Speedrunning Tibia Points of Interest

Tibia map enthusiasts are undoubtedly familiar with the Measuring Tibia quest, which involves exploring various areas in the game in search of so-called Points of Interest (PoIs). In 2018, TibiaMaps.io released Tibia map downloads with a grid overlay to help with this.

After selecting a subarea to explore in the Cyclopedia Map and clicking the Start Discovering button, these PoIs are randomly placed across the map. At least, that’s what most Tibians believed…

As it turns out, PoI positions aren’t completely random. If PoIs would be truly randomly distributed across the area, then every single tile would have an equal chance of having a PoI appearing on it. In practice, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as some clever players discovered. To confirm this, try the following:

  1. Enable the Points of Interest for a given area.
  2. Walk around and add a map marker for every point you discover.
  3. Reset the Points of Interest and repeat.

After a while, you end up having markers for possible Point of Interest spawn places. Perhaps surprisingly, you’ll find that they’re not quite evenly distributed across the entire area. This means that once you have these markers, you can simply mapclick to them instead of exploring the entire area. Since this significantly reduces the area to search, it ends up saving a lot of time for repeated explorations — effectively making it possible to speedrun Points of Interest! For example, it’s possible to reliably complete the Plains of Havoc subarea in less than 4 minutes.

Still, this speedrunning is only possible after first spending a lot of time discovering and resetting PoIs over and over again. Luckily, this effort can be distributed across multiple collaborating players. Each person in the team can independently choose a subarea, exploring and re-exploring it while adding new markers. Using the TibiaMaps.io tooling it’s possible to collaborate on marker data without overwriting each other’s changes. And you guessed it… That’s exactly what we did!

The result of this research is now available in our updates downloads section. Our installer has been updated with a new option called Tibia maps with grid overlay and PoI markers. The installer remains the easiest way to regularly swap between map and marker types, or to keep your maps up to date with the latest TibiaMaps.io data — simply run the same executable again whenever you need to update or change your maps. However, for those who prefer manual installations, a ZIP file is available as well.

This project was a collaboration between TibiaMaps.io and Moeln, Itexo, Agent Delaxin, Temestokles, and Brighid Grand Explorateur. Thanks to everyone for their contributions!

Note that we don’t have complete markers for all areas yet, although the most important ones are there. Contributions are welcome! Here’s a live preview of this marker pack:

We recommend reading Brighid’s article on the Measuring Tibia quest (in Portuguese) for more details on the mechanic.