// the find
mapbox/tippecanoe
Build vector tilesets from large collections of GeoJSON features.
Tippecanoe converts GeoJSON (or CSV/Geobuf) into MBTiles vector tilesets, handling the hard problem of multi-zoom simplification and feature dropping so your data looks right at every scale from world to street level. It's a C++ CLI tool — no server required, just pipe in GeoJSON and get out an .mbtiles file. Aimed at anyone who needs to serve their own geographic data through Mapbox GL or compatible renderers.
The zoom-level simplification logic is genuinely sophisticated — automatic maxzoom guessing (-zg), multiple drop strategies (densest, smallest, fraction), and cluster-accumulate for summing attributes across merged features are all things you'd spend weeks building yourself. Parallel input parsing (-P) via memory-mapped files makes processing large datasets practical on a single machine. The filter system (-j) accepts Mapbox GL-style expressions including $zoom, so you can do things like 'show only major roads below zoom 11' declaratively without preprocessing. The felt/tippecanoe fork actively maintains what Mapbox abandoned, so the project isn't actually dead despite the README's tone.
The original Mapbox repo is effectively unmaintained — the README actively steers you toward their paid hosted service (MTS), so you're reading a product ad embedded in the docs of a tool they no longer care about; you should be using the felt fork instead. No Windows builds and the build process on anything non-Homebrew/Ubuntu requires fighting with compiler flags. The option surface is massive (100+ flags) with no sane grouping — finding the right combination for a new dataset type means reading the entire README. Output is MBTiles (SQLite) only natively; getting to individual tile files requires tile-join, a separate tool in the same repo but not obviously documented as part of the workflow.