This is an archaeology addon for World of Warcraft. Its main purpose is to serve as a checklist for completed artifacts, but it has evolved over time to have a lot of general purpose archaeology assistance.
Note that starting from version 4, much of the data handling has been separated out into another addon named ExcavatinatorAPI. You will need to install it for Excavatinator to work. It can be found in this repository.
To open Excavatinator, use the slash command /arch. This will open the main
window, where you can see your overall progress for each race. The window is
paginated into the different expansions the archaeology races belong to, and you
can use the arrows at the top to navigate through the expansions.
For each listed race, the left side shows the race's name and icon, and your overall progress (completed artifacts) for that race. Pristine artifacts are counted separately here. The right side shows your active project for that race, with the progress bar filling up as you get fragments. Once you have enough fragments to solve the artifact, the icon will light up and can be clicked to solve it. You can hover over any other part of the race line to see some more information about your completion for that race, and click the same to open the race details window.
The large button at the bottom of the main window is a survey button. You can click it to cast Survey if you are in a digsite.
The crate at the bottom left shows the number of crates in your inventory, with the number of artifacts you can crate in brackets. If you have any artifacts to crate, the crate icon can be clicked to crate one of them.
The arrow next to the close button opens the mini-window. In older versions of Excavatinator this would replace the main window; in this version it is a separate window.
Clicking a race line in the main window opens this window below it. Basic information about the race and your completion of it is shown in the left portion, while the right (main) portion is the race's artifacts. The icons will be lit up for completed artifacts. There will also be a small quest mark on artifacts you have not found the pristine version for (if applicable), as well as a counter for the collector achievements for the Mists artifacts, if you have not completed them. You can hover over any artifact to see more information about it, such as how many times you've completed it (if applicable) and the game's description of it. For rare Legion artifacts this also shows you when they will next be available.
The mini-window is designed to be used for active digging. It has the Survey button, the crate button, and a solve button that changes to whichever race you last got fragments for. At the bottom it has a list of the digsites on the continent you're on.
This version re-introduces minimap tracking. When you make a find at a digsite, Excavatinator remembers it and marks it on your minimap. These marks are only visible while you're in an active digsite - once you finish digging (or leave the digsite), the markings disappear, until the next time you dig in the same digsite.
Excavatinator allows you to shift-click a fragment crate at any archaeology vendor in order to enter a number of crates to purchase, like it was any ordinary stackable commodity. It will then purchase that number of crates over the course of a few seconds.
There is a simple popup that opens up the first time you visit a vendor that this can apply to, telling you about this. I put it in because there is otherwise no visual indication that you can do this now. Don't worry - Excavatinator remembers that you've seen this popup, and won't show it to you a second time.
- Sometimes, when hovering over an artifact icon, the description doesn't load. Hovering over it a second time will show the description.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a designer. I have tried to make Excavatinator acceptably pleasant to look at, particularly with the latest version, but I expect there are others who can do much better, should they want to. If anyone wants to make use of the data processing aspect of Excavatinator and just design a better interface, I wanted that to be possible without needing to load the entire UI of Excavatinator as well.
I may, of course, be getting well ahead of myself in thinking that is something anyone would want to do, but in case someone does - have at it :)