Map

Know where you are and where that road goes — and click a room across town to walk there, without keeping a wiki tab open beside the game.

What it’s for

GemStone is big, and the part of it you can see is one room of prose. Everything else lives in your head or in a browser tab: which way the bank is, whether this alley connects back to the square, how far you drifted while hunting.

The map draws the town around you from the map database — rooms as squares, exits as lines, your room ringed — and recenters as you walk. Go inside a building and it swaps to that building’s floor plan on its own. Click any room you can see and you walk there, using the client’s own pathing. No Lich required, which is why it works on the phone too.

Set it up

Common setups

A corner mini map you never think about again

Download the data, add the map window, and send it to a zone where it can stay — a corner of the Right Bar works. Leave zoom at its default. Then forget it: it follows you, swaps to a floor plan when you step inside a building, and swaps back when you leave.

You’ll see: a small live map that always shows the block you are standing on, with your room ringed and its exits ticked around the square.

Reading a whole town without leaving your chair

Right-click the map and choose Open Map Explorer. It opens as its own OS window, so you can park it on a second monitor. Turn Follow off, drag to pan and scroll to zoom, then click a room to select it and read its details in the collapsible Description, Environment, Forageables, Tags, and Exits sections. Walk here sends you to the selected room; double-clicking a room does the same in one gesture.

You’ll see: the full town laid out, with any room’s title, tags, and exits one click away — and a trip starting the moment you press Walk here.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ The mini map does not pan or zoom by gesture. Dragging it moves the window, and the scroll wheel does nothing to it. Zoom is the Custom map zoom checkbox in its right-click menu. Drag-pan and scroll-zoom live in the Map Explorer, and pinch-zoom on the phone.

⚠️ The map is GUI and mobile only. The terminal prints a one-line hint instead of drawing. The travel commands behind it work identically in all three.

An empty map is telling you which thing is missing. Each message means something different: “Download map data in Settings > Map (or point at your Lich folder)” means no database; “Waiting for a mapped room…” means the database loaded but your room hasn’t matched yet; “Generating map…” means the layout is being computed and will appear shortly. Layouts are generated once per location and cached on disk, so only the first visit waits.

Nothing downloads on its own. Download map data and .mapdb download are explicit actions. .mapdb on its own reports the loaded database, its room count, and which release you have.

Downloaded releases carry GemStone data. DragonRealms sessions get their map from a Lich install instead — set Lich folder under Settings ▸ Map.

Unmapped shop interiors are normal, not broken. Map maintainers leave most shop interiors out on purpose, because they change constantly. Walk into one and the map holds the street outside: what is on screen stays mapped truth.

Cartography mode sketches those interiors instead. Turn on Cartography Mode in Settings ▸ Map and unmapped rooms draw as dashed, dimmed ghost rooms hanging off the room you entered from. Dashed means “what your client saw this session”; solid means “in the database”. Ghosts are never saved — they vanish when you close VellumFE, so they can never go stale. Ghost capture runs whether or not the mode is on; the setting controls only whether you see them.

Your map learns things it never writes down. Run forage sense or a ranger’s sense and the response is captured for the room you are in, showing up in the Map Explorer’s Environment and Forageables sections. Like Lich’s in-memory map edits, these are session-only — the map database on disk is never modified.

Player-shop warrens get their own map per town, listed in the location picker as, for example, Mist Harbor (Player Shops). Walking in switches the map over the same as entering any other location, which keeps the town map readable.

Explorer edits survive map updates. The Explorer’s Edit toggle lets you drag a group of rooms to tidy a layout (hold Alt for a single room). Edits save as per-room override diffs layered on top of any community-curated overrides shipped with the data. Reset overrides clears only your own layer.

If the map is stuck on the wrong room, run .room. It prints how your current room resolved, including its id, location, and edge count. On connections that never report a room id, the map falls back to matching title, description, and exits — and only trusts an unambiguous match, holding in place otherwise.

See also

• Travel (.go2) — the commands behind every map click
• Compass — the current room’s exits, for the step you are about to take
• Room Window — the room’s own prose and exits as text
• Travel & Day Passes — how the pathing engine routes, and what it costs to cross paid edges

[[windows]]
name = "map"
widget_type = "map"
title = "Map"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 12
cols = 30
show_border = true
zoom = 16

[map]
lich_dir = "C:/Lich5"
mapdb_repo = "Nisugi/mapdb"
mapping_mode = false