Surveying Your Natural Resources

One of my first posts was on the subject of how to fly around mining more effectively. The idea was to form personal farming routes from experience, by getting to know what sorts of areas are likely to have frequent mining nodes spawning, and what areas to avoid. The trouble with this was that whilst I had provided several examples of my previous mining routes, it still relied on personal experience to be able to put the ideas into practice in any other zones. Additionally, whilst the examples given certainly were more efficient than running about randomly in the hopes of stumbling across a random node, the routes were based only on my own perception of what was efficient, rather than working out the most optimal routes possible.

Which brings us to Cartographer Routes - the most useful tool in your arsenal in maximising your gains when you're out in the field. I'm sure that many of you have heard of this elsewhere before, but this isn't just a quick little praise outlining it's benefits - I'm going to show you step by step how to set it up and actually put it to practical use.

First off, let's start with the base mod, Cartographer. Adds all the usual stuff like notes, coordinates, instance maps and boss loot lists, herbalism/mining node tracking, information about zone and instance level ranges, and so forth plus a few extras like being able to see guild members on the world map who also use the same mod, regardless of being in a party with them or not, way points, and a 'Fog of War' to show what areas of each zone that you haven't yet explored.



Cartographer Routes, after adding the module takes your tracked herbalism/mining nodes, and creates a customisable farming pattern that will take you through all the nodes marked on the map in the shortest path possible, turning it into something like the following example.



So, how do we set it up? First of all, we require all the components that make this possible. The most recent build of Cartographer is found here, which is always the latest build of the mod. Unzip the file into your /interface/addons/ directory, under the one Cartographer directory.

The next step is to download and install Cartographer Herbalism, Cartographer Mining, Cartographer Fishing and Cartographer Extract Gas where your professions are applicable to track nodes, and finally Cartographer Routes to be able to create the paths, each mod going into it's own respective directory under /interface/addons/.

Unfortunately, at the time of posting Extract Gas and Fishing both have errors with their included Ace2 and Babble libraries. To get Extract Gas to work properly, you will need to install a copy of the latest version of Ace 2 and for fishing, the Babble-2.2 libraries. Both install directly into your main /interface/addons/ directory.

There's one last thing you'll need to get Cartographer Routes up and running - node data for all those fishing, mining and herbalism spawn points. If you preferred to, you could start from scratch and build up your own list of visited nodes, or you could just install Cartographer Data Packs, compiled from Wowhead and listing almost every known node for mining, herbalism and treasure chests. Unpacks into the usual /interface/addons/ folder. You know the drill.

So, now you've installed everything and made sure the mods are all enabled on your character selection screen, your map should look something like this:



Of course, the edges won't be transparent like this, but if you like that look, simply hold down the shift key and scroll your mouse wheel down until it fades out. So, how do we then add the routes to your map from here?

First, open your map and navigate to the zone you want to deal with and click on the 'Cartographer' button. On the window that opens up, navigate your way down to 'Routes', expand and select the 'Add' page.



Type in a name for the route you are creating in the topmost box. The routes you save are separated by zone, so you don't need to include the zone in the name like I had. In the second box, click the far right arrow to drop down the menu to select the zone you wish to work with. Don't worry if you can't see the zone listed that you want to work with - just close the options window, navigate on the world map to the right zone, then when you open the option window back up, it will be on the list. Otherwise, the list will only display the Outland zones plus whatever area you are currently standing in. Choose your area, then click on the arrow on the right again to close the drop-down box.



Next, click on the arrow for the Data drop-down box. Here you will see a list of all the different nodes that are in the zone. Clicking on an item will add or remove a check box to indicate what nodes you want to create the route from.



Take a note of what you are including in the route - for instance, the Oshu'gun Crystal Fragments are pointless if you are already friendly or better with the Consortium, and if you aren't a rogue, the Dented Footlockers won't be much use either, and I think the Diamond entry probably refers to some quest item. The suffix number after each entry indicates how many nodes of that type have been tracked in that zone. Remember, you can choose to add everything in one large all-encompassing route, or one that only navigates around mining nodes or treasure chests. Click on the arrow to retract the drop-down box, and then click on add!



Oh noes! My map looks like a tangled web of lines going everywhere and obscuring everything else! Don't worry - it's supposed to look like this at first.



