SilverDragon - Rare Scanner
SilverDragon
SilverDragon tracks rares in World of Warcraft. It will try everything possible to notice them and tell you about them.
How does it search?
Vignettes
Those little skull icons you see on the minimap. If one of them is a rare SilverDragon knows about, it'll yell at you.
Targets
If you mouse over or target a rare mob, SilverDragon will notice it.
Nameplates
If you have enemy nameplates turned on, SilverDragon will keep an eye on them to look for the names of known rares.
Macro
SilverDragon can also create a macro to target any rares that are known in the current zone. You can stick this on your actionbars as a button to spam while chasing after a rare, or bind it to a key. This is sort of a last resort.
Chat
Some rares yell in zone chat. If SilverDragon notices those yells, it'll alert you.
How will I know when a rare is seen?
Frame
When a rare appears, SilverDragon will pop up a frame that you can click on to target it.
Warning: If you're in combat, secure action restrictions mean that it won't show up until combat finishes.
Sounds
You can choose from assorted sounds to play when a rare is seen. The sound can loop for a while, to make sure you don't miss it.
There's special settings for rares that drop mounts and world boss rares which you might want to call up a group for. If you're sitting mostly-AFK on a Time-Lost Proto Drake spawn, you probably want the sound that plays to be utterly ridiculous and go on for a good long while, to make sure you don't miss that sucker.
Messages
A notice can be sent to a number of places:
- your scrolling combat text
- your chat frame
- a channel in your chat frame (announcing it to your party, for instance)
- a popup window
- etc
History
A log of seen rares will be shown in a window, so you can easily glance over spawn times.
Other useful things?
Custom mobs
In SilverDragon's options you'll find a "Mobs" section. In the "Always" section, you can add any mob you want to be scanned for. All you need to know is the mob id.
So, let's say you wanted to keep an eye out for Lil Timmy in Stormwind, to buy the kitten he sells. You would…
- Go to his wowhead page.
- Grab his id from the URL. It's
8666. - Enter
8666into the "add" field, and click "okay". - Play with your new kitten.
Yes, this example dates me.
Ignoring mobs
If there's some mob you don't want to hear about for whatever reason, just go to the "Ignore" section of the options. Again, enter the mob's id into the "add" box, then click okay. Bam! You will never again be told that Vern is up.
(Actually, Vern is ignored by default. But you get the idea.)
Alternately, right-click the close button for the popup and that'll ignore it as well.
Syncs
SilverDragon will talk to itself. It can communicate with other copies of itself run by people in your party / guild, and tell you when they see a rare mob. (If there's a group of you camping all the Time-Lost Proto Drake spawns, say…)
You can turn this off completely, if you want to be private about it.
Tooltips
Some rares are part of an achievement. When you mouse over a rare mob, SilverDragon will add to the tooltip whether you've already killed it, so you know whether you need to rush for it.
Broker
SilverDragon includes a Broker plugin. It'll attach itself to the addon compartment and also your minimap, or a Broker container you have installed, and show you a list of the mobs it knows about in the current zone.
Other addons you may find useful
- AppearanceTooltip: integrates with the SilverDragon loot popups and shows transmog-known status.
- ServerRestartSound: plays a sound when the server's about to restart. If you're AFK-camping for a rare spawn, you probably want to know about this.
- ObjectScanner: A few rares are hidden away behind interacting with world-objects like the Edge of Reality. These have to be localized individually, so you need to work out what they're called in your language and set up a watch for tooltips mentioning them. This addon does that bit.
- ButtonBin: a broker display. SilverDragon's minimap icon will show up on it (or any other addon like it) instead of cluttering up your minimap, if you have it installed.
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Posted Sep 15, 2026I think the insane obstructiveness of Blizzard's icons should be dealt with if possible. This rare is completely hidden under the abundance icon and is only visible if you zoom in. I think either some manual tweaks could fix this, or a strata option? That, or if something could be done to nerf Blizzard's icons, that'd also be useful, not just for seeing SilverDragon's icons. This isn't just adundance icons, its also for WQs or any other random huge icon Blizzard loves. Yes, you can turn off icons in the filter, but thats pretty annoying to have to toggle that constantly just to see a few rares you might not even remember could be obstructed.
https://imgur.com/a/E6whhQS
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Posted Sep 15, 2026In reply to yaplaw:
I normally operate on the principle that I shouldn't be interfering with the built-in map information, but I don't mind adding a setting to raise up the frame strata I'm showing icons on. If people opt in to me getting in the way, that satisfies my normal objections.
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Posted Sep 15, 2026Hello, i have a "small" feature request: Target rares directly from spawn-location icons
Would it be possible to add an option where clicking a rare's known spawn-location icon on the minimap/map attempts to target that rare?
