Maps

Eleven maps, and our coverage of them is wildly uneven: Ragnarok gets two pages, Genesis gets eight. That is not an accident of who was writing that week. Two pages is what a map needs when everything you already know still works and the only open questions are where the metal is and what lives on the hill. The moment a map switches something off, whether that is flight, or water, or the ability to walk where you like, it starts needing guides that no other map needs, and the page count climbs.

So the useful way to read this bucket is as a difficulty curve for your habits rather than for your character. Below, the maps run from the ones that ask nothing new of you to the one that replaces the world outright.

The maps that need only two pages

Ragnarok and Lost Island are the control group. Both get exactly the pair every map gets and nothing else, because there is nothing else to say: your existing tames work, your existing gear works, and the only thing you lack is coordinates.

On Ragnarok that means the resource map, which puts Oil Veins at 83.1, 27.7, Silica Pearls in Vikings Bay and Black Pearls up at 70, 21 alongside the metal, crystal and beaver dam runs, and the dino spawn map, which is where you find the Allosaurus packs at 64, 42, Brontosaurus in Highland Bay at 20, 76 and Megalosaurus over in Pelagornis Bay.

Lost Island runs the same pair. Its resource map is built around two landmarks worth memorising, the crater lake at 39.2, 63.1 for Black Pearl and the waterfall cave at 27.5, 54.2, and the dino spawn map runs from Allosaurus at 65.5, 65.6 up through the Rex and Therizinosaur spawns.

The maps that only move the furniture

Crystal Isles is the first map to need a third page, and the reason is a quiet one. Its resource map handles the things you go hunting for, Obsidian on Emberfall Mountain and metal at Copper Peaks, but the basics you normally trip over turn out to be hidden here, so there is a separate other resources page for Charcoal and Wood at 50.4, 57.6 and the Chitin and Clay mud piles at 53.8, 43.7. Its dino spawn map covers the rest, including the Giganotosaurus in the fire swamps and the Allosaurus packs across the Halcyon plains.

Genesis Part 2 is stranger than its three pages suggest, because a good deal of it is not ground at all. The resource map has you collecting Mutagel on the Space Bridge, Sulfur at 29, 65 and Honey from beehives at 60, 80. The dino spawn map is where the map's headline creatures live, the Tek Stryder in Eden Trench, the Voidwyrm out in space, the Shadowmane in Rockwell's Garden and the mind-controlling Noglin. And because the terrain is so unusual, base building gets its own treatment, from the Eden side of Hangar Bay at 32, 79 to the Summer Lake island at 42, 66 and a hidden underwater option.

Fjordur only has three pages here but it is a genuine oddity: it is not one landmass, it is several realms with travel between them, and our coverage reflects that. The dino spawn guide ranges from the Giganotosaurus at 46.7, 92.0 to Rock Drakes up in Asgard and the Desmodus tucked in a cave at 71.3, 01.1. The unique creatures page is one of the few in this folder that states its own total and then meets it, listing all five: the Aberrant Megalania at 41.0, 82.0, the Andrewsarchus at 35.0, 31.0, the Desmodus, the Fjordhawk and the boss Fenrir. The third page is admin commands, for spawning those creatures directly, pulling Mjolnir and the runestones, or teleporting to each artifact.

Scorched Earth: the map that takes your water

This is where a map first starts overruling habits rather than just relocating loot, which is why Scorched Earth is the earliest map in the folder to get a dedicated survival tips page. Drinking becomes a logistics problem solved with water veins and jug bugs. The weather becomes an active threat, and our page's neatest trick is taming a Jerboa purely as a sandstorm forecast. Preserving Salt handles food, and wind power handles electricity because the usual answers are not available.

The other two pages are the standard pair adapted to a desert. The resource map carries coordinates for Cactus Sap, Crystal, Metal, Obsidian, Oil Veins, Salt, Silica Pearls, Sulfur and Water Veins, and the dino spawn map puts Wyverns in the World Scar, Thorny Dragons at 35.5, 45.0, Morellatops at 35.2, 68.3 and Mantis out at 71, 72.

The Center and Valguero: maps built vertically

The Center's four pages are all, in one way or another, about the fact that the interesting parts of the map are not at ground level. The caves map covers the cave network, the underground world entrances, the loot crate spots and the Terror Bird and Castoroides spawns. The survival tips page is essentially a geography lesson: the natural bridge between the snow and redwoods biomes, the tunnel systems below, and the floating skull-shaped island above.

Its resources follow the same two-tier split Crystal Isles uses. The resource map is for the trips you plan, Obsidian at 64.60, 69.20 on the lava mountain island and metal at 10.50, 58.20 in T-Rex territory, while other resources covers the Stone, Flint, Wood, Fiber and Fat you pick up on the way, with the stone run sitting under the floating island volcano at 39.4, 32.1.

Valguero is the busiest of the free maps at six pages, and the reason is compression: it has no ocean, and it spends the space on six biome chapters instead, which our survival tips page walks through along with the Wyvern Trench. That density means the caves are not a side attraction but prime real estate, so bases and caves treats them together, with the Marble Hills ruins at 90.0, 88.1 and their crystal farms as the showpiece and separate notes for PvE and PvP.

