Witcher's (updated) Guide to Tmaps - How you can, and why you should, be running your own Tmaps (2024)

Credit for banner: SumO

First and foremost, I sell my rune tome system in it's entirety at rates that you're unlikely to beat elsewhere (50k per tome). The system is currently 14 tomes (5 old world, 5 new world, 2 expansion and 2 wildlands). The 2 expansion books are to deal with the 1400~ spots that were randomly added by staff to the old landmasses. I am not releasing a standalone map as ExploreOutlands and the LootGoblin app (both explained in more detail lower in the guide) are far more valuable tools than me making a JPEG.

Feel free to reach out to me to purchase rune tomes or with general questions although if you read through the guide you shouldn't have many left

I'm witcher_outlands on discord.

I have also added the XML that you can use to have my locations show up on your in-game mini map. Found here

A lot has changed since I wrote the original guide so buckle up!

This guide will serve to show that the barrier to entry for MOST Tmapping isn't cost but simply lack of information about the system itself. By the end of this hopefully you'll feel more comfortable grabbing a friend or two and venturing out to dig up some loot and have some fun even if you're fairly new to the server.

So lets talk about the steps to completing a map starting with characters.

Suggested Character Breakdown:
Character 1: Cartographer to decipher maps. Isn't involved in the actual mapping process. You just need someone to decode the maps and stay at home. with recent changes to cartography adding bonus damage, you may want to include this in your build, or not.
Character 2: DPS to kill mobs. You CAN make this char the one who has lockpicking to funnel all the XP to them but it's not necessary with the new addition of party splitting XP from chests.
Character 3: Picker to open chest, this character gets the chain XP and leaderboard credit for the chest. As mentioned above if you utilize party XP sharing you can level both this char and your main DPS or choose to kill a little slow and map with just the one char (simplicity has its merits).

One or more of your chars should have tracking! This helps you decide BEFORE you dig whether you want to proceed and also gives you a heads up if someone is barreling in on you while you're in the middle of the chest and allows you to put the callout for help out there sooner.

It should be noted that you can only do damage to the TMap mobs on one char now and only one char can pick the chest at a time. These limitations make combining lockpicking onto your DPS char a little more appetizing as there really is very limited reasons to bring that second char. If you even accidentally do ANY damage to the mobs on an alt char that you bring along you will incur a 60s punishment where you do 1 damage no matter what you try to do to kill the mobs, essentially putting a standstill to your map and this timer refreshes for every time you do damage OR apply barding affects from a second char on your IP address. You can only fight the TMap mobs with ONE char.

Deciphering the map:
You don't need to, nor should you, decipher the TMap on the same char you do the map on. The process of deciphering a TMap and completing a TMap are 100% separate. I would suggest having an alt character that you use for deciphering and save skillpoints on your actual Tmapping build. You need the cartography skill and a spyglass to decipher the maps. Double click the spyglass and target the map. The colour of the spyglass matters as a bonus to your effective cartography skill. Cartography is fairly cheap to train and the skill scrolls aren't very expensive so I personally took my character straight to 120 cartography and used bronze spyglasses which gave me the ability to decipher all maps level 1 through 8 to 100% accuracy. I would personally never try to find a map that wasn't deciphered to 100% accuracy.

Figuring out the location:
There are two amazing resources for doing this. One is an app developed by Hanebu that visually scans your screen and instantly tells you the closest rune to the map it can see. It has a stay on top feature and you can just move it to an alternate screen or keep it in the small mode at a spot of your choosing. This app has a lot more features than just locating maps for you, I won't get into them all here but explore it all and you'll see what I'm talking about.

The only drawback to this is it tells you the closest rune IN A STRAIGHT LINE so sometimes it doesn't account for geographical issues like the map being on the other side of a mountain pass or wall. This happens so rarely that it's really a non-issue. You can download Hanebu's app https://lootgoblin.diobyte.com/app/LootGoblin.exe
it is not affiliated with Outlands in any way but, as far as I know, it's been given the greenlight by staff as something that is within the TOS to use.

