Field Notes

A dungeon journal for World of Warcraft: Forever that starts blank and fills in as you play. Nothing is shown until your character has seen it: the halls you walk, the creatures you fight, the bosses you face and what they drop.

Beta. This is an early test build. Most of it has only been played through the first half of the Deadmines. Expect rough edges, and please report them (see Reporting problems).

What it does

• Map – a parchment sheet for each dungeon that is uncovered room by room as you reach it, drawn in the game's own dungeon-map art. Bosses you have faced are marked with a skull; click one for its page. Inside a dungeon the map key (M) opens this map instead of the game's empty one.
• Bosses – a page per boss: attempts, victories, defeats, your fastest kill, its abilities (written in once you have beaten it) and its loot.
• Bestiary – the creatures you have killed, with level, type and the abilities they are known to use.
• Quests – the errands that lead into each dungeon: who gives them, what to look for, what they pay, and how far along yours are. The map marks where each one takes you, where one is handed out inside, and where a finished one is handed in.
• Spoils – every item of note found in the dungeon and who carried it. Shift-click a line to link the item in chat.
• Diary – a dated log of each visit, and a box on every page for notes of your own.

Maps ship for the 26 classic dungeons and raids (Ragefire Chasm to Naxxramas) and for the nine new Forever dungeons. The new dungeons' maps are painted from their minimaps, and which room is which on them is a first guess.

Installing

1. Download FieldNotes-<version>.zip from the latest release.

2. Unzip it into your game's addon folder so that you end up with

   World of Warcraft\_forever_\Interface\AddOns\FieldNotes\FieldNotes.toc
   

3. Start the game (or /reload). The first time, a line in chat tells you the journal is in your pack.

To update, delete the old FieldNotes folder and unzip the new one. Your journal is kept separately (in WTF\Account\<you>\SavedVariables\FieldNotes.lua) and survives updates.

Using it

Open the journal with the minimap button, /fn, or a key of your choice (Options → Keybindings → AddOns → Field Notes). Inside a dungeon, the map key opens straight to the map.

Command
/fn	open or close the journal
/fn full	the journal fills the screen, or goes back to its usual size (you can also drag its bottom right corner)
/fn settings	the Preferences page, where everything below can be clicked (also: right-click the minimap button)
/fn announce	chat lines when something new is written down, on/off
/fn quality <0-5>	lowest item quality worth noting (default 2, uncommon)
/fn button	show or hide the minimap button
/fn mapkey	whether the map key opens the journal inside dungeons
/fn notices	the slip of parchment shown on screen when something new is written down, on/off
/fn notices move	hold a sample on screen so you can drag it where notes should appear (reset puts it back)
/fn sound	the journal's sounds, on/off
/fn sketch	whether new parts of a map are sketched in or simply appear
/fn maptest [instance id | off]	preview a shipped map without going there
/fn debug	what the game let the journal read, and what it hid
/fn errors	anything that went wrong, for reporting
/fn version	the installed version

"Tear these pages out", at the bottom of a dungeon's first page, erases everything noted about that dungeon.

Things to know

• The game hides a lot from addons inside dungeons. Enemy names, ids and spell casts are not readable there, and the combat log is closed. The journal works from what is left: zone names, boss encounter events, experience and loot messages, corpses you loot, and what creatures say. So:
  • a creature enters the bestiary when you kill it for experience or loot its corpse, not when you first see it;
  • at maximum level, or for kills that give no experience, only looted corpses count;
  • abilities are not observed in the fight; they come from a list shipped with the addon and appear after the kill.
• Maps of single-road dungeons fill in behind you. Reaching a room also uncovers the rooms you must have passed through.
• Boss positions are researched, not surveyed. Most come from the classic spawn database and the retail dungeon journal; a few are best guesses (notably Shadowfang Keep's upper floors and all of Alcaz Prison).
• The journal is account-wide, English only for now.

Reporting problems

Open an issue and include, if you can:

• what you were doing and what you expected;
• the output of /fn errors and /fn version;
• a screenshot of the journal page that looks wrong;
• for map problems: the dungeon, where you were standing and which part of the map did or did not show;
• best of all, your saved journal: WTF\Account\<you>\SavedVariables\FieldNotes.lua (it holds only what the journal recorded: dungeon, creature and item names, and your own notes).

Saved journals from the new Forever dungeons are especially useful: the room names and creatures recorded there are what the missing maps will be built from.

For developers

FieldNotes/        the addon (Core, Record, Journal, Buttons; Maps and Abilities are generated)
tools/             the generators and tests
tools/defs/        one map definition per dungeon (see tools/defs/BRIEF.md)

• python tools/test_addon.py loads the addon into Lua 5.1 against a mock of the game client and plays a dungeon run through it (needs pip install lupa).
• python tools/package.py builds dist/FieldNotes-<version>.zip.
• python tools/make_maps.py and python tools/make_abilities.py rebuild the generated data. They need reference material that is not in this repository (map tiles and data tables from the game and from wago.tools, and the cmangos classic database), which they fetch or expect under refs/.

Credits and licence

Field Notes is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version; see LICENSE.

Creature and ability data is derived from the cmangos classic database (GPL), the retail dungeon journal tables published by wago.tools, and the spell lists tracked by the BigWigs and LittleWigs boss modules.

The addon ships no game art: maps are drawn from tiles already in the game client, shown through masks. World of Warcraft and all related names and art are property of Blizzard Entertainment; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard.