NOTE:  Updated for 3.0 and beyond!

How would you like an addon that:

1. Put EVERY known spawn point of every type of ore/herb on your map? (not just ones you’ve gathered)

2. Put a tiny ore/herb indicator on your minimap which showed what type of ore/herb it is?

3. Had the minimap indicator turn into an empty circle when you’re close enough to see if there’s a spawn there or not?

AND

4. Drew a route on your map and minimap that most efficiently took you to visit every spawn point?

Welcome to Routes!

Move over ‘Gatherer Addon’….there’s a new mod which will do more than replace Gatherer. It reduces the time it takes to find ore/herbs.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to curse.com and get the ‘Curse Client’

2. Once you’ve installed it, you can choose which addons you want. Choose and install:

* Cartographer
* Cartographer Herbalism or Cartographer Mining or both, depending on your Professions
* Routes - NOTE:  NOT ‘Cartographer Routes’…that is old.  There’s a new one called just ‘Routes’.

3. Once in the game, with the addons installed (you’ll have to load out-of-date addons for the Herbalism and Mining to show up), type /routes.

4. You can add a new Route for each zone.  Basically, stick with the default settings, checking on all of the spawn points (herbs and ore) you want plotted.  This will create a really ugly non-functional route.

5. Once the route is created, find it in your list of routes on the left, and modify it.

6. You’ll see an option to CLUSTER.  Absolutely do that.  Basically what that does is combines spawnpoints into one ‘point’ if they are within 60 yards (by default).  That creates many fewer points to route out, and 80 yards is the distance for detecting the presence of an herb or ore.

7. Then click either Foreground (my preference) or Background and it will create a single route.

8. If you have Cartographer enabled, along with the Herbs and ore, and Routes, it creates a white line path around the map.  If you fly that route, it will take you the shortest route possible within detection range of each spawn point you chose to display.  On your minimap, spawnpoints out of range will display with a small icon representing the type of spawn it is (adamantite ore, felweed, etc.).  Once within range, that mini icon will turn into an empty pink circle.  If the circle is empty, there’s no spawn…else it will have the normal yellow dot in it.

TA-DA! You should have the most efficient (shortest) route that will circuit the map and hit every spawn point along the way!

Now you can just fly along this route (you don’t have to stick exactly to it), and you will fly over every point on a given zone.

The other thing you can do is create shorter routes based on fewer spawn points. Don’t choose EVERY type of data, but instead choose just one, such as Adamantite. Let the route be built on Adamantite only. Maybe you’re only interested in Adamantite because it sells better on your server than Fel Iron. You can shorten your route a bit…and you can still see Fel Iron if you happen to fly over it. You just won’t go out of your way to check a single Fel Iron spawn point.

Here’s a video I made of me setting it up. I ran a 20-minute loop around Terokkar and made 100g (well…99, but still). Honestly, I do not run around vid-capturing all of my farming hoping to get something cool…I set out to make a demo to show how nice it worked and though I normally get 60g every 20 minutes doing this, I got 100 because of the rare gem that dropped.