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TLDR: centaurs can often be found near elevation tags on OpenStreetMap.

Brown Centaurs have been one of the mysteries of Wizards Unite. For some of us, they’re easy. For others, impossible to find.

Using centaur mapping research by u/vanfanel842, mapping from local users’ responses around Melbourne, Australia and elsewhere, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that centaurs are found near elevation markers on OpenStreetMap (ele=*).A few examples we know about:

1. They’re common almost everywhere in the US, including big cities.
2. Uncommon almost everywhere in the UK
3. Common in some countries in Europe, uncommon in others. Seems to be more dependent on the political designation of a country than climate, season or latitude.
4. Uncommon in most of Australia & New Zealand.
5. Rare in Singapore

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Niantic uses OpenStreetMap for deciding spawn points in Pokemon Go and flagged locations in Wizards Unite. Comparing OpenStreetMap views of Chicago with Melbourne, the number of elevation markers (ele=) was a striking feature. Amost every park in Chicago is labelled with an elevation, while in Melbourne, elevation tags are very rare. Only a few tags on hill and mountain tops, a sprinkling of suburb elevations and accidental mis-use of elevations instead of heights.

Checking whether ele=* markers work.

This was done by searching for ele tags and going to the locations to search for centaurs in the wild. Also by publicising locations of old ele tags in a local group and gathering information about sightings in those areas. Less than 24 hours after publicising the list of ele tagged locations, I have the following confirmed centaur spawn locations.

Confirmed Spawns with ele tags in Melbourne, where centaurs are very rare:

1. Belgrave
2. Eltham
3. Moorabbin Airport

A Spawn in Singapore with an ele tag:

Cuscaden Road, Central.

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To search for ele tags in your area, use this and change to your location. Niantic don’t update their maps very often, so make sure you only physically check locations where the markers are at least 2 or 3 years old.
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NZX

Edit: change markers to tags in the TLDR:

I've been looking at fortress locations today after hearing that in Prince George, BC, Canada, a city of about 80,000 people, there are only 3 fortresses. They will all become inaccessible during the winter months due to snow and bears. Contrast that with my home city of Melbourne, Australia, where we used fortresses in shopping malls and retail districts in winter.

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Fortress Locations in Melbourne, Australia

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Fortresses may appear on the map in these locations:

1. Parks. Open Street Map (OSM) Tag leisure=park. Closed objects or paths in parks may encourage more than one fortress to appear in a park
2. Malls with OSM Tags shop=mall combined with highway=corridor or landuse=retail and highway=pedestrian
3. Specific Retail areas with OSM Tags (a) landuse=retail and amenity=library or (b) landuse=retail and the portal name includes Post Office or Historic. The portal names may also indicate portal classifications in Niantic's database.

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Fortress non-Locations in Prince George, Canada

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1. A mall without OSM tag shop=mall or highway=corridor
2. A mall with OSM tag shop=mall but without highway=corridor
3. OSM tags shop=mall inside landuse=retail where the portal name includes Post Office, but there are no highway=corridor or highway=pedestrian tags. This one isn't consistent with my observations in Australia. Perhaps these tags and portal names allow a fortress but don't ensure one.

How do your fortress locations compare?

I've done 20+ tonic traces since event has dropped and only have 9 or 10 of them.

Had loads of the other oddities since then.

Definitely get more doxies smashing the tonics in the morning, more vampires/werewolves at night and erklings in the day but seems fairly random to me. Weather has more or less been rainy or cloudy since event start as well.

I have searched a lot and tried myself to figure out what does affect Fortresses creation, but I haven't found anything conclusive. Does anyone have any idea or clues about how it could work?
I live in a quite small town, so I don't have too many Fortresses to use as samples, but I have looked at OSM where they are located, and feels like most of them are placed in the same tags as what triggers EX-gyms on PoGo (parks, playgrounds, nature reserve, etc), except that not all EX-gyms are Fortresses on HPWU. Looked also on the amount of Forts per lvlX s2 cell, but still nothing conclusive.

Will this be a mystery forever?

Challenge XP Calculator: http://www.2pih.com/hp_wizardsunite_calculator.php(Note: There are no ads or anything on this page, so feel free to link to it all you want. Just don't be an Erkling and copy it so you can host it on an ad-infested site.)

