UOD: March 9, 2017

Nestor picked up a Davies' Locker with several level 6 Treasure Maps in late February. I had fond memories of solo testing the T-Maps on Test Center during the revamp and expressed interest in doing them. Since he remembered liking T-Map hunting, Nestor loaded up a character with the appropriate skills and we attempted to start our adventure.

Unfortunately, the T-Map hunting Nestor remembers is no longer valid. He made an honest effort at trying out the new system, but the amount of skills he would have had to give up only frustrated him. He already had lockpicking and cartography, how was he supposed to add in mining to broaden the window he had to work with to dig up the chest? How was he supposed to pinpoint the location? In the end, he logged out an incredibly frustrated person.

In an attempt to find a way around the situation, I bought several alacrity scrolls, created a character, and ran to a Mapmaker's shop in Britain to begin my journey.

Unlike tailoring and blacksmithing, I couldn't select "make max" and leave the game be with a check in every 5 minutes. I had to actively sell the maps I was making and buy more blank/shop maps to create more maps from. Even so, I was surprised at how little time it took to get my cartography from 50-99.5 - about an hour. From 99.5, I bought a .5 transcendence scroll for about 15k and basked in my new GM Cartogrpahy.

From there, I bought some alacrity scrolls for lockpicking, found Goodman's public training box, and got to work.

It took another hour and a half for me to bring my lockpicking up from 50 to 100. I moved some skills around, added cartography to my bard, contacted Nestor, and got to work.

The last time I did treasure maps in 2010 or 2011, I had a much smaller screen. This time around I found I had to take a screenshot of the map with the plotting line added (the line is more precise than the pin), load up the screenshot in Photoshop, and zoom all the way in.

Even then, there were some maps that I had difficulties with figuring out the exact location. There were two maps where it took me upwards of 20 minutes to find the chest.

Since Nestor wasn't the one doing the chest searching, he was happy to sit around and wait, though. :)

With Nestor's mage and my Bard/Mage prowess, we quite easily conquered all of the guardians for each chest. Even the ancient wyrms were easier than I expected.

I still haven't sorted through our loot. Nestor's trammel tower is completely stuffed full of dryad green bags. Perhaps one day I will finally vendor up/store the jewelry and gear. Until then, the first floor of the tower will continue to be an eyesore.