PurpleSerpent's Monster Manual Tracker

[PurpleSerpent]

PLEASE NOTE: Development on this tracker has been paused since Update 75, as it appears SSG are no longer maintaining the Monster Manual in its current format (no monsters in Lamordia or subsequent content have been added to the manual). If the tracker can be adapted to fit the new format, if and when that ever materialises, it is likely I will release a new version from scratch both to fix a number of errors in the original document and because the exact workings of the manual are likely to have been altered.

As anyone who's been paying attention to the forum's profile post tab in the last couple of weeks might be aware, with the upcoming server transitions I'm preparing to say a regretful goodbye to my five years of progress on doing my utmost to completely fill out the Monster Manual. A few people might have wondered how exactly I got quite so exact a count of how many entries were available.

Well, during my five-year hunt for every available enemy in DDO, I found myself wishing at a number of points that some sort of tracker tool were available to definitely record my progress The Slayer objectives would be fairly easy, sure - I had a tracker sheet written for that already - but what about the Hunter objectives? What if I then wanted to go a step further, and completely fill out a particular entry?

Alas, such a thing would require a Monster Manual obsessive who'd combed the game thoroughly to track down as many monsters as humanly possible, who was absolutely confident they'd found every entry still available, and was then willing to spend the better part of two weeks manually typing that information into a user-friendly list...

Oh, wait. Hang on.

Presenting PurpleSerpent's Monster Manual Tracker! A handy new tracker tool (read: tricked-out Google Sheet) for anyone with an interest in Monster Manual farming to track their progress on filling out the Hunter and Slayer Objectives and/or collecting the roughly 4400 entries in the full Manual.

The sheet is available in a publically available, but uneditable, form here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...c-t_keMqqw/edit?gid=1129663382#gid=1129663382. In order to set the form to editable mode, you'll need to make a personal copy (this will require a Google account, at least at this time); after you've done so, make sure to check the next post for instructions to initialise the form (this is required for the self-hyperlinking functionality on one of the tabs to work properly.)

Of course, as the Monster Manual gets updated on a fairly frequent basis, occasionally I'll have to update the core document to account for the changes (I intend to do this within a few days of any update that adds new monsters or adds in previously missed ones, although major changes like expansions or new manuals are likely to take a bit longer.) In order to prevent early adopters from having to reset the whole file every time an update releases, I've decided to release modular updates, allowing you to update the file between versions by bolting the extra bits on yourself with a judicious amount of copy-and-pasting. (Or of course, the obliquely mentioned upcoming changes to the Monster Manual may render the whole thing obsolete in a couple of months, making this whole endeavour pointless. Let's... just hope that doesn't happen for now. I spent way too long on this.)

Thanks for taking a look, and incidentally, if you do run into any technical hiccups or entries I managed to miss (quite likely, considering I had to fill in four thousand database rows by hand), do use this thread to let me know!

 

[PurpleSerpent]

Initialising the Tracker
Initialising the tracker isn't too difficult - all it really requires is one usage of Google Sheets' Find and Replace function. Here's what you need to do:
* Find the drive URL of your copy of the file, and copy the section of the URL between the strings "/d/" and "/edit". For example, for my personal copy of the file at URL https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UiynBMaU0bYnfx-HPJ0O3NJt5rQxXX3Z6uncHmouy6k/edit?gid=0#gid=0 , you'd copy the text 1UiynBMaU0bYnfx-HPJ0O3NJt5rQxXX3Z6uncHmouy6k . Paste it somewhere you'll be able to access it easily.
* Copy the following bold text: 1PyvDCJan420ahNZDVOnWZW-3-qvlsWUda9_OI0YFq8g . Load the Google Sheets Find bar with Control + F (Cmd + F on a Mac), and paste that text into the "Find in sheet" bar. Don't search for anything yet - instead, hit the three vertical dots symbol to load the "more options" menu. (If you can't find this text, you might need to search for 1Qhas68sPGJlr4mzSUGmcT7d3GChZFHgvsc-t_keMqqw instead, as it appears Google Sheets changed the hyperlink of the public file at some point.)
* Go back, get the first text you copied, and paste it into the "Replace with" bar. Select "Search all sheets" and check the "Also search within formulae box", then press "Replace all".
* To check the hyperlinks are now working, click any of the hyperlinks in the TypesSearchbar tab. The link should lead to a row in the TypesDatabase tab of your own copy of the document (before this process it would have taken you to the public shared version.)