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This is a followup to the following post, incorporating the feedback from various commenters. I came up with the original chart after trying to answer the question, "What's the fastest humanly possible that someone could max out their red books, and how much would it cost?" (~160 hours and ~$1,000 in gold, if you're curious). But in the process of doing so, I realized that some of the calculations I was doing would be helpful for people who aren't looking to totally munchkin their character.

So I created a chart based on what I considered the "average" performance across all three professions. But, most people pointed out that the chart was relatively Auror-biased and also didn't take into account the impact of high level Runestones. Also, the chart was just terribly laid out. My bad.

So I converted the static chart into a dynamic calculator. You plug in the following variables:

• Which Chamber will you be entering.
• On average, how many potions do you use?
• On average, how much spell energy do you spend?
• On average, how many seconds does it take you to complete?
• Other stuff: what level Runestone, how many friends in your group, and is it a Sponsored Fortress?

It will then tell you how much XP per hour you can expect to gain, along with how many resources you'll spend to do so. But more than that, it will also take your performance at your chosen level and project how you would perform at other Chambers as well. You may find that there's another chamber that's more effective at whatever it is you're trying to do, whether it's min-maxing XP/hour, or conserving spell energy or Runestones or potions, or what-have-you.

Note: the charts will auto-update as you change the various inputs, so no need to hit "submit" or anything.

Some observations based on various inputs:

• If soloing, using L1 Runestones, Tower I seems to be the most effective for maximizing CXP per hour.
• Unless you have just an absurd number of high level Runestones, save them for group battles to maximize their impact.
• On average you'll get roughly 1 Red Spell Book per 500 CXP.

A few technical notes:

• "Base XP" is pulled from several publicly available sources that show how much CXP you'll get at each chamber. The various multipliers used to produce "Total XP", including Sponsored Fortresses, Runestones and Friend bonuses are pulled from the same.
• "Average Difficulty" refers to the numeric difficulty the game displays in the lobby of the Chamber. (example). The ranges are pulled from both personal experience and validating that against various YouTube videos and screenshots of Fortress battles. So it may not be 100% accurate, but I think it's pretty close.
• "Casts Needed To Complete" is based on what you input for the amount of Spell Energy you need to complete. It then compares that to the average difficulty for each Chamber, along with the average number of enemies to determine roughly how many spells you'll need to cast.
• "Total Minutes to Complete" is based on both what you input for how long it takes you to complete, and then combines that with the projected number of casts needed to complete the Chamber to estimate how long it will take you. It also adds 30 seconds to account for the amount of "downtime" between each Fortress run that is lost due to loading, queuing up, wait times, etc. Note that if the "Minutes to Complete" is expected to be greater than 10 minutes, that basically you wouldn't be able to finish that Fortress based on your current performance and inputs.
• "XP Per Hour" is just Total XP divided by the number of runs you can expect to complete per hour, based on the above Minutes to Complete.
• "Runestones Per Hour" , similarly, is based on Minutes to Complete.
• "Potions per Hour" uses your expected level of potion usage, and combines that with the expected number of enemies and number of casts.
• "Spell Energy Per Hour" is just Casts Needed to Complete combined with Minutes to Complete.

Background:

I wanted to know which profession had the most Damage-Per-Second (DPS), or in Wizards Unite, Damage-Per-Cast (DPC). I started with some simple calculations and ended up with a Python script to be able to handle all profession spells and buffs.

I focused only on stats and spells that directly affect damage dealt. They are: Power, Critical Power, Precision and Proficiency Power.

Also, enemy Dodge and Defence were taken into account and the damage dealt reduced when profession has not enough Accuracy or Defence Breach to neutralize it.

I didn't mixed professions buffs, as I wanted to know the DPS a profession can achieve on its own. So the results are valid for a single-player battle. In a group battle all professions are needed, and they all get the best of them by focusing on enemies they're proficient against, so their single DPS value may be less interesting in those situations.

