General

The cartography skill is used to draw maps, which can be used to travel and to navigate boats. More importantly cartography is required to decode treasure maps!

There are four different map sizes that you can draw: Local, City, Sea and world maps.

This is the best profit to expense ratio gold farming engine in the game. You can go to any shard, and within a day, have enough gold to buy a large house deed. The best way to do this is with a young account because of the auto respawn of scrolls of NPC Vendors for Young characters. In September of 2002, after the shard Lake Austin opened up publically, 3 of us were able to place a Large Marble, a Large Tower, 2 Log Cabins and a Sandstone with just 3 days of hard work.

The minimum skill required to decode treasure maps are:

• Level 1: Less than 71
• Level 2: 71.0
• Level 3: 81.0
• Level 4: 91.0
• Level 5: 100.0

Skill Training

Start by buying the skill from a NPC Cartographer. It's recommended you start a character with 50 Cartography in Trinsic or Moonglow. The Provisioner's of both shops have Map Maker NPC Vendors and are easy to get too. I recommend Trinsic. Closer to the bank and less camped.

• 20-52: Local Maps
  
  
• 62-65: City Maps
  
  
• 65-67: Sea Charts
  
  
• 67-99.5: World Maps
  
  
• 99.5-100: Level 2-4 Tattered Treasure Maps*

Getting Maps

Since the new vendor code is in, it is possible to work a cartographer to 999 and then buy 125 scrolls, draw them all, and sell your maps for massive profit back to the vendors instead of just dropping them on the ground: Usually vendors will buy world maps back for 26 gp. Because of the high price they may (may!) run out of gold pretty fast, and if you want to get rid of all your maps, you're going to have to drop some gold on him. Give him 500 gp and try to sell some more maps. Most of the time the vendor will now buy more of your maps, as long as you keep giving him enough gold. Since you get the gold back as soon as you sell your maps, it doesn't really cost you anything to do this.

Hopefully you'll be able to sell all of your maps, then you can just buy them back as blank maps. (The vendor turns your world maps into new blank maps).

Unfortunately this doesn't work all the time or with all vendors. Some vendors simply refuse to buy anything, even if you buy all their world maps, blank maps AND give them enough gold. When that happens try selling to a map maker in another shop or on another facet.

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Tips & Tricks

• Anyone can use a decoded map which means Decoded maps can be sold.
  
  
• Removing the chest after a treasure hunt is easy. Keep the map in your pack, and shift+left click the chest bringing up the menu and remove the chest. This goes a long way in helping others by not blocking chest spots.
  
  
• All UO Shards have Treasure Hunting Libraries and you do not need to spend the time to find your way to the treasure spot. You can just recall to it. Even so, it's recommended you have your own rune set just in case. Players quit and houses do decay or change hands for various reasons. It's best to have your own set and not worry about finding the next Treasure Hunting Library.
  
  
• On non-Siege ruleset servers (shards), you do not need Remove Trap nor Detect Hidden to open the chest. Simply unlock it, walk away at LEAST 8 spaces, then cast telekenises and use your last target macro (since most of the chests are hard to see under trees). Although, Treasure Hunting on Siege requires you to have Remove Trap and Detect Hidden to open a chest.
  
  
• After you have bought up and used all the maps from the mapmaker, theres no need to wait for respawn or to recall to another mapmaker. You can use blank scrolls to make maps. So after you have bought and used your blank scrolls you can now sell the maps you made to the mapmaker and you will be able to buy them back as blank maps. Hope this helps!
  
  Tip by: Lucky Odds