Atlas Mapping in Full — Waystones, Tablets, and the Fortress
Finishing the campaign opens the Atlas of Worlds, a huge interconnected map where most of your endgame hours — and most of your character’s gear — will come from.
The Atlas isn’t a treadmill you simply keep running, though. You only ever hold three levers: the Waystone that opens a single map, the Tablet that reshapes an entire region, and the route you take across the Atlas itself. This page covers what each one decides and where they feed into each other.
What it takes to open a single map
A Waystone is a consumable that opens a map — but calling it a key undersells it. A Waystone’s tier sets the map’s area level, and area level is simultaneously the monster difficulty and the quality of what drops. Choosing which Waystone to run is really choosing how hard today’s maps are and how well they pay.
Tiers run from 1 to 15 (T1–T15, shown in-game as I–XV).
0.5 added a step in front of all that: a Waystone must be identified before it can be activated in the Map Device. An unidentified Waystone simply won’t go in, so anything you pick up off the floor doesn’t count as stock until it’s been identified. Hoarding an unidentified pile the way you might have in a previous season leaves you with nothing usable at the moment you want to open a map.
Tiers climb on their own, and by hand
There are two ways your Waystone tier goes up.
The first is passive. You start dropping Tier I, higher-level monsters drop the next tier up, and your stock drifts upward on its own. On top of that, Waystones never drop below your current map’s tier. That makes the climb self-sustaining: the higher the maps you run, the higher the Waystones that sustain them, and a tier bracket you’ve reached rarely collapses back down.
The second is manual. The Reforging Bench turns 3 Waystones of the same tier into 1 of the next tier (T1–T14). It’s what you use when the passive climb stalls, or when you’re sitting on a pile of one tier and nothing above it.
Being able to climb isn’t the same as needing to. Area level is difficulty, so pushing into a tier your character can’t handle gets you killed, killing you costs the Waystone, and losing Waystones breaks the sustain loop that was carrying you upward. Raise the tier one step at a time, as your defences catch up — that’s the fastest route in practice.
Going past T15 has exactly one method: use a Vaal Orb on a non-corrupted T15 for a small chance to reach T16. It’s a gamble, and the other outcomes include dropping a tier or having the modifiers randomised, so it’s not something to throw at a Waystone you care about.
How far to roll the modifiers
A Waystone can carry up to 6 modifiers. Pack Size, Item Rarity, and Monster Rarity all raise difficulty and rewards together, so more modifiers is, in principle, a better map.
There’s a catch built into that, though. Rolling to 6 modifiers drops the map to a single portal, which means one death deletes the whole map. Since a heavily rolled Waystone is also the one with the nastiest monsters, the maps you most want to finish are exactly the ones you can lose outright. Go to 6 only with defences you trust; if resistances and Life aren’t there yet, stopping at 5 is the safer habit.
Watch Quality too — it doesn’t add modifiers, it increases the value and effect of the modifiers already on the Waystone.
0.5 gave you one more reason to care. Pack Size and Rarity modifiers on a Waystone now multiply with matching sources on the Atlas tree rather than simply adding to them. In a tree specialised in one direction, dropping a well-rolled Waystone on top of it compounds hard — the deeper the specialisation, the more a single good Waystone is worth.
Tablets change a region, not a map
If a Waystone is a one-map lever, a Tablet is a regional one. A Tablet is slotted into a Tower and applies its effects to every eligible map in that Tower’s radius.
Getting one in place works like this. Clear a Lost Tower map and activate the Precursor Beacon at the end; that drops a Tablet and reveals the surrounding Atlas. From the Atlas screen you can then slot up to 3 Tablets into that Tower. Each one carries 10 charges — roughly ten maps — and is consumed the moment it goes in.
Tablets come in a few flavours:
- Precursor (generic) Tablets — pure reward juice: Item Rarity, Pack Size, Rare and Magic monsters, Gold, Essences, extra chests.
- Mechanic Tablets — bolt Breach, Expedition, Delirium, Ritual, or Abyss onto the maps in radius.
- Overseer Tablets — add Map Bosses. Strong map bosses guarantee a higher-tier Waystone, which makes this the card you play when your Waystone sustain is slipping.
Tablet effects stack. Find a spot where Tower radii overlap and you can run several mechanics in one map, or stack the same mechanic repeatedly and push density as far as it will go. That’s the reason to pick a farming region and deliberately layer Towers over it rather than slotting Tablets wherever you happen to be.
The empty-slot rule added in 0.5 runs against intuition, so it’s worth memorising: an empty Tablet slot adds random league content to the area. Fill every slot and you restrict the region to only those Tablets’ content. Filling slots isn’t automatically an upgrade, and leaving one empty is a legitimate strategy.
One more 0.5 addition: Orbs of Chance can now be used on Tablets. What that actually produces, though, is unconfirmed — whether it upgrades rarity the way it does on items, or resolves differently, isn’t something we found solid grounding for.
Toward the Fortress, by the shortest path
Atlas progression itself is a loop of running maps, killing bosses, revealing the Atlas, and unlocking nearby objectives. The most common early mistake is trying to clear every map you can see — you don’t need to run every map. Path to quest objectives by the route that crosses the fewest maps.
What you’re heading for is the Precursor Fortress. Completing maps inside the fortress is what grants Atlas passives.
Reaching the Pinnacle boss in the fortress tower is where the pace changes completely, because every kill auto-completes a large section of the fortress — roughly 40 maps at once. Nothing you do map-by-map compares, so treat “get to the fortress tower quickly” as the early goal rather than “run lots of maps.”
Steering with Atlas passives
The Atlas passives you collect form a tree that sets the direction of your mapping — leaning hard into specific league mechanics, for instance, to match how you like to farm. Because of the multiplicative scaling described earlier, committing deeply to one direction feels far better than spreading points thinly across several.
In 0.5 a separate Expedition-specific Atlas passive tree was added, letting you tune the difficulty and rewards of Expedition encounters on their own.
The loop, end to end
Those are the parts; here is how they feed each other. Running a tier you can handle pushes your Waystone stock upward on its own, and that stock is what buys you the headroom to run higher. Layering Tablets builds density, density raises Waystone drops, and those drops are what pay for density in the next region.
There is only one place this cycle stalls: the moment stock starts falling. Run a tier your defences can’t hold, or die on a single-portal 6-mod Waystone, and consumption outruns sustain — at which point the loop runs backwards. So the test for raising tier and modifiers isn’t “can I survive this” but “can I run this repeatedly without dying”. Those are not the same tier.