Cartography and Treasure hunting.

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LaughingCoyote
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Cartography and Treasure hunting.

Post by LaughingCoyote »

Yarr!

Anyway. I've figured that the quickest method of raising cartography to 100 is as follows:

Fish for about 100 hours ingame. This translates to roughly 3 months of fishing if you fish for an average of 1 hour a day.

At 100% fishing, you will get about 15 maps spread out over lvl 0-15 per hour, contrary to what the manual says.

So you'll end up with about 100 maps of each lvl, 1500 maps in total (but only ~900 maps that actually trains your cartography). I managed to have a little bit more then this...

Do NOT read any maps while you fish. Save them so you can read them all in one go.

Remember to UNCURSE those treasure maps - 1/5 of them will be cursed - drop those (it will be obviously if you have them all in one place in your inventory) next to the brazier of a shrine to reveal them as cursed, pick them up and then use a scroll of uncurse all.
Cursed treasure maps do not train any xp for Cartography!




Now here's the hard bit:

At 0% cartography you can only read lvl 0 maps. But you can barely read lvl1 maps. lvl2 and + maps are impossible. However, because you can train up your cartography on "barely able to decode" maps, you can use just One lvl 1 map to raise your cartography to 10%!

So don't use your lvl0 maps yet.

Now you have 10% cartography. You can read lvl1 maps but lvl2 maps are still impossible to decode. You can barely decode them at 11% cartography - so now is the time to read those lvl0 maps - they still raise your cartography by a decent amount. Use them until you have 11% cartography and then you can use just 1 lvl2 map to train your cartography to 20%!

At 20% cartography, you can read lvl0,1,2 maps but you find lvl 3 maps impossible. They are barely decodable at 22% cartography. So again, use your lowest lvl maps to raise your cartography to 22% - you should still have plenty of lvl0s - use them up first. Get up to 22% cart and then you can raise it to 30% cartography with just 1 lvl3 map...

etc, etc etc.

The rule for maps that you can read is simple - Lvl of Maps * 10 = % Cartography required. Rule for % Cartography to do "barely" so you can jump to the next 10%tile is (roughly) Lvl of Maps * 10 + lvl of Map.

Basically, you want to get rid of those low lvl maps while you still have low cartography when they will give the most xp - at a higher lvl you will require more and more of those lvl0,1,2,3s etc to get the same amount of xp - so use the lowest lvl maps first!



Now I didn't quite do this while I was fidgeting around with cartography - I tried using the newly readable maps to train on until the next % where I could "jump" to the next 10% step in cartography, so I can't give the exact numbers but this should be a rough guide. See attached graph at end.

Problems with this approach:

I ended up reading about 600 maps, from lvl0-5 inclusive in the space of an hour (would have being faster if I wasn't taking notes) - you can just use the repeat use key f9. Now this literally littered the entire continent with hidden chests and caves. It also seems that there are only certain areas where the chests spawn, so you found them (after searching with a shovel) in clusters.

I didn't have time or the inclination ( I had to go to work the next day) to find all those 600 odd chests although they gave from 70 to 150 gp per chest depending on the lvl map, as well as other chests, items, etc. Potentially lost 60k in gp, as well as items there... (treasure chests can contain equipment with enchants on them, like the old chests use to do).

Instead I announced what I had done and offered on global for anyone to loot the chests themselves - they didn't need to know the co-ords - just randomly search with a shovel where no one else is and you'd hit a chest.

Newbies had fun, but we also found that after a while it really lagged up the server as the continent was filled with caverns and chests...

If you could limit the chests to just one area, it would make a great Easter Event! :)

Flames of Fire estimated that it would take 2 hours for the unfound chests to expire - I had to go to work but after 4 hours people were still going at the the chests that weren't found...

Question to Egg: how long does a hidden chest last before it
expires (if at all?).

Obviously what chests you dont find you dont loot.

Advantages:

I managed to raise my cartography from 0 - 80% in the space of 2 hours.

Its the most efficient use of maps, better then training cartography little by little as you get more maps. Even though you can still use lvl 1s to train at 90%, you need a huge number of them to get even .1%, so xp wise it is better to do it all at once from lowest to highest.

[This is a hypothesis. I can't be bothered to test it out with another character and attempt it incrementally and I wasn't willing to split what I had. I guess greed won over curiousity :smoke: ]

I'm at 85% and I still have most of my lvl 6 and + maps to be read. I think I will have enough to get to 100% (or very close).

Alternatives:
The obvious alternative is to simply not bother raising your cartography at all! Befriend some one who has 100% cartography already and ask them to read your lvl15 treasure maps for you. My first +9 weapon was found that way (thanks Sumoworm!). You can now sell all those other maps to the suckers who are training Cart for a tidy profit.

I should have read the 500 maps over the weekend and get a group around to uncover all of them... perhaps I'll do it with the lvl 5,6,7 maps so I dont lose too much money/xp.

