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I've currently got two characters, although for now I'm playing almost exclusively on one of them.

One thing I was doing to help level up alternate low-level weapon skills, such as Short Blade (I generally use Long Blade), was to visit the smallest "dungeons" on the map, which are the crypts shown as the darkest red squares on the map. They're useful for leveling low-level fighting skills because their size makes them quick and easy to clear, then you can exit and reenter to reset them and clear them again.

They're also a good source for farming loot, such as weapons, armor, enchanted items (if you're lucky), potions, and ingredients. And specific crypts seem to have specific types of enemies-- although the types apparently change as your character level goes up-- so they can also be a good way to improve your skills with certain enemies, such as Impish, Orcish, etc.

Anyway, while switching between my two characters, I noticed that one character has some crypts on his map that aren't on the other character's map, and vice versa, because they're among the various unknown locations which get added to your map as you find map parchments while looting.

That made me wonder if I can discover specific unknown crypts on my own by traveling overland to the area where they should be. Unfortunately, each square on the map seems to cover a large area, and either the graveyards are too small to be easily stumbled upon that way, or perhaps they don't even exist until they've been added to your map by finding a map parchment.

Does anyone know which of those possibilities is correct? I suppose I could test by trying to discover a much larger site, such as a town that isn't on the map yet-- if there even are any "undiscovered" towns like that in the game.

You can definitely find maps for the "secret hidden locations" of crypts and other types of smaller dungeons, such as ruins, because I find them a lot. This is plain vanilla Daggerfall, whatever the latest official version was before the CompUSA one that added extra quests, with no mods or unofficial patches, and without running under Unity.

From what I can tell by filtering out everything except dungeons, doing a screen capture, then looking at the colors in a paint program, there are four types of dungeons. The smallest are crypts and graveyards, the next up are ruins, and I'm not sure about the second-largest. I find maps to all four types, or at least to the three smallest.

It seems like the largest dungeons (which have an orange marker rather than red) are usually quest locations, and I think they might be added to your map by the quest giver without actually needing to find a map to them.

As for whether or not exiting and reentering a dungeon is "cheating" or "exploiting," I guess that's a matter of personal view. In Arena you can farm a dungeon or house by simply going up and down the stairs, since each floor gets reset whenever you reenter it. To me, it's less a question of whether or not it's an "exploit" so much as it's a question of how boring it is. I know there are similar discussions about hanging around on a particular level of an arcade game and farming respawned enemies for points, rather than getting a high score "legitimately," but I'm not playing Daggerfall in a competition, so it boils down to how much fun it is (or isn't) to keep repeating the same bit of content over and over again. And that is not only acceptable but actually embraced in MMOs where you're "grinding" for something, so I'm not sure why it shoukd be any different here.

But as I said, it's a matter of each player's personal view and preferences.

Thank you! I prefer leveling up my skills manually rather than by training, and for some reason I've been encountering very few Centaurs in my quests, so I might go visit some Centaur-infested locations to help level up that particular skill.

Edit: Oops, apparently Centaurs are known for becoming rare to encounter after Level 11, and I'm already at Level 17.