Cartographer

For those of you who don't use it, Cartographer is a very nice addon for World of Warcraft that adds a coordinate system to your map. This makes it easier for people to explain where things are on message boards, guild members, etc. It also shows general level brackets for zones, instance maps, and has a whole slew of other great features. Read up on it at the link above!

However! Today, a guildmate of mine tuned me into the fact that Cartographer has another very useful purpose: Gathering! With the use of some nifty databases, Cartographer can put little points on your map showing you where ALL the possible spawn points are in any given area. That can be mining nodes, herbs, treasure, questgivers/turnins, whatever. This makes it so, so easy to follow a route around a zone to gather materials, because you now know every possible place it can spawn. I can't stress how much easier this makes gathering! And unlike Gatherer, you don't have to have found it first for it to show up on your map: it's just given to you!

You can download the databases from Curse, in the form of LUA files. You need Cartographer installed, and you also need to get the dependent program for whichever nodes you want. Look under the "dependencies" header on the link provided.

Installation is simple enough. Make sure you aren't logged in. Extract that Cartographer addon to your World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons folder, and extract the database files (the LUA files) to your \World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\_name_\SavedVariables folder. Make sure you enable the addons on your character select screen, and you're done!