Map completion: a gold star and two Gifts of Exploration

The icons in the corner of your map are a completion counter. Filling it on every core map is world completion, one of the longest solo goals in the game.

The reason people do it is specific: the Gift of Exploration.

What counts

Each map holds five kinds of marker:

• Renown Hearts, NPC tasks that fill from anything you do in the area
• Waypoints for fast travel
• Points of Interest, landmarks that tick as you walk past
• Vistas, viewpoints you have to climb to
• Hero challenges, the skill points

Close all of them and the map counts as complete and pays out a chest.

What 100% of the world contains

The totals for core Tyria, laid out so you can see the size of the thing you are agreeing to:

• 31 maps (six cities, twenty-five explorable zones, one instance)
• 653 points of interest
• 486 waypoints
• 226 vistas
• 189 hero challenges
• 303 renown hearts

That is 1,857 markers, and you will visit every single one on foot, in the air, or by falling off something.

Full completion on one character pays 2 Gifts of Exploration, the Been There, Done That achievement, and a gold star beside your name that other players notice more often than you would expect.

🔴 Only core Tyria feeds world completion.

This is the part that catches people: expansion maps do not count.

You need all six cities and 25 core zones. Southsun Cove and the Maguuma Wastes zones are excluded, despite belonging to the old world.

Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire, End of Dragons and the rest have their own completion and their own rewards, and none of it moves the gold star.

What world completion pays

Once per character:

• 2 × Gift of Exploration
• a gold star beside your character name
• the Been There, Done That achievement and title

What the gift is for

The Gift of Exploration goes into first-generation legendary weapons. Each of those needs two gifts, so one full world completion equals one legendary (where a legendary starts).

And here the detail bites: the reward belongs to the character. Complete the world on a second character and you receive two more gifts.

Players chasing several legendaries therefore complete the world several times on different characters. The gift cannot be bought and cannot be traded.

How long it takes

20 to 40 hours for a first pass, depending on how carefully you move.

Later runs go faster because you know where the vistas hide. With mounts and a glider the difference is enormous, which is why doing this before 80 makes no sense at all.

How to do it efficiently

Mounts first. The raptor and springer halve the time. The skyscale and griffon cut it further.

Ignore the order. Close whichever maps suit your level rather than working through numbers. The experience feeds masteries either way.

Watch the hearts. Renown Hearts fill from any activity in the zone, gathering included. They close in the background while you run between vistas.

Vistas are puzzles. Half of them are about finding the way up. If you are stuck for five minutes, there is almost always an unremarkable ledge off to one side.

What the walk feels like

Nobody warns you about the strangest part of this achievement.

Core Tyria is the oldest content in the game and it is almost empty. You will spend evenings in Kessex Hills and Snowden Drifts and the Blazeridge Steppes seeing perhaps two other players, both of them running past you toward something else. The events still fire on their timers. The NPCs still say their lines to nobody in particular.

Some people find that bleak. Others find it is the best the game ever feels.

There is a vista above Lion’s Arch that takes four minutes of climbing and shows you the whole harbour at sunset, and on the evening you finally get up there, alone, with the last hero challenge of the map done, the achievement stops being about the two Gifts of Exploration.

Then you go and do Straits of Devastation, which is horrible, and the feeling passes. But it comes back. That is roughly the rhythm of map completion, and the players who finish it on four characters are not doing it for the gifts.

Is it worth it for a newcomer

For the star, no. For a legendary, yes, without hurrying.

The sensible approach is to close maps as you pass through them while levelling and farming. A few months of ordinary play later, half the world turns out to be done, and only the tail is left.