Scouting

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Scouting has a chance of occurring whenever a new room is entered or certain Curios are activated, making nearby unexplored areas less risky to traverse.

Effect
When scouting is triggered, nearby rooms and corridors on the minimap will be revealed, showing their contents. Some rooms and corridor segments may not be scouted successfully, their contents remaining hidden. Depending on the successfulness of the scouting, one or more nearby corridors may be scouted.

The January 2016 full release added secret rooms (represented by a star on the minimap) - entrances to which can only be identified through scouting.

Scouting chance
The scouting chance of each character is hidden, but there are ways to enhance it to make scouting events occur more frequently through the use of trinkets (Ancestor's Map being the trinket with the highest scouting increase). Light is also an important factor in determining whether a scouting event will occur, with brighter light giving substantial increases to the scouting chance. To save on torches or if the player wants to maintain a lower light level, it is advisable to raise the light level just before entering a room. Some camping skills can increase scouting chance significantly.

Importance of scouting
Increasing scouting chance can be very beneficial. Knowing what awaits behind the next corner allows to save a great amount of time by skipping empty rooms or unnecessary fights or reaching quest objectives faster. Scouted traps are an easy source of stress heal for heroes with good disarm chance and scouted battles will remove the chance for the party to be surprised.

Scouting is also the (only?) way of identifying secret rooms. These rooms contain significant amounts of valuable treasure, so make scouting valuable regardless of dungeon difficulty. Scouts can also reveal secret rooms in hallways you've already traversed.