The other day, I was looking to embed a tile based world map without detailed zoom levels (up to z11-12) into an offline desktop application. I was surprised by the difficulty to achieve this. The source formats are really heavy (120GB+ for planet) and the tools either too slow and/or overly complex (for example requiring setting up a DB to import the data in). Most tools I found seemed to be for making maps for smaller areas. I ended giving up...
Maybe I've done it wrong. Would love some good pointers on this. Any simple ways to generate vector tiles for a world map up to zoom levels 11 or 12?
I built planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) for this purpose. The output up to z14 is ~80gb and depending on how big of a machine you have it takes from 30 minutes up to a few hours - no DB required, just java or docker. If you are only going to z11-12, it should be quite a bit faster/smaller.
Brandon from Protomaps is also helping add pmtiles output natively to planetiler, so you won't need a conversion step afterwards!