Another great resource to use in locating maps is https://www.exploreoutlands.com/ which is maintained by Manik. It has a feature that allows you to upload a snippet and find the map location that way. I personally prefer the ease of using the lootgoblin app for getting the rune number and then using exploreoutlands to verify and find the exact spot. These tools combined make it completely unnecessary for me to release a standalone map. Explore outlands IS the standalone map as far as I'm concerned. ExploreOutlands is such a beautiful way to explore the Outlands map and also comes with additional features that I encourage you to explore! Example image from the website:

HUGE shoutout to both Hanebu and Manik for these amazing tools.

One public library exists at Cambria moongate, shown below:

Finding the actual spot to dig for the chest:
Honestly this is an easy task when you use lootgoblin. You can simply use the expanded version and it tells you the EXACT X and Y to dig at so I won't bother with too much explanation here. Either use the snippet tool from ExploreOutlands or get the LootGoblin app!

Digging up the chest:
First thing to note is that the chest has two context menu options. One pulls the spawn back to the chest in case the mobs gets lost behind a wall or stuck in a weird terrain glitch and you can't get to it (this has limited uses, dont waste it). The other destroys the chest when you're done. The character that digs up the chest is the only char that can use this context menu. It's very handy to dig on a char that will be alive throughout the process of completing the map and able to use the context menu (single click the chest to access it).

Any character can dig up the map, no skills required, but as mentioned above the context menu being readily accessible is handy.

Two things need to be on your character to dig up a chest. The map and a shovel.

I personally use a bronze shovel as the cost/benefit/availability of bronze ingots is ideal in my opinion. A common misconception is that the mining skill is required for digging or increasing your dig radius. Mining, in my opinion, is useless as it pertains to Tmapping. Skills are valuable, a few extra gold for a bronze shovel vs an iron one is negligible. A higher coloured shovel will provide a larger dig radius and the opposite is true of a lower coloured shovel. It's very easy to make a macro to use a shovel every 600ms and run around digging until you find the chest, especially after you do it a few times and get better at the initial guess.

While digging up the chest you are paralyzed, can't recall/gate/teleport/use adventurer's rope etc and 100% vulnerable. Due to this, you are easy pickings for spawn native to the location of the chest. I personally have an earth elemental (no summoning required) guard me and draw all the aggro. You can also simply kill the spawn before you dig. The actual spawn that the Tmap itself spawns will spring into existence when the chest is fully out of the ground and at this point you are free to move again.

Killing the spawn from the chest:
To do this you need some form of DPS. That can be a trapper for AOE damage, a dexxer, a tamer, a summoner etc etc. Whatever you choose, just know that the longer you spend between digging and recalling out with the loot in hand the higher your chances of being raided are. Pick the quickest method that is also within your price range at the time. For example trapping becomes really effective with 120 Tinkering/Detect Hidden/higher aspects and a few damage links in your chain but that's a hefty chunk of change depending on your bank account. If you don't do a lot of maps that build might not be worth the investment to you.

The number of mobs/difficulty of the overall spawn seems to rise with the map level.

Picking the chest:
Note: you cannot start to lockpick the chest until all TMap mobs are dead. Can't skip them, have to kill them all.

Below is a guide to what value you need for Lockpicking at each TMap level 1 through 8. Level 8 maps are created using research materials, spawn a boss level mob and are not practical to do solo or even as a small group of 2-3 players, unless you really know what you're doing.

The above grid on the left shows success percentages for the various map chest levels using NON-GM store bought iron tools. Add up all your bonuses from the right side, including harvest bonus, GM or non GM tools and colour of the tools used and subtract that from the number you need in the left-hand grid and that's the actual skill your char needs to have in their skills gump for that percentage of success.