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Results:

https://gist.github.com/alvarogzp/9c301c632e63b78c58d5cb10f38734cc

There you can find the source code of the script, with all the different values collected from the three professions. At the bottom of the link, in a comment, you can see the execution output. The most interesting bits are the average_damage and max_power stats.

average_damage is the average damage per cast for a profession when maxed out and using all possible buffs. Their values are:

Auror:         227.60
Magizoologist: 184.99
Professor:     279.07

max_power is the maximum damage a cast could inflict (ie. a critical hit with all profession buffs active). Their values are:

Auror:         432.16
Magizoologist: 652.01
Professor:     510.99

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Conclusions:

From the data above, I was disappointed as an Auror to discover that Professors can potentially get more DPC than me (supposedly being the DPC role), ~50 more per cast. Professors seem to be the strongest profession in terms of damage dealt, and also they have more stamina, so they can even last longer. Magizoologist have the least damage, as expected, but they compensate with the greatest stamina. And, despite not being easy to achieve, they can inflict the strongest single-cast damage possible, with 652 points of damage. Aurors, have the lowest maximum damage of the three professions, but it's more easy for them to get it.

On the other stats shown by the script output, you can see how Magizoologists and Professors rely way more on additional damage from strategic spells and conditional buffs (average_buff_power), and Aurors rely mainly on their critical hits (average_critical_power_value).

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Notes:

This is a very small and homemade research made only from my own game experience and data collected from https://wizardsunite.gamepress.gg/guide/profession-stat-comparison-guide.

I found out that Aurors tend to be more stable and predictable with their damage dealt, as their conditional buffs only depend on stamina and foe type. On the other hand, Magizoologists and Professors may struggle to get all buffs enabled, as some of them need lots of Focus or even (for Professors) aren't easily achievable when playing solo.

However, I wanted to be generous with Professors and Magizoologists, as I know less about their battling style and I didn't want to underestimate them. So the result may be a little bit biased in favour of them.

For example, I counted with the +40 power buff of Magizoologists as being available on every cast and the +150% against elite foes too, but I don't know if that is practically reasonable. Same with Professors' Proficiency charm and Deterioration hex. Please, feel free to suggest improvements based on your play style.

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Update: I updated the results to take into account Accuracy and Defence breach, previously ignored. I also added Proficiency Power to the equation so the numbers represent closer the reality.

Album: https://imgur.com/a/6Ztr3bJ

Hello,
While exploring I found two zones that evidently spawn specific traces but don't have flags within.

I looked for osm tags in this zones and found ones that usually trigger matching flags. In both cases there are game objects where a tag has place.

I am looking for some other examples with this hidden flags if anyone has it.

I've spent weeks puzzling over this but so far I have found a formula that seems to work. Feel free to test it out yourselves and see if you can find a real world example that breaks it.

If you are looking at and S2 L15 cell to determine the inn color in that cell, then start by looking at the 8 adjacent cells that surround it. Add up all the inns in those 8 cells, then divide that number by how many of those 8 cells actually had inns. Take that number (average) and add it to the number of inns in the cell you are examining. If that final number value is 5.0 or less, then the inns are green. If it is greater than 5.0 the inns will be blue (or pink/brown).

I don't have enough examples around me to determine the exact threshold from blue to pink, but feedback from others after the initial post seems to be 5.0-10.0-15.0-20.0

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This image is showing a cell with a new inn (blue) which caused the other 2 inns to change to blue as well.

I applied the formula to the middle four cells in the above image, showing their values and how they were calculated to give an example of how it works. The cell with the changing inn colors had an old value of 4.33 (green) and changed to 5.33 which triggered all of them to become blue (although 2 of them are still shown with the the old colors)

I'm fairly new to the game and I was wondering if I will ever be able to fill my registry for the events that have already happened or will that not be possible for me?

This is only preliminary research, but I couldn't find any other posts on the topic, so decided to post it and see if anyone else can confirm or refute. There is an area near me that has three different colors of inns in a small area. After mapping most of them and trying some different S2 overlays, I found that L15 cells exactly outline the different colors.

For that particular area, when there are 1-2 inns in a L15 cell, they are green. Where there are 3-6 inns, they are blue. Where there are 7 inns, they are pink.

Additionally, while scrolling around my area, I could not find any instances of more than one fortress in an L15 cell, except for sponsored fortresses.

Now, that said, this doesn't include many data points, and the inn color by L15 hypothesis, while it neatly and EXACTLY delineates that particular area, definitely does NOT apply universally, as there's also a couple parks by me, one of which has 4 green inns and a fortress in one of its L15 cells (should be 5 + a fortress, but one POI from PoGo did not transfer over while an Ingress POI not in PoGo did transfer over), the other of which has 2 blue inns in one of its L15 cells. (And a fortress, so it could be 3 POI triggering the color change rather than 3 inns.)

