Add-on feature

With all the nonsense of guild drama raising it’s head last week I’ve decided to move on to greener pastures in terms of topics. There’s only so much to be learned from watching a guild self destruct.

So, in the spirit of helping out my fellow players I’d like to highlight something you may have missed. There’s a blog called The Khorium Toolbox that looks suspiciously like my own (except he’s been around longer) and last week WoWInsider highlighted a nifty post regarding Cartographer, a mapping add on for WoW.

Cartographer is a neat way to replace your world map with something that has a number of extras that don’t come with Blizz’s UI. I used to use Cosmos’ AlphaMap, and in fact I still have it loaded while I test out Cartographer. But I’m quickly becoming a convert.

The piece focused on Cartographer Routes – a small section of the module that allows you to plot, in a visible format, a patrol route for your gathering needs. Need to find Fel Iron? Use CR to plot your trek through Hellfire. Couple that with the Track Minerals option for miners and you’ll get not only small icons on your minimap that show deposits, but small circles that show where they can spawn, much like Gatherer does. But, and this is a big but, you can also get an optimized path showing you the best way to fly/run along a route. I installed this over the weekend and spent most of Sunday mining Thorium in EPL – I cleared 150 ore in about 2 hours that way.

So friends – go check it out, this guy has the smarts this bear doesn’t!

The Khorium Toolbox

WowInsider story on Cartographer Routes