In the end I think that effort required is almost not worth it. If I couldn't leave EUO to fish in the background while I was at work I simply wouldn't have the time to fish so many maps. Although the payload of reaching 100% is higher than most other crafting skills (eg. Tinkering) the time required to fish just encourages macroing.

If Egg was still developing EUO I would argue that boss drops should be tweaked a little higher - perhaps allow shadowspawn to drop +7 weapons/etc - so people have an alternative to endless idling to get higher end items.

Anyway, I hope this helps would be Cartographers to better decide what they want to do with their time as well as prevent them from wasting too many maps.

Apologies to all those who got mundo lag. I didn't expect the chests to last so long.
Last edited by LaughingCoyote on Tue Jul 11, 2006 10:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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LaughingCoyote
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Post by LaughingCoyote »

Here's the table.
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LaughingCoyote
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Post by LaughingCoyote »

* I decide that I should use lower level maps while they still give decent xp.

** I stopped at 85%. To get .1% required 5 lvl6 maps. I'm guessing I will need to use up all my lvl6&7 maps to reach 90%, which will leave me 100 lvl8s and 100lvl9s to train from 90-100%.


*** I have now reached 90% cartography, and have decided that I will simply need more maps - it took 50 lvl 6 maps to reach from 88-89%, and I only have 80 lvl 7s, 120 lvl 8s, 120 lvl 9s. My estimate now is that I should have started with 150 maps of each lvl before raising my cartography.


On a side note, it is well worth looting lvl 6+ maps as there is the possibility of getting +5 attack items (and therefore enchanted weapons) from the chests.
Last edited by LaughingCoyote on Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Roopert
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Post by Roopert »

As much as I like all the effort that you have put in to help people out in raising their skills, I think that buy telling people step by step what to do to raise them the fastest and easiest takes alot of fun away from the game. I think some things should be left unsaid, like all the alchemy recipies. As one of the people that spent alot of time raising skills the hard way, it feels good that I have raised them so high without much help from anyone else. The tougher skills like carography, enchanting and alchemy should be left as much a mystery as possible. Just my two cents.
edited for spelling mistakes
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ChrisCooper
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Post by ChrisCooper »

Then again, only like 10 out of 50 newbs will register on the manual (even less now that the banned players thread is dead).

This thing might just be ignored by most players on the forums, since there's like 10-15 on here that actually still play.
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Keighn
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Post by Keighn »

Good job LC. And Chris, is that Socky from a certain webcomic?
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ChrisCooper
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Post by ChrisCooper »

You mean this?

http://www.homestarrunner.com

For anyone that hasn't seen it already.
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Post by Morsetlis »

Oh gawd, the fun of discovery! Like discovering how to use antibiotics to keep your recently sutured wounds from getting infected! Everybody should discovery the joy of septic shock once in their life.
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Post by Gulnar »

Dead thread resurrection :)

Contrary to what LC implied, I don't see any difference in skill gained by level of map read. Read level 1s at 90 skill, read level 9s, it doesn't matter.

Some notes (spoilers) I've made while training cartography.

Enemies in caves:
lvl 0-1: animals, reapers
lvl 2-3: orcs, goblins (chance of ettins for chests on world map at level 3 or higher)
lvl 4-5: low level undead (skeleton mages or weaker)
lvl 6-7: ettins, trolls
lvl 8-9: minotaurs

Money in chests (averaged over 20-30 maps)
lvl 0: 30
lvl 1: 60
lvl 2: 90
lvl 3: 130
lvl 4: 170
lvl 9: 370
(I didn't calculate this for lvls 5-8, but it looks like the formula is 10+40*map lvl for lvls 3-9)

You can find another map in a map chest about 1/7th of the time. I find I can get the chests from about 30 maps in an hour. This gets me about 4 maps an hour (all of them less than or equal to the lvl of the map that spawned them, hence useful for traing). LC says you get 15 maps an hour fishing, 10 of them useful for training cart. My experience has been more like 6 lvl 0-9 maps/hour of fishing (10 lvl 0-15/hour). To me, it looks like maps it's worth taking the time to dig up the chests from your maps rather than fishing for more maps (due to the cash gain and chance of another map) down to level 2-3ish, but YMMV.

I've gotten an artifact (shardcrystal greaves) out of a lvl 4 chest. I think lvl 4 was also the lowest I got a +4/+5 weapon from. +6 weapons from lvl 8/9 chests. I've found +2 weapons in lvl 0 chests, so it doesn't really drop off much below lvl 4 maps. It's hard to get a decent sample size, but it looks like the chance of getting an magic item in a chest is around 5%.
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Post by serialband »

Hmm... I discovered this on my own too. I've been playing for months without reading the forums, and only just started reading because of the major changes recently.

I doubt this is a give-away to any special secrets about cartography. If you pay attention to the messages, it's easy to figure out the patterns. Except, I didn't do mine in all one shot. I did mine in stages along with everything else in stages. I would alternate from one to another skill, as I use up items. I would also go find the chests and caverns to boost my xp and
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Post by eggmceye »

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