Examples:
1) you have a 100% success rate to lockpick on a lvl 4 Tmap chest with 100 Lockpicking while using NPC bought tools. No bonuses needed.

2) Now let's say you want to save skill points on that template and you spring for GM iron tools.

100 - 10 = 90 required skill. You will now only need 90 lockpicking. You just saved yourself 10 skill points on your build.

Let's say you can afford harvest aspect and you've leveled it to tier 13. You have +10 from GM iron tools and +16 from tier 13 harvest for a total of 26 effective bonus.

100 - 26 = 74 required skill. You will now only need 74 lockpicking for 100% success chance.

Training lockpicking is incredibly easy and cheap up to 100 skill. Above 100 skill the only real cost is in the skill scrolls. If you mess around with the numbers you'll see that you can make a TMapper to run lvl 4 and below TMaps for almost no cost. This is what I meant when I said the barrier to entry really isn't cost and more just understanding how it all works and being confident to go do the map. You'll also quickly realize that in order to complete a lvl 6 or above map you need at LEAST 20 effective skill bonus from the right side of my picture to get 100% success even with 120 skill in lockpicking (I wouldn't be doing maps regularly with less than 100% success chance as you'll fall prey to traps while using tools, but that's up to you).

The majority of the maps in the market are lvl 4 and below. Making a picker that uses iron store bought tools, no skill scrolls and no aspect is perfectly viable for beginning players.

Use whatever aspect you like on your picker but I do suggest harvest aspect for the skill point bonus and the chance to double the loot. Some people prefer fortune, which is cheaper and has it's own benefits depending on your goals.

There are two methods to lockpick a chest:

First method:

Second method: Double click your tools and target the chest. This method does NOT reveal you if you are hidden while doing it and allows you to stay hidden all the way through the picking process. You do not get the progress gump this way but you can see the progress in the system messages in the bottom left of your screen.

Both of these methods take advantage of the recent continuous options you can select by opening a picking gump (shown below)

Looting and loot amounts per map level:
Note: Anyone who interacts with the chest in any way (lockpicks, double clicks, or loots an item) that is not in the digging characters party or guild will flag as criminal

To loot the chest you have two options. Manually loot it or add all the possible items to a restock agent and use it to target the chest. I prefer the second as it's automated and you can precast recall and hold the targeting cursor up while the restock agent loots the items making for a much more successful getaway if getting raided. A character that suddenly pops out of invis and instantly pre casts recall while simultaneously initiating a restock agent is MUCH harder to stop than someone who has to cast recall after being visible for the duration of looting the chest.

The loot system for TMaps underwent a massive overhaul lately. It's simpler now in that the chest level represents an amount of gold dropped and that amount affects special/rare loot drops. A scalar for the special/rare loot was added and the simplest way to explain it is as such:
Gold Baselines
We have updated the Gold Baseline for systems that determines the average amount of Gold a player will encounter from them, with amounts as follows:

Treasure Map Chests

• Level 1: 4,000 Gold
• Level 2: 6,000 Gold
• Level 3: 8,000 Gold
• Level 4: 10,000 Gold
• Level 5: 12,000 Gold
• Level 6: 14,000 Gold
• Level 7: 16,000 Gold
• Level 8: 25,000 Gold

Special and Rare Loot Item Scalars
Item Scalars (Special/Rare Items) for loot systems have been updated as follows:

• Treasure Map Chest: 4x Item Scalar

This means that if you run a lvl 3 map it will drop 8k base gold and special/rare loot equivalent to the drops you would expect to see on 32k worth of mobs. (8k base times 4 scalar = 32k)

You will make money running Tmaps. How much depends on how much you sell the loot for, whether you buy or find the maps, how many you lose to PKs etc.

Hopefully this guide, although long and in depth, has given you all the info and courage you need to stop selling every map you find and start enjoying this portion of the server's content.

Feedback and constructive criticism more than welcome below
-Witcher