Updating the tracker
The public tracker is currently on version 1, so there aren't any updates to download yet, but I've effectively figured out how I plan to release updates already - do note however that the following is subject to adjustment if the original plan doesn't come off. Remember to follow this thread to receive notifications when new versions release.
* When updating to a new version of the tracker, first head to your own file's UpdateInstructions tab to find out what version you're currently on. Go to its corresponding row in the public file's UpdateInstructions tab - to update the file to the current version you'll need to follow the instructions on that cell, then go up through the list, following all instructions in order, until you reach the current version.
* Installing new entries into the database is simple - the instructions will direct you to a tab in the public file and give you a range to highlight with your mouse and copy. Afterwards, just paste into the specified cell in your own TypesDatabase tab.
* Occasionally the instructions might need to instruct you to expand your TypesDatabase and TypesSearchbar tab by 1000 rows (with luck this won't be too common, I've left several hundred spare rows in the current version already.) To do so, first go to those tabs, scroll to the bottom and press the button to add 1000 new rows. You'll then need to go to cell F2 in TypesDatabase and increase the number in the formula by 1000 (for an update from 5001 to 6001 rows, you'd replace =SEQUENCE(5000) with =SEQUENCE(6000) , for example.) Next, go to your TypesSearchbar tab, search for the number of rows in TypesDatabase before the update and replace it with the new total (in the example case you'd search for 5001 and replace it with 6001), then click a row near what used to be the bottom of row A, click on the blue dot in the bottom right corner and drag it downwards all the way down to the bottom of the column; finally, after you've done this, go to the TrackerSheet tab and repeat this process there.
* Once you've completely updated your file, copy the contents of the public file's UpdateInstructions tab, delete the values in your own version of that tab and paste in the current version.
* If you're downloading the tracker for the first time in an updated state, you can delete everything except the first five tabs - these will be completely up to date.

 

[The Blonde]

Master of his craft.

 

[PurpleSerpent]

Just a quick update regarding a launch version of the tracker: I've identified a typo on the TrackerSheet page which is stopping the "total kills" value in cell E98 from displaying correctly. If you downloaded the tracker before today and haven't fixed it yet, you'll need to replace the text in the cell with the following bold text: =D98-F98

Similarly, the text in cells F10, F11 and F12, rather than the current numbers, should be =D10-E10, =D11-E11, and =D12-E12, respectively.

These issues has been fixed in the public-facing version of the tracker, so any subsequent downloads will work as intended. (I intend to release version 2 when SSG get round to adding Lamordia to the Manual, as currently every monster in the entire expansion is missing.)

 

[PurpleSerpent]

Another minor update regarding a couple of errors in version 1 of the tracker - the cell for Ravenous in the sheet TypesDatabase is supposed to link to Ravenous the Scorpion, rather than the Ravenous Reveler. I've corrected the error in the public version of the tracker so you can just copy that cell over to your version to fix this issue. The same goes for cell H27 of TrackerSheet - the Hunter target for Forgewraiths is 6, not 16 - and the listed Reward Type for the Volume 0 monster types (these don't actually grant DP for completion, so I've switched the reward type in the public tracker to "None".) Also, cell A58 of TypesDatabase should refer to the Ancient Sentry Ward, not the Animated Sentry Ward. (I also initially left the "u" in Strahd's Armor, Steadfast Armor and Tempered Armor. Force of habit.)

Additionally, Hyrelgas and Wizard Relig are incorrectly marked as rare - this isn't really much of an issue but you can delete the contents of the cell in column D of their rows in TypesDatabase if you want to fix it - and the Summoned Shadow is missing its hyperlink (https://ddowiki.com/page/Summoned_Shadow). Myrthen is also incorrectly marked as rare - this should instead apply to Ordes the Keeper in the row below; the same applies to Yrrgal, who has the "rare" identifier meant for Zheeregh, two cells below. Diyab, meanwhile, should be marked as rare, but isn't. The note on the Alpha Werewolf (saying its Eberron version in the Epic Orchard also counts for its entry) is incorrect, and should be removed.

I appear to have missed the Condemned Deadeye, Spectator, Peron Uthe (mistakenly recorded as missing from the Monstrous Plants) and Locrian (who I'd apparently never managed to fight) from the database entirely - I've added a row for all three at the end of the public table, in rows 4411 to 4413, which you can copy over at the end of your table.

Finally, I've so far found six entries in the table that don't actually exist - the Air Mephit Prince and Guardian of Flame don't appear to have Monster Manual entries any more after U50, the Skeletal Sharpshooter (Army of Eternal Night) and Undead Necromancer (Dryad Grove) no longer have unique entries, and Muckrot and the Darkest Shadow never had entries at all. If you don't care about total available hunter counts, this isn't really relevant - if you do, I suggest you fix the issue by selecting and cutting all the cells in columns A to E below each affected monster's row and pasting the contents into the cell containing the monster's name. (Directly deleting the rows causes problems on TrackerSheet and TypesSearchbar, as the formulas there automatically adjust their ranges.)