A clue scroll is a map you cannot read yet. It drops while you skill, it sits in your inventory doing nothing, and you cash it in on the Exploring → Expeditions tab: loading a clue consumes it and sends your character down a route of skilling sites, paying XP at each one and a chest of coins, gems and gemstones at the end. There are 4 tiers — Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic — and a better tier means a longer route and a much richer chest.

The four tiers

Clue	Share of drops	Route	Solve time	Chest coins	Chest gems	Gemstone	Cascades
Clue Scroll (Common)	50%	2–4 nodes	20s–40s	2,000 gp	1–2 💎	20%	—
Clue Scroll (Uncommon)	30%	4–6 nodes	40s–1m	4,000 gp	2–5 💎	40%	—
Clue Scroll (Rare)	15%	6–8 nodes	1m–1m 20s	8,000 gp	5–12 💎	60%	20% Clue Scroll (Common)
Clue Scroll (Epic)	5%	8–10 nodes	1m 20s–1m 40s	16,000 gp	13–30 💎	100%	20% Clue Scroll (Rare)

Every clue that drops rolls its tier off this same table, wherever it came from — an Epic is 10× rarer than a Common. The route length inside its band is rolled per expedition and then fixed for that clue.

Where clues come from

Exploring surveys — the main source

Every completed survey on the Exploring tab rolls a flat chance at a clue. Higher areas roll a slightly better chance, but the bigger lever is area mastery: 1,000 successful surveys in one area cut that area's survey time by 50%, and because the chance is per survey, half the time per survey is twice the clues per hour.

Area	Exploring	Survey time	Chance / survey	Clues / h fresh	Clues / h mastered	One clue every
Gloomwood	1	120s → 60s	0.10%	0.030	0.060	16.7 h
Hollowdeep Mine	15	120s → 60s	0.11%	0.033	0.066	15.2 h
Emberhall Ruins	30	120s → 60s	0.12%	0.036	0.072	13.9 h
Thornfield Estate	45	120s → 60s	0.13%	0.039	0.078	12.8 h
Ossuary Reach	60	120s → 60s	0.14%	0.042	0.084	11.9 h

Mastered = that area's survey timer fully reduced. Survey clue rolls fire offline too: the offline simulation runs the same roll, so a night of Exploring banks clues like an active one.

Lucky Clue — every other skill

Without it, only Exploring drops clues. Lucky Clue is a one-time permanent upgrade (100,000 gp, unlocked after 10 expeditions solved) that adds a small clue chance to every non-combat skill you train — woodcutting, fishing, mining, cooking, thieving, the lot.

The rate is 0.006 clues per hour of training, roughly one every 167 h. It is deliberately time-based rather than per-action, so a fast Normal Tree and a slow Redwood pay exactly the same clues per hour — picking short actions to farm clues gains you nothing.

Quest rewards

Hand-outs from the quest lines are where your first clues come from, long before any drop rate matters — 109 quests pay one:

Clue	Story quests	Event quests 🎟️
Clue Scroll (Common)	1	30
Clue Scroll (Uncommon)	4	30
Clue Scroll (Rare)	2	30
Clue Scroll (Epic)	2	10

Each clue's own page lists the exact quests — follow the link in the table. Event quests only pay out while that event is live.

Expedition chests

The top tiers feed themselves: a Rare chest has a 20% chance to contain a Clue Scroll (Common), and an Epic chest has a 20% chance to contain a Clue Scroll (Rare). The lower tiers never cascade.

Not from combat

Killing monsters never drops a clue, at any level, in any area or dungeon. Clues are a skilling reward only.

Making them drop faster

Clue Booster (permanent)

The Clue Booster line is the only real lever on the rate. Tiers replace each other rather than stacking — owning tier 9 is ×10, not the product of everything below it — and the multiplier applies to both clue sources, the survey roll and the Lucky Clue trickle.

Tier	Upgrade	Exploring	Cost	Rate	Clues / h (mastered Gloomwood)
—	(none)	—	—	×1	0.060
1	Frayed Map Case	1	50,000 gp + 100 💎	×2	0.120
2	Oiled Compass	10	150,000 gp + 200 💎	×3	0.180
3	Surveyor's Loupe	20	400,000 gp + 350 💎	×4	0.240
4	Gilded Astrolabe	30	900,000 gp + 550 💎	×5	0.300
5	Cartographer's Desk	40	1,800,000 gp + 800 💎	×6	0.360
6	Ley-Marked Sextant	50	3,500,000 gp + 1,100 💎	×7	0.420
7	Diviner's Theodolite	60	6,000,000 gp + 1,600 💎	×8	0.480
8	Starlit Orrery	70	12,000,000 gp + 2,400 💎	×9	0.540
9	The Wayfinder's Eye	80	20,000,000 gp + 3,500 💎	×10	0.600

At the top tier that is one clue every 100 min of mastered surveying, against 16.7 h unboosted.