For example, if RareScanner shows that Rare X spawns inside a cave/crypt, but the rare hasn't been detected yet because it's out of detection range/behind terrain, clicking its spawn icon could effectively run:
/targetexact Rare X
This would be especially useful for rares that spawn underground or inside buildings. You could target the rare while still outside/above the location, and then RareScanner could detect it normally once the target is acquired.
Basically, I'm imagining the existing "rare spawn location" map icon becoming a "try to target this rare" button, rather than only being informational.
Obviously I'm not sure whether WoW's API/security restrictions would allow this, but if it is possible, I think it would be a really nice QoL feature! 🙂
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Posted Sep 15, 2026In reply to Rayao:
It's a challenge -- it's actually doable, which is why click-targeting works from the popups and from the history window, but it introduces the difficulty of not being able to create the frames that do the targeting during combat. Since opening the map while you're not yet out of combat is fairly common, it'd involve a branching creation of map pins based on the current state, and conveying to the player why this time you can't target the rare from here.
Short-term, look into the existing macro-targeting option. It's set up to do some smart things where it tries to target the closest rares first, so it should work fairly well for the example situations you gave.
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Posted Sep 10, 2026Is there a way to make the colors brighter under "Unique per-mob"? Unless I make the icons huge some are really hard to see for my crap eyes especially on the minimap.
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Posted Sep 10, 2026In reply to viralmessiah:
There isn't at the moment, though I do agree that they wind up a bit muted. I'll take a look and see if I can skew them noticeably brighter.
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Posted Sep 10, 2026In reply to viralmessiah:
Having taken a look at it, I've reworked the colors a bit so they're brighter. There's an alpha going up at the moment with that, and I'll put out a new full release soon.
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Posted Sep 12, 2026In reply to Kemayo:
You're amazing and appreciated my man :)
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Posted Sep 8, 2026Hello. Can I translate the add-on into Russian and provide it to so can play it in Russian? So that the translation remains when updating.
Thank you.
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Posted Sep 10, 2026In reply to igor4ela:
I don't currently have this set up for localization, but I'm not opposed to doing so per-se. I recently redid a bunch of the options, so I'm probably going to let that settle and make sure I'm not going to need to rewrite anything soon which would waste your effort, and then I'll look at actually getting that hooked up.
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Posted Sep 5, 2026I used to be able to Alt click on a rare icon when it pops up to get the Tomtom arrow to point to it. Now it wont' switch. It automatically swaps the arrow to the newest rare or treasure that's popped up. I've turned off the blizzard in game pin it system, because that's just irritating. Is there any way to fix this?
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Posted Sep 5, 2026In reply to cybercatart:
Do you have the "Replace waypoints" setting enabled? (It affects what might be happening when a new one appears.)
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Posted Sep 6, 2026In reply to Kemayo:
I think I turned that off but I'll double check
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Posted Sep 5, 2026In reply to cybercatart:
Actually, I looked through the waypoints code and saw some issues. There's an alpha build going up that may well help you.
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Posted Sep 6, 2026In reply to Kemayo:
Awesome thank ya very much!
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Posted Sep 5, 2026hey all got a question not sure if it was a recent update or something bugged out but ive been roaming MOP for some stuff i missed in mop remix and last week my map showed all rare spawn locations and today its only showing only a few rare spawn locations not sure whats happened or its on my end
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Posted Sep 5, 2026In reply to user_k7bzsenbs6bz4tue:
I changed the default behavior in the last version. It now defaults to showing only rares that still have something you want. If you’d rather switch back to the old behavior it’s in the settings, or just right click the silverdragon icon on the map for quick access.
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Posted Sep 5, 2026@Kemayo i think thats a cool change. but for example in the jade forest i have 1 rare mob that im still missing 1 drop from and its not showing on the map Creature ID 50338 and the item im missing is item ID 87642 could it be because im on a warrior and technically its staff drop or could it be because ive learned the tmog from another item as shown in the att item list ?
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Posted Sep 5, 2026@user_k7bzsenbs6bz4tue There's a few layers to this one. Firstly, the shared zone loot pools for rares weren't a thing I was tracking back in the Pandaria era, so it doesn't actually know about most of the loot. (And my dataminer doesn't pick up the staff even though it *is* a Kor'nas-exclusive drop, because it's also in some of the grab-bags.) Since you've reminded me of this, and I have a whole fancy shared-loot system now that makes this easier, I'll fix that up probably-today.
Next layer is that several default settings might get in the way. In the "General" section, it defaults to showing loot that's for your current character only (it trusts some Blizzard APIs about this, and they are *incredibly* inconsistent between expansions, varying between "this is actually appropriate for your character" and "this could potentially drop for you even though you can't use it"). Then "transmog exact items" defaults off, meaning a shared appearance counts. If you're being a completionist you'd probably want to flip both of those.
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Posted Sep 5, 2026@Kemayo u sir are amazing thanks for the info and keep up the great work on this addon