"Grid" Theory: walking through landmarks, or not

[Tom Pullings]

Roland, Rupert and others (apologies to those I am leaving out) have noted that when all else fails, you can get an idea of whether you are near the right place depending on whether you can walk through landmarks. If you can, then the treasure or other quest must be elsewhere; if you can't, perhaps you are getting warm. When you are trying to find something with a single map piece, or with no easy identification of a starting shoreline landmark, this hint can be a help - though sometimes a little frustrating.

I have tried to use this as tool to find lost cities with one map piece in the Purely Piratical Challenge (see Tavern sticky), with mixed results, and decided to start this thread to share information with others interested in this aspect of the game.

From what I can see, it appears that the game activates a kind of "grid" when an orienteering quest spawns. Within the grid, the landmarks are "live" and impassable. The boundaries of the grid are harder to determine - sometimes they seem to cover an area that includes several shoreline landmarks in the same general section of the world map, but at times it seems that the shape may be irregular (maybe long and thin instead of wide?).

It also appears that occasionally, there can be two quest grails within a single grid, and that active grids tend to get re-used, but it is hard to be more precise about how or why this works.

Any ideas? Any other experiences or observations out there?

[Roland]

Once a grid is activated, does it remain activated after you have found the object of the quest and sailed away?

[Tom Pullings]

I don't think so. It does stay until you sail away, but then it seems to revert, and I think I have seen landmarks change and disappear.

[loki59]

A few months ago I started to experiment a bit with this idea but never finished working on it. I started a game and saved before entering each port in the beginning. I got my first map piece for a buried treasure and got a piece that was good enough to tell where it was with just the one piece. I went to the area and went ashore and found the land marks. I then loaded my last arrival before I got the map piece and didn't talk to the traveler, left port and sailed back to the same area and there were no landmarks now. In fact in the beginning of the game before you get any maps the only landmarks are very few geysers and dead trees, you can check this at the beginning of a game by going ashore at the shoreline landmarks and walking around. I continued on and later received a map for a treasure in the vicinity of Leogane, took a screenshot of the full map with the position of the landmarks. I then got a map from the same traveler for the next treasure, again this was in the vicinity of Leogane in the same location. When I got the other map pieces I took another screenshot of the map and compared it to the first. A couple of the landmarks were in the same spot but most had moved and some that were in the first map were missing from the second, and some in the second didn't appear in the first. As for walking through landmarks, I've never been able to walk through a totem pole, arch rock,deserted cabin, stone head, temple. The geysers and dead trees are different though, if they are part of your map you can't walk through them but there sometimes are geysers and dead trees in the same area not part of your map that you can walk through.

[Tom Pullings]

This is interesting. I thought I had been able to walk through a temple once, but now I am not so sure. Now that you mention it, the "walk-throughs" that I clearly recall are all trees and geysers.

I wonder if the cabins, stone heads, arch rocks, temples and totems only appear on "active" maps. That seems too obvious, but now I am going to watch for it. It does seem that the "active" area containing objects that cannot be walked through is larger than a given map, though (I theorize) still contiguous.

Has anyone noticed a situation where, with a single open quest, there will be more than one area that is active (e.g., active landmarks north of Vera Cruz and in about the Bay of Honduras?