Valguero also has the folder's only real redundancy. Its wildlife is written up twice, once as creature locations, which leads on the Deinonychus at 92, 89 in the White Cliffs and adds egg raiding notes, and once as a dino spawn map, which covers much the same roster with the Karkinos in the Aberration cave at 32.1, 92.9 and the Ice Golem at 12.2, 65.5. The resources are doubled the same way, with a resources map for the Polymer runs on dolphins along the river coast and penguins in the snow, and a shorter resource locations page for Stone, Flint, Wood, Fiber and Fat, with the lakeside stone at 40, 22.

Aberration: the map that takes the sky

Aberration is the first map where your existing tames simply do not come with you, and every one of its four pages exists because of that. Flying is out, so taming gets a page of its own for the replacements: Reapers, Rock Drakes, Ravagers and Bulbdogs, each with its own method and its own reason for existing. Movement becomes climbing gear, and the survival tips page opens on repairing climbing hooks before it gets to the map's other ways of killing you: radiation, ice crystals, mushroom spores, and four mushroom types that each do something different.

Building is a separate problem again, because the ground shakes. Our base building page is about finding sites that sit near wood and mining resources while surviving earthquakes, radiation and the local predators. The creature spawn map is the one that tells you what you are walking into, from the Nameless and Seekers around Element Falls up to the Rock Drakes, Ravagers, Bulbdogs and Reaper Kings on the Surface.

Genesis: the map that fences you in

Genesis gets more pages than any other map, and the tell is what those pages are about. Three of the eight exist because the map will not let you walk where you want. You cannot cross between biomes on foot, so starting zones is about beginning in the Bog, gathering the basics, and then using HLN-A to reach the Southern Island and the seven others. General tips covers the same machinery from the other end: teleporting with HLN-A, working through the two hundred missions, and spending the Hexagons they pay on resources and loot crates.

Then there are the glitches, which are not bugs but collectibles: HLN-A repairs them, and each repair pays Hexagons, XP and a piece of the simulation's story. Both pages state a total and then deliver it exactly, which is rarer in a wiki than it should be. The Arctic biome page numbers thirty locations from 85.4, 30.7 onward with no gaps in the sequence, and the Bog biome page numbers twenty-two starting at 69.9, 77.0, with a further set of story note glitches on top.

Genesis is also the only map in this folder with two separate base guides, which follows from the same fencing. Base locations is the practical list, the hidden Arctic spot at 79.0, 16.9, the Bog metal structure at 83.5, 60.5 and the Lunar caves, while hidden base locations is specifically about staying unfound, at 66, 22 in the snowy mountains, in the cave at 14, 71, or in the underwater cave at 17, 60. The resource map covers the biome-by-biome hauls, metal on the Arctic's Mount Everest, lunar element at 19.2, 37.4 and gems at 35.3, 54.1. The eighth page is the Bog's own hazard, insect swarms, which you beat by standing in water, holding a torch, sending a tame in, using Bug Repellant, or emptying two hundred seconds of flamethrower fuel at them.

Extinction: the map that replaces the world

Extinction gets six pages and every one of them is about something the other ten maps do not have. The wildlife is hostile in a new way: corrupted creatures covers the Element-infected roster in No Man's Land, untameable by design and worth killing for Black Pearls and Corrupted Nodules. The tameable side sits in creature locations, which includes the Enforcer, a mount you craft at a City Terminal rather than tame, and the Gacha.

The tech is different too. Structures is largely about those City Terminals, which craft the Scout and Enforcer engrams and charge batteries, and weapons and armor introduces the Cryopod, which turns a tamed creature into an ice cube you can carry. Even the resources are new, with Extinction resources sending you after Blue Crystallized Sap from the Fungal Trees near the Sanctuary and Condensed Gas out in the Sulfur Fields.

And on top of all that sit the Titans, four of them, each summoned at level 1500 in its own cave arena and each tamed by destroying corruption nodes rather than by any normal method. Our bosses guide picks up the two with pages of their own from there.

The two-tier resource pattern worth knowing

Three maps in this bucket carry two resource pages instead of one, and the split is consistent rather than duplicated. A map's resource map is the tier you make a trip for, obsidian, metal, crystal, oil, pearls, sulfur. Its other resources or resource locations page is the tier you should never have to make a trip for, stone, flint, wood, fiber and fat, which only needs writing up when a map hides them somewhere unhelpful. If you are new to a map and cannot find wood, that second page is the one you want. Where a resource has its own dedicated write-up, it will be in our resources guide instead, and the systems that turn those materials into anything are in mechanics.

Frequently asked questions

Which map should I start on?

Ragnarok or Lost Island, on the evidence of this bucket. They are the two maps that needed nothing written about them beyond where things are, which is exactly what you want while you are still learning the systems.

Why does Aberration need its own taming guide?

Because flyers do not work there. The whole standard toolkit for crossing ground and escaping trouble has to be replaced with Rock Drakes, Ravagers and climbing gear, so the tames are not optional variations on what you already own.

Are the Genesis glitches a problem with the game?

No, they are deliberate collectibles. HLN-A repairs them, and each one pays out Hexagons and XP while unlocking a piece of the simulation's story.

Where are the boss fights for each map?

Extinction's Titans are summarised on the Titans page and written up individually under bosses, along with Genesis's finale. Arena bosses on the other maps are reached from the terminals covered in our locations guide.