My New Favorite Add-On

My interface used to look like this when opened my map in Nagrand. This character is my miner and Cartographer has dutifully recorded all the node locations I'd ever found (thankfully on any character). If I needed to get me some Adamantite Ore, so for instance, my engineer can craft some bullets, I used to try to mentally determine a decent path between the nodes, minimizing my searching time and yet trying to visit each known location to see if anything was up.


I had heard several weeks ago about an addendum to the Cartographer suite that would map a "best path" from node to node of various types to take the mental work out of flying around and farming up some Ore. The addon is called Cartographer-Routes and is available from the wowace site.

One Warning: Cartographer-Routes doesn't work standalone; it's a mod that relies on its internal Cartographer Data of known node locations.

After installing the addon, imagine my surprise when I saw this:

How was I supposed to make more raping the land of (and by that I mean "mining for") Adamantite more effective and efficient? What has been done here is that each node is connected to each other node, resulting in a myriad of connections like a Delta Flight Map or an intricate spiderweb. (Choose your analogy). The answer is, of course going back into the options and "optimizing" the route. This can be done either foreground or background. Also you can select the color of the route, whether to use waypoints, and a number of other options.

When that is finished, you wind up with this:

Now that is indicative of a land ready to be mined for its natural resources. I've not extensively tested this mod, but so far I like what I see. It works for herbs, fish and gas clouds as well. The only thing I've not found out how to do is eliminate a single "outlier" point that requires a flight out of the way to pick up a single possible node. For my purposes, I just deleted the note point that showed where the node was and the route got much better.

It does add points dynamically if you happen to see a new location not in your database and redraws the map on the fly. So far, it's all thumbs up!