The Compass in Dragonwilds: Eleven Markers, and One Spell That Adds Ore
Dragonwilds has no minimap. What it has is an overhead compass with four cardinal directions and a distance in metres to every marker, and most players use it for quests and nothing else. It also tracks your gravestone, every vault entrance in an unlocked region, your teammates — and, if you cast one particular spell, every clay and ore deposit within 200 metres.
What the Compass Shows
| Marker | When it appears |
|---|---|
| Primary quest marker | When you start the main quest |
| Secondary quest marker | When you start a side quest |
| Primary quest NPC | Points at the next NPC for the main quest |
| Secondary quest NPC | Points at the next NPC for a side quest |
| Gravestone entrance | At the site of your death |
| Vault entrance | When you unlock a region of the map |
| Respawn marker | When you set your respawn on a bed roll or bed |
Two of these do more than they appear to.
The vault entrance marker appears on region unlock, not on discovery. You do not have to find a vault for it to show up — unlocking the region reveals it. That makes the compass a vault-finding tool rather than a vault-remembering one, and it is the fastest way to plan a route through unexplored territory.
Quest markers come in two flavours each — the objective and the NPC. If you are lost in a quest chain, the NPC marker is telling you who to talk to next, which is a different question from where to go.
The Gravestone Rule
The death marker carries one clause worth knowing before you die somewhere awkward:
Appears at the site of the player's death — deaths within vaults and Velgar's Rise will spawn a marker at the entrance.
Dying inside a vault marks the vault door, not your body. The compass will walk you back to the entrance and then stop helping. That is a meaningful difference from dying in the open world, where the marker sits on your gear, and it means a vault death costs you the run back plus the search inside.
The same applies to Velgar's Rise. Plan a vault run on the assumption that a death means retracing the interior from memory.
Summon Stone Spirits Turns It Into a Prospector
This is the compass feature most players never find. Casting Summon Stone Spirits displays nearby clay and ores up to 200 metres on the compass, with a dedicated marker per deposit type:
| Marker added | Source |
|---|---|
| Tin deposit | Summon Stone Spirits |
| Iron deposit | Summon Stone Spirits |
| Gold deposit | Summon Stone Spirits |
| Clay | Summon Stone Spirits |
Two hundred metres is a large radius in a game with a distance readout on every marker — the compass will tell you exactly how far the iron is, which turns a mining trip from wandering into navigation.
The practical use is not standing still and casting it once. It is casting it as you travel, so ore you would have walked past registers, and using the distance figure to decide whether a deposit is worth the detour. For a group, one caster prospecting for everyone is a real division of labour.
Multiplayer and What Is Coming
Players can see other players on the compass in a multiplayer world, with the same cardinal bearing and metre distance as any other marker. That is the whole coordination system — there is no map ping and no waypoint sharing — so "I am 340 metres north-east of you" is a sentence the interface answers for you rather than one you have to work out.
Two markers are documented but not yet live:
- Eldergate location — upcoming in a future update
- Boss location — upcoming in a future update
A boss marker in particular would change how the compass is used, since boss altars are currently something you find and remember rather than something the interface tracks. Neither is in the game yet.
Running your own Dragonwilds server
Player markers only matter when everyone is in the same world at the same time, and a shared world needs to be running when people log in. A gamever Dragonwilds server keeps Ashenfall persistent with automatic updates and one-click backups.
Conclusion
Dragonwilds replaces the minimap with an overhead compass giving four cardinal directions and a metre distance to every marker. Seven marker types are live — primary and secondary quest objectives, primary and secondary quest NPCs, your gravestone, vault entrances and your respawn point — and the vault marker is the underused one, because it appears when you unlock a region rather than when you find the vault, making the compass a route-planning tool for territory you have not visited. The gravestone marker carries one important exception: deaths inside vaults and Velgar's Rise place the marker at the entrance, not on your body, so a vault death costs the run back plus an unaided search inside. The feature most players miss is that Summon Stone Spirits adds Tin, Iron, Gold and clay deposits to the compass out to 200 metres, turning it into a prospecting tool best used while travelling rather than standing still. Other players show up in multiplayer with the same bearing-and-distance readout, which is the game's entire coordination system, and Eldergate and Boss markers are documented but not yet live.
Want teammates to navigate to? Rent a RuneScape: Dragonwilds server at gamever.io — instant setup, one-click backups and updates, and 24/7 uptime. Start with a free trial and use promo code WELCOME.