Forever Scribe

Description

If you have installed an addon on Forever and found it strangely empty, this is why.

An addon that tells you where a quest starts, what a mob drops or which vendor stocks an item does not work that out as you play. It ships a database that somebody built by scraping years of a live game. Those databases exist for vanilla and for TBC, and they are being adapted for Forever — but three things put a hard floor under how complete any of them can get:

• The Encounter Journal does not load. That is the client's own built-in record of what drops from what, and on Forever it is absent entirely — so the usual shortcut of reading the data straight out of the game is closed.
• Item data stays encrypted until an item first drops somewhere in the world. The client genuinely does not know what an item is until somebody, somewhere, has seen one. You cannot look up a drop that has never happened.
• Forever has its own quests. Roughly a quarter of those in the starting zones sit above ID 90000 and appear in no database anywhere, because nobody outside Forever has ever seen them.

Vanilla and TBC databases cover part of this and get the rest wrong, which is worse than covering none of it. The missing part can only be built one way: by people playing the game and writing down what they find.

That is what this addon does, and it is all it does.

ForeverScribe watches while you play and records:

• Quests — text, objectives, who gives them, who takes them in, and where
• NPCs and objects — what they are, where they stand, what they drop
• Items — what exists, and what it is, as the client unlocks that data
• Drop tables — what actually came off what
• Vendor stock — what is sold where
• Gathering nodes — herbs, veins and clickables, with positions

It has no window, no minimap button and no settings. It never changes anything you do. Every part of it runs inside a protected call, because a recorder should never be the reason a quest turn-in breaks.

The part that needs you

The data sits in a file on your computer. For it to become a database anybody can use, that file has to be shared.

Type /scribe and it will tell you where the file is. Close the game, then drag that file into #scribe-drop on Discord:

https://discord.gg/3WVqSFQJaU

Once, occasionally, or never — whatever suits you. Everything gets merged, and the merged database is published back to everyone in #scribe-database, released into the public domain. Anyone may use it in any addon, including ones that compete with this one. It is a record of a world, not an asset.

There is no automatic upload and there never will be: addons cannot reach the internet, and you should be suspicious of any that claim otherwise.

What is actually in the file

Worth being specific, since sending someone a file from your WoW folder is a reasonable thing to hesitate over. The file contains:

• Quest, NPC, item, object, vendor and node records, with map coordinates
• The level you were when you picked up each quest
• Your realm name, faction, client build, locale and the date

It does not contain your character name, your account, your gold, your chat, your whispers, your guild, your friends list, or anything about what you did. No names appear in it at all.

The one thing worth knowing: the item list is seeded partly from items that pass through your bags, so it reveals which items you have encountered — not how many you own, or what you did with them. If that bothers you, open the file first. It is plain text and you can read every line of it.

Requirements

None. No dependencies, no libraries, no configuration.

Fixed on the Forever beta

Recorded data that vanished between sessions was a client bug, and Blizzard fixed it in beta build 70009 on 25 September. ForeverScribe now keeps what it records from one session to the next. If you copied your file out while the bug was around, send those copies as well: an old copy can hold records your current file lost.