Cartographer's Call (event)

Old maps resurface across the wilds. Surveys turn up clue scrolls twice as often. That is a live ×2 on the Exploring survey roll, multiplying on top of your Clue Booster tier — so Cartographer's Call plus the top booster is ×20. Event modifiers apply to online play only; offline progress keeps the un-evented rate.

Solving a clue — the expedition

Load a clue on Exploring → Expeditions and it is consumed on the spot. Your character then walks a route at 10 seconds per node, flat, at every tier — an Epic takes longer only because it rolls more nodes. The route reveals itself as you go: you see the site you are at and the ones behind you, never the ones ahead, so the node count (and with it the finish time) stays hidden until you arrive.

Each node is one skilling site tied to a skill you have already unlocked, and completing it pays XP in that skill — an expedition is a small spread of XP across your account, not Exploring XP. 18 skills have site pools and can appear. One expedition runs at a time, and the timer is real wall-clock time: it keeps running while the game is closed, with no offline cap, so a clue loaded before bed is waiting finished in the morning.

XP per node

A node pays its rarity factor against the square of your combined level — your Exploring level plus the level of that node's own skill — so the same clue is worth dramatically more on a developed account than a fresh one:

Exploring / skill level	Common	Uncommon	Rare	Epic
10 / 10	96	192	288	384
30 / 30	864	1,728	2,592	3,456
50 / 50	2,400	4,800	7,200	9,600
70 / 70	4,704	9,408	14,112	18,816
99 / 99	9,409	18,818	28,227	37,636

XP for one node. Multiply by the route length in the tier table for a whole run — and note a route mixes skills, so the total is split across whichever ones it rolled.

The chest

Finishing every node unlocks the chest; claiming it rolls the contents once and grants them immediately. Every chest pays its coins and premium gems in full (see the tier table). On top of that:

• One gemstone, at the tier's gemstone chance — Common 20%, Uncommon 40%, Rare 60%, Epic 100%. Rarity moves the odds, never the amount: a chest that rolls a gemstone always grants exactly one.
• A cascading clue, on the tiers that have one (above).

Which gemstone it is, is its own weighted roll:

Gemstone	Chance (when one drops)
Topaz	40%
Sapphire	28%
Ruby	18%
Emerald	10%
Diamond	4%

Expeditions pay no ores, logs or herbs — the chest is deliberately not a gathering faucet. Coins, gems, one gemstone and the occasional clue, nothing else.

Notes & Strategy

Never sit on a clue. Only one expedition runs at a time and a clue in your inventory is doing nothing, so the moment one drops, load it. Since the timer is wall-clock and ignores the offline cap, the strongest habit in the game is loading your best clue right before you close the tab.

Solve in order of what you want, not what is rarest. If you are saving for a gem purchase, an Epic is worth four Commons and then some. If you just want the route done, a Common is 20–40 seconds. There is no decay and no expiry — a stack of Commons keeps fine while you hold an Epic for a bedtime run.

Level Exploring and the node skills together. Node XP scales with your Exploring level plus that node's own skill level, squared. The same Epic clue that pays a trickle at level 10 pays orders of magnitude more at 99, which makes clues a late-game reward that happens to drop early.

Mastery beats area tier. Moving up to a higher-level survey area buys you a rounding error on the clue chance. Grinding one area to full mastery halves its survey time and therefore doubles its clues per hour. Pick the area you will actually park in and stay there.

Buy Lucky Clue early, the Booster when you can afford it. Lucky Clue is cheap and turns every skill you already train into a background clue faucet. The Clue Booster tiers are the only thing that meaningfully moves the rate — and because tiers replace rather than stack, there is no reason to buy a middle tier if you are close to affording the next one.

Watch the Events tab. Cartographer's Call doubles the survey roll while it is live, and it multiplies with your Booster tier. A day of mastered surveying under the event with a high Booster is worth a week of unboosted grinding.