Click on the cartographer button again, and navigate down the menu through to Routes, the zone in which you made the route in (if it's your first, the only sub-menu there), and then click on the name that you gave your route. Ignore the majority of what you see for now, we can fiddle with that later. For now, focus on the lower half, in the box labelled 'Optimise route'. You have two options here - foreground or background optimisation. By clicking the background optimisation button, you can exit the menu and continue playing the game whilst the module does it's calculations, though you may suffer a performance hit whilst it does it's stuff. Alternatively, you can select the 'Are you sure?' check box and hit the optimise button for the foreground - and your game will freeze up entirely. Don't worry, this just means that your computer is focusing solely on the route optimisation calculations. Depending on the total number of nodes in the route and the speed of your computer, this could take anywhere between a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes. The more nodes, the more calculations, and the time taken at least seems to increase almost exponentially. For instance, on my computer, 100 nodes would only take a couple seconds, 200 nodes around fifteen, 300 would take about forty five seconds, and 400-500 nodes would take the game hostage for a good 2-4 minutes to process. Once it finally completes and you regain control of your game, your map should finally look something like this, depending on what your route is tracking:



Now you have one mathematically optimised route that will give you the shortest route to cover all the nodes on your map. Better yet, if you discover a new node that hasn't yet been marked, then the Cartographer Routes module will dynamically incorporate it into your optimised route. However, when this occurs, it only makes minor tweaks to paths leading to other nodes within the immediate vicinity. Technically, this may cause the route to become less optimal, but in reality, the impact will be too minor to notice any difference in efficiency when making your farming rounds. However, for those of you who are statistical freaks like me and want the absolute top-of-the line optimal farming pattern, simply go back into the route options and re-optimise every now and then. Sometimes the changes will be minor, and sometimes you get more significant pathing changes like this:



If nothing else, it provides for some variety rather than always going on the same old route. Of course, nothing is forcing you to follow the entire route from start to finish - you can quite easily veer off or cut corners whilst still keeping upcoming nodes in the route within tracking range for even faster farming.

If you want to create a second route in the same zone, simply go back two steps and repeat with the more inclusive/exclusive set of nodes you want to deal with. This time, it's a good idea to at the very least change the colour of the route lines to be able to differentiate between the two (or more) paths that you've created; you can do this from the same window where you optimised your route pathing with. The result:



It's also worth noting that you don't have to have your main map open to see the routes either; they'll show up on your mini map as well!



Now, to reel this article back into an engineering-specific tangent:

Gas Cloud Mechanics

Unlike herbalism or mining nodes in which spawn in specific fixed spots, gas clouds tend to act more like a mob and drift randomly around the areas they spawn in. Because of this, essentially every time that you extract motes from a cloud, it will add another 'node' to Cartographer. After marking enough clouds, you will start noticing the general specific areas in which you are likely to find a gas cloud floating about in. In general, you'll find that you get the biggest 'bang for your buck' in the value of the motes extracted from a single gas cloud than you would get from any given mining vein, herbalism node or even treasure chest, so once you start getting a general idea of where the 'pockets' of gas clouds mainly spawn over the zone, be sure to make a gas-cloud-only route to follow for maximum profits.

As for gas cloud respawn rates, it at least kind of seems to follow a similar mechanic to mining nodes - you have a set number of nodes where a vein can spawn, and a set number of veins that can be active at any given time, I assume as some sort of percentage of the total nodes in the area. This means that you would theoretically encounter a similar number of gas clouds per number of spawning areas, as you would mining nodes that actually have active veins.

Additionally, there's a few more quirks to pay attention to when farming the gas clouds, particularly in Nagrand - if you can't see the cloud, look up, as they are sometimes located floating up near one of those floating islands! However, as the following example shows, this can sometimes be rather problematic.



Here you see two nearby floating islands, but the gas cloud floating out of range of the mote extractor from either one. What's worse, the clouds do not drift when high up in the air like this, and they remains taunting you there, continually out of reach. I have once or twice come back later to find that they've snapped back to a more assessable position, but more often than not, they're probably stuck there until the next server reboot.

Call me silly, but I'd love to be able to do something like dismount from my gyrocopter, use the mote extractor on the cloud as I fall past, then activate a parachute cloak just before hitting the ground far below. But alas, the mote extractor cannot work unless stationary, so that rules out that creative solution.

Either way, putting up with it is only a small price to pay for the ability to turn a production based profession into an additional gathering one to boot.