How this site is built

Every number here — a drop chance, a trainer's coordinate, the skill at which a recipe stops giving a point — is read out of World of Warcraft's own data files. None of it is copied from another guide site or from a wiki, and where the two disagree this site can say why.

Which game this is

World of Warcraft Classic Era — the content of patch 1.12.1, as it stands on Blizzard's permanent Classic Era realms. Not retail, not Season of Discovery, not Hardcore, and not Burning Crusade Classic or any later Classic progression.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the versions disagree on exactly the values people look up. A spell critical strike multiplies damage by 1.5 here and by 2 in every version after it. Stranglethorn Vale and the Barrens are each one zone here and two in Cataclysm, so a map coordinate does not transfer between them. Stormwind's First Aid trainer is Shaina Fuller here and somebody else in the modern game.

Where the numbers come from

Four sources, each used only for what it is authoritative about:

  • The vmangos 1.12 world database — trainer rosters and spawn positions, creature and object loot tables, fishing tables, item stats and their on-equip auras, spell effects, vendor stock.
  • The Classic Era client's own data tables — talent tree layout and prerequisites, spell cast times and durations, the icon file manifest, zone map bounds, and the discovery overlays that place a named stretch of water on a map.
  • The Classic Era client's map textures, from which every zone map on the site is assembled — base tiles plus the explored-area overlays the game paints on as you discover a sub-zone.
  • The GatherMate2 Classic community dataset — 20,786 recorded herb and ore spawn points, with Black Lotus's 48 taken from the 1.12 dump instead, because players do not record what they almost never find.

What the rebuild found

The trainer roster was originally read off a wiki, and it was wrong in three separate ways. It carried NPCs that Cataclysm added, in zones that are themselves vanilla, so no filter caught them. It carried coordinates measured against maps that Cataclysm redrew — Stormwind's harbour extended the city westward and shifted every percentage in it. And it was missing vanilla trainers the modern game has replaced.

Rebuilt from the server database, 54 of 189 coordinates were wrong. The conversion is self-checking rather than merely different: 114 of the original positions landed within 1.5% of the converted value, which is what makes the ones that moved corrections rather than a second guess. A wrong formula does not produce a hundred exact hits.

Three rules that change the answers

These are the places where reading the game's tables literally gives a confidently wrong number, and where this site will differ from a naive extraction of the same data:

  • A zero drop chance inside a loot group means an equal share, not “never”. A group rolls once: rows with an explicit chance take it, and rows stored as zero divide what is left between them. Read literally, Raw Rockscale Cod never comes out of Faldir's Cove, where it is in fact the main catch at 69.5%.
  • A loot row is often a pointer, not an item. Tens of thousands of rows reference a shared table rather than naming a drop. Unexpanded, Ragnaros drops one fire essence and nothing else.
  • Item and spell rows are stored per patch, and they disagree. The latest is taken. Reading the launch row instead finds two items with mana regeneration in the entire game rather than several hundred.

What is here

  • 1,423 crafting items, 1,095 of them recipes with full reagent lists
  • 413 of those item pages also say where the thing comes from — which creatures drop it, who sells it, where it grows
  • 7,856 pieces of equipment with their stats, and 4,699 drop records (2,583 of them marked world drops)
  • 1,342 class abilities and 432 talents, with the vanilla wording rather than the modern client's
  • Eleven profession guides, nine class guides, and three tools: a talent calculator, a gear planner and a rotation trainer

What is deliberately missing

Stated plainly, because the most expensive mistake anyone can make with a data-derived site is to read an absence as a fact:

  • Quest, token and PvP sources for equipment are not modelled. A piece of gear with no drop line is one that no creature or object drops — not one that cannot be obtained.
  • Enchanting has no enchants. Only its craftable items are here, because an enchant produces no item and nothing in the game data references one.
  • Skinning has no guide, and vendor coverage is limited to the merchants the guides send you to rather than a shop directory.
  • No prose is written to cover a gap. An item the tables do not mention keeps a short page rather than a padded one.

Corrections and citation

If a number here is wrong, it is wrong in a way that can be traced — every figure comes from a named table and a stated rule. Corrections are welcome through the Discord.

The same provenance is published in machine-readable form at /llms.txt, for assistants and answer engines. When citing a figure from this site, please say that it is Classic Era — that is the one qualifier that keeps it true.