That hypothesis also would not explain brown and purple inns. Perhaps a larger cell's POI density could also modify the list of which inns are available, from pink (1-2), brown (3-6), or purple (7+) up to green (1-2), brown (3-6), or pink (7+).

It will be interesting to see if existing inns change color when new POI are added.

Through this survey, we want to determine what Biomes affect specific spawn. We know that Horned Serpents do NOT apparate in Desert Biomes, but we want to discover other spawn mechanics affected by Biomes. This survey is VERY SIMPLE.

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- Where are you located?

- Check the Traces you have seen for every Family Registry

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We do not ask you to look for your Biome as we are able to determine this information ourselves.

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This survey is a first step in our research process on Biomes. After the results from it, we will do more in-depth research on our end to validate the patterns, and come back to the community with concrete results.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdZFdYMM3jxryXho76_mlUOV95Ie-c8EX0utywp_VAU5tGq9A/viewform?usp=sf_link

Similar to Pokemons attack animations that guarantees a pokeball will bounce right off, I'm wondering if there is a similar mechanic in Wizards Unite. For example, Snape pounding on the side of the bottle or the mountain troll struggling to escape the vines.

By the end of the Fantastic Flora and Fauna event I had 2 or 3 7km portkeys in my inventory that had completed, but had been started. I also had 2/3 Brilliant Snargaluff fragments, hence why I noticed this affect, I only needed one more fragment to finish the entire set.

Fast forward to today, I had one 7km portkey that had still not finished by the time the Potter's Calamity event had started. After playing a bit getting Harries and Hedwigs, the portkey finished. When I opened it, I teleported to the Forbidden Forest and was rewarded some XP and... Harry's School Trunk.

I was caught off guard, I was expecting one thing and got another, I don't have screen shots to 'prove' anything. I do know I have not walked more than 7km today, and I have 1/3 School Trunk and still 2/3 Snargaluff.

So what I am guessing is that the 7km 'event' portkeys are tied to the 'most recent' event, or possibly even current event (I didn't pay attention to if/when a 7km portkey unlocked in between events). This is significantly different than eggs in PoGo, which are 'locked' when picked up, so event eggs keep their hidden contents locked even after the event.

Anyone else notice this? Or experience anything different?

Since the update I'm finding traces being unsuccessful at a much higher rate, causing me to drain spell energy even faster. Anyone else noticed this?

Can anyone, with absolute certainty, confirm that they opened a 2 KM Portkey that lead to Borgin & Burkes?

That would be the last information I would need to conclude my research on Portkeys before unveiling the results.

Hello all,

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My name is Jimmy/BoonSlevin, owner of Jibs Entertainment. I hope this post will not be flagged as self-promotion as the only reason I am posting it is to get help from people dedicated to the game and shredding light on various mysterious mechanics. We have several ongoing research projects on which we would need your help.

- Portkeys

- Spawn mechanics

- Ingredients

- Oddities

- Wizarding Challenges

- and more to be added.

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The link below will take you to the various surveys we have up and going. Please, help us find the answers many are desperately looking for!

https://jibsentertainment.com/2019/06/25/wizards-unite-ongoing-research-projects-we-need-your-help/

Edit 2: Nope. Not a thing. Sorry. You can, however, play a stronger potion at any time, even if you haven't used up all the spells on your weaker potion.

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Edit: Before you go wasting potions, I may have confused this with just replacing a weaker potion with a stronger one instead of stacking. More research will be necessary. I haven't seen an emergency level confoundable yet to confirm. Will repost when I do.

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I think you can stack Exstimulo potions for added benefit? As long as you start with the regular strength potion, you can then add a Strong or a Potent Exstimulo to make the confoundable even easier to defeat.

I had my bar on Professor McGonagall, normally orange due to its Emergency rating, solid green and caught it on my first cast by adding just a regular then Potent potion.

Of course this feels bad if it flees after the first try but you’ll have a better chance at it.

I asked about this the other day, and no one is collecting this information so far. It seems really valuable to me, so I made this Form to get info.

I realized that you can get the information from the final screen of the Portkey, but I also screen-recorded a few to get it more accurately. I'd really appreciate help!

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Here's the link if you want to share it: https://forms.gle/tFDZEoyEuYmEGmc88