In Serpent's Pass, it took me a long time to really explore the islands because it was so hard, and I think I even felt like I wouldn't even know which direction to head out in, and I was surprised when I found some flat areas. Now that I'm responsible for transport, I'd find it really useful to have a topographic map. Sure, I could just explore but it does seem weird to explore something when you already have a map for it
Do other people think this would ruin the game for them and would you be willing to enable this, Theo?
Dynmap has support for topographic views.
https://github.com/webbukkit/dynmap/wiki/HD-Map-Configuration describes configuration, I think "topo256-noplants" would be a useful view, particularly with the number of trees that are in SP, not sure if LCI is so bad. See also
http://mcedu.ca/dynmap/ which explains configuration. I think this is an example of what it would look like:
http://mcedu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dynmap-Topographical-Map-578x301.png
If people don't want this I'll probably generate my own somehow with VoxelMap.