For example, to set the minimum zoom to 2 and maximum zoom to 7, the command would look something like the following:
tippecanoe -o geography\_regions.mbtiles -Z 2 -z 7 Documents/geography\_regions.geojson
You can then upload the resulting MBTiles file you created above to your Mapbox account as a tileset. Take a look at the troubleshooting guide for more information: https://docs.mapbox.com/help/troubleshooting/adjust-tileset-zoom-extent/.