Crawling character_misc to get Quest and Recipe CRCs?

So back in August, /character_misc/ started exporting for every character. This contains a record of Active Quests, Completed Quests, and Known Recipes for a character.

However it was NEVER INTENDED that we would use character_misc without proper /quest/, /recipe/, and /collection/ records which would provide us a detailed "master record" for quests, recipes, and collections. Character_misc was only ever intended as a simple checklist against those records.

However here we are in November, twiddling our thumbs, and I wanted to do *something* with Quests and Recipes. They say idle hands are the devil's playground. Or maybe it's desperate times call for desperate measures...

<span style="color: #d40000">Digging for Quests

So I found that if you page through /character_misc/ records of lots of different characters, you will quickly find characters working on quests that you'll immediately recognize, based on the Quest Text, Stages, and Branches. For instance, it was very easy to find the Lore & Legend quests because they all call for the body parts and have the name of the creature intended:

census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/character_misc/?quest_list.stage=I must locate several boarfiend body parts.

In some cases, I pulled a character_misc record just before and then again just after picking up a quest and then scrutinized them to find the differences. This is how I got some of the Signature quests. If you know the exact stage description for a quest step, you can search for a character who is on that step.

Trawling character_misc is an imperfect solution and I wouldn't dream of trying to find all 11,500 quests this way, but I suppose someone could if they had the patience.

<span style="color: #d40000">What About Recipes?

To get the Recipe CRCs out of a known recipe book, just look in the recipe_items block on an item of type recipebook:

census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/ite...fo.name,typeinfo.recipe_list,typeinfo.classes

Trickier are recipes which are auto-granted and never appear in your inventory. For example some quest items, and all Tradeskill Apprentices. For these, a trick is, you can drag-and-drop the recipes to a hotbar and then use /savehotkeys myhotkeys.txt and then reading that file. The recipe crcs there match the ones in /character_misc/. Again, it's slow-going, but it could be done.

<span style="color: #d40000">Collections?

As for Collections, we were supposed to get a record for each character of which shinies had been collected for each collection the character was working on. Alas it didn't make the initial cut.


The search continues for proper Quest, Recipe, and Collection data...

 

After slowly hitting up the server for the first 9,000 character_misc, I have recorded 5,576 quests, 109,430 stages and 212,514 items. looks like the remaining 5.5k quests may take a bit longer to come across. =)

 

Well call me surprised... Is this what we have been looking for?
http://census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/quest/?c:limit=10

 

Ehrmagerd! I had no idea this was coming today!!

OK I will post more about this later, but...

Quests are broken down into Stages (steps), and each stage can have multiple Branches (parts) like Kill 10 Rats, Find 4 roots, etc. I highly recommend looking up a quest you are familiar with, and then comparing the walkthrough on Zam or Wikia to see how the data is encoded.

Now, everyone should understand that this data is NOT perfect, but it is what we can get for the time being until sometime in 2014, and I thought it more important to have imperfect data now, then perfect data months from now.

<span style="color: #d40000">Limitations of this data which will hopefully be fixed next year...

• Recipes give Components and Fuel as item names, instead of unique itemids. This will make linking up recipes a bit tougher. The reason for this is, some recipes accept more than one item to make the recipe. For instance, some recipes take "fluid" as a component, or older types of malachite.
• Quests are not exported with Quest Giver info. -- This could be an NPC, a book, a spawncamp (an object you click), or by a triggered event.
• Quests are not exported with Starting Zone. However quests ARE exported with finishing zone for each step!
• Quests do not include complete/consistent Reward data. Quest rewards can be in several different formats, and we only got support for the simplest type.
• The active quest journal section of /character_misc/ is exporting in German, French, Japanese, or Russian for players on those servers. This will make matching up and displaying your active quest journal outside the game pretty much impossible for these players. Sorry!

<span style="color: #d40000">Corresponding Quests and Recipes to Character_Misc

<div style="padding-left: 30px">If you look at /character_misc/ you'll see sections for Active Quests, Completed Quests, and Known Recipes. In all cases, these correspond to the CRC value when viewing /quest/ and /recipe/ data.

<span style="color: #d40000">Linking Individual Recipes to Recipe Books

<div style="padding-left: 30px">If you look up an Recipe Book item ( http://census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/item/?typeid=7 ), you'll notice that the items it creates are given both as a NAME, and an ID. This ID is actually a Recipe CRC. So now you have all the data necessary to marry Recipe Books together with Recipes!

 

Looks like 6,106 Quests exported, which should be over 11,500. Meanwhile, 18,400 Recipes exported, which should be over 22,000. I've got an e-mail in.

 

For starters, we appreciate all you have done and will do for us. The amount of information given to us today alone is very much appreciated. Especially for a novice like myself. Thank you...

I was wondering if you could take one request/suggestion back to the team. If they can consider it. I was wondering if it was possible to track how long it takes a guild to kill a raid mob, and record their fastest time for each. Basically other mmo's use this to rank guilds once these mobs are on "farm" status. And then record it in the achievement section somewhere in the guild data. Just a thought/wish...I know there are much higher priorities.

 

I've gone on a bit of a spree, creating proper, up-to-date threads about current EQ2 Census data. I would appreciate your feedback as I am a volunteer moderator on these forums and can clean up and amend these threads, as well as pass feedback onto SOE Platform and game teams. The only thing I can't do is suspend time or insert additional days into the week to allow for development, but I do what I can.