The /loc Guide

The /loc command is the single most useful command in this game for finding yourself and getting around to different places. It is much better than the Sense Heading skill for several reasons. Sense Heading must be trained, and therefore is practically useless at lower levels, and is only really reliable when you start hitting your high teens in level. Sense Heading is also quite vague. You can be heading Southwest, turn a significant amount, and still be heading Southwest. This is fine a lot of times, but many (in fact, most) you need to know exactly where you are and where you're headed.

That's where the /loc command comes in. This guide will tell you how to use /loc to find your way around. In case you all are wondering, all of my maps have the places on them in their appropriate positions. The reason I don't have a specific /loc printed out for each of them is that you can look at the map, eyeball what the /loc would be, and head in that direction and finally see it.

The /loc Button

Before I go on to describe how to use /loc effectively, you need to set up a button devoted to the /loc command. This involves reassigning one of your Social buttons to be a /loc button. First of all, pick a useless Social button, like AFK or GM's. Then reassign this to be the /loc command and place it in your hotkeys on the left side of your screen. If you know how to do this, skip to the next section. I will briefly describe how to do this (it's all in your manual as well).

You go to the Social buttons section, and you will see a dozen or so neatly arranged little buttons. Right-click on one of them, and it will pop up in the chat window the reassignment window. The top bar you will notice is the name that you saw on the button. Click on this and you can type in whatever name you want, let's use "loc". The bottom part is similar, and this is where the actual command goes. Here you must type "/loc" for it to work. Tada, you've reassigned the button! Click Done, and you will see the little loc button on the right.

Now you must move it to one of the hotkey areas in the lower left. Mine is in spot five on page 2 of the hotkeys, my travel menu, but that's just me. :) To do this, you left-click on the loc button and hold down the button. After a second has passed, you will get a floating loc button. Move this to the left side and click it into the spot you want. Now you can either hit this button with your mouse to give you the /loc, or you can use the numbers to do it (on mine I hit shift-2 to go to the second window, then 5 for the loc button).

Everquest's Grid System

Everquest's grid system is unique. Not willing to follow the trend of eons of mapping and coordinate systems, EQ's creators decided to create their own. Although not difficult to master, anyone used to normal grid systems will be confused by EQ's grid system from time to time. Even myself, who has probably hit the /loc button more times than anyone in the game (and you think I'm kidding) sometimes just sits and stares at the string of /locs that I get, confused. Or maybe that's the beer. At any rate, I'll explain to you how...

There are three numbers in any /loc. These numbers can either be positive or negative. The first number is the North/South coordinate location, with positive numbers being more North. The second number is the West/East location, with positive numbers being more West. That one is the confusing one, as almost all systems make East the positive direction (hence North-South, East-West), but in EQ it's flipped. The third number is Vertical location (or altitude). This is really only useful if you are lost underwater and want to figure out which way is up, and so I won't discuss it any more in this article and focus on the first two numbers instead.

This is the layout of a /loc result:

Let's do some examples using just the first two digits. If we assume a symmetric map (most of EQ's maps aren't this, but let's just assume)...

-2478, 300
Southwest of center, far more south than west
512, -324
Northeast of center, slightly more north than east
512, 300
Northwest of center, slightly more north than west

You simply have to get used to looking at them. Now on to how to use them to replace Sense Heading.

The String of /locs

So you've figured out how to find out the /loc that you are at. The problem is that that is useless. Why do you care, you're already there? What you need is how to find out how to get from the /loc that you're at to the /loc you want to be at. You could use Sense Heading and go in the general direction, but this simply isn't practical most of the time, for the reasons I mention above.

What you need to do is use /loc repeatedly, creating the "string of /locs." This is where the true power of the /loc command comes in to play. How do you do it? It's easy, you just keep hitting the hotkey over and over as you run in a relatively straight line. What you need to get going is just a bunch of sequential locs to analyse, the more the better. The hard part is interpreting it.

Now, if you want to get from point A to point B, the string of /locs is easy to interpret and use. This is best seen with an example. Say you enter the zone at /loc 2300, -800 and you know that the spot you died in was at /loc -200, -500, and you want to get to your body (who doesn't, right?). You start running into the zone, and you start hitting the loc button. Your first loc that you get is 2250, -840. Are you heading in the right direction?

Let's think about it. Simply look at the /loc you're at and the one you want to be at and compare the two. In the above example, you need to go vastly negative (south) in the first number, and just a touch positive (west) in the second number. It helps to be able to do math. So what you want out of your /loc's is to see that trend, you want the first number to be dropping quite quickly, and the second number to move only very slightly more positive throughout your trip. Obviously at any point you may have to reassess where you are and where you should be heading, but this is fairly easy. You'll begin to feel like a spaz because you'll be striking that loc button a thousand times...

Replacing Sense Heading with /loc

This is a more advanced topic, but one that is much more useful and powerful than the use of /loc above. As I said before, Sense Heading can be vague. Say you want to go east, but slightly to the north. Sense Heading will just say "You are heading East" but that doesn't tell you if you are headed slightly north or south during that trip. You need more specific info.

The first step, as above is to develop a string of locs. Say you are a poor human, lost and blinded at night in North Karana looking for the path to East Karana. You have no idea where in the zone you are or which way you're headed, but you know you want to go to the east. Well, simply start running and build up a string of locs, which might look like the following:

15, 130
5, 155
-5, 180
-15, 205
-25, 230

You get the idea. Which direction are you headed with the above string? Just analyze the numbers. Comparing the second (or fifth) set of numbers to the first, you see that the first number has become more negative, and the second number more positive. Negative, Positive, when looking at the little table above, corresponds to South, West. See how easy? This particular string can provide you with more info if you're quick at math. The first number dropped 40 loc points, the second increased 100 loc points. This tells you that you are heading more West than South, so like a West-Southwesterly direction. To get pointed east, you can just turn until your string analysis says you are heading East, using the above method.

The other way to think of it is to say to yourself, okay, I want to head east, what would my loc string look like? A purely easterly course would mean that the first number in the loc would not change at all (no north/south movement). The second number would be dropping steadily as you head more easterly. You then start running and turning and do the string of locs until you see this pattern emerge. This is a little brainless, but is very simple to do and quite reliable, especially when you're in your 20th hour of consecutive playing and can't remember where you put the coffee pot...

Conclusion

With all of this said, I don't want you to go away thinking this is easy to master. I was an engineer and math person, and have been hitting locs since January (yes, the beta) and this still sometimes eludes me. My only advice is practice practice practice. On a good awake day I can do two locs (maybe three) and head to a spot on the opposite side of the zone and hit it close enough to see it in the rain, simply by doing the math and using the slew of information in the /loc command. Good luck!