How to complete the homeland robbers task? Search all tiles?

[甜汤]

How to complete the homeland robbers task? Search all tiles?

Are there any skills to improve search efficiency？

[BlankPaper]

Yeah, it's one of the most infuriating tasks to complete as the robbers don't ever leave the forest cover, and don't seem to leave tracks on the overland map until AFTER you've zoomed in on their location. You have to manually zoom into each tile, and look around for human tracks. If they're nearby you also won't be able to exit the area to the overmap, which is a good indicator. You will lose time, sanity, and unless you savescum (rollback your save to when you just accepted the quest), your save file size is going to massively inflate from all the local maps you've visited. The reward is pretty good though (100 squirrel pelts worth of goods), but I think I'll just save myself the effort and skip that one, next time.

[PALU]

There's no smart way to go about it. You have to do a brute force search of all the tiles within the area. For open terrain it's sufficient to zoom in, look both ways, and then zoom out, but with spruce you can miss them using that method.
They're almost always hidden, so trying to look for them from a high place is unlikely to be successful.
A useful tactic when looking for robbers is to have a beggars outfit, i.e. only carry stuff you can do without, so if you encounter the robbers and fail to get away, you can surrender to them and then return equipped with your real stuff and supported by a posse of hirelings, as you now know where they are.

The payment doesn't nearly cover the cost of hiring a posse to deal with the robbers...

[甜汤]

Yeah, it's one of the most infuriating tasks to complete as the robbers don't ever leave the forest cover, and don't seem to leave tracks on the overland map until AFTER you've zoomed in on their location. You have to manually zoom into each tile, and look around for human tracks. If they're nearby you also won't be able to exit the area to the overmap, which is a good indicator. You will lose time, sanity, and unless you savescum (rollback your save to when you just accepted the quest), your save file size is going to massively inflate from all the local maps you've visited. The reward is pretty good though (100 squirrel pelts worth of goods), but I think I'll just save myself the effort and skip that one, next time.

Button 7 seems to be able to clean up some garbage and effectively reduce the archive volume. I found that when the archive is compressed by compression software, it is less than 8m

[甜汤]

There's no smart way to go about it. You have to do a brute force search of all the tiles within the area. For open terrain it's sufficient to zoom in, look both ways, and then zoom out, but with spruce you can miss them using that method.
They're almost always hidden, so trying to look for them from a high place is unlikely to be successful.
A useful tactic when looking for robbers is to have a beggars outfit, i.e. only carry stuff you can do without, so if you encounter the robbers and fail to get away, you can surrender to them and then return equipped with your real stuff and supported by a posse of hirelings, as you now know where they are.

The payment doesn't nearly cover the cost of hiring a posse to deal with the robbers...

I always thought it was because my eyesight was too low to see from the big map...

[甜汤]

Yeah, it's one of the most infuriating tasks to complete as the robbers don't ever leave the forest cover, and don't seem to leave tracks on the overland map until AFTER you've zoomed in on their location. You have to manually zoom into each tile, and look around for human tracks. If they're nearby you also won't be able to exit the area to the overmap, which is a good indicator. You will lose time, sanity, and unless you savescum (rollback your save to when you just accepted the quest), your save file size is going to massively inflate from all the local maps you've visited. The reward is pretty good though (100 squirrel pelts worth of goods), but I think I'll just save myself the effort and skip that one, next time.

Will they stay where they are? If they can move, it is a nightmare

[PALU]

They will essentially stay where they are, i.e. there is an area of a few tiles where there are footprints, and it is possible to follow the footprints until you get near enough for them to home in on you. The crucial thing is to find the first footprints, but once you've done so you can leave, raise a posse, and return to engage them.

[甜汤]

They will essentially stay where they are, i.e. there is an area of a few tiles where there are footprints, and it is possible to follow the footprints until you get near enough for them to home in on you. The crucial thing is to find the first footprints, but once you've done so you can leave, raise a posse, and return to engage them.

When I receive this task for the third time, I will complete it!

[Teellox]

I just completed this the other day, and I agree, it's very tedious to find them.

Luckily they don't seem to leave the quest area. I found their shelter using unconventional means¹, and then followed their footprints from there. They weren't very far away, but "searching for tracks" on the world map didn't reveal anything, so I'm not sure if I would have had the patience or luck to find them otherwise.

¹

Spoiler: show

 I partially reverse-engineered the internal creature structure used by the game, and read their location out of the .CRE file using ghidra.

[BlankPaper]

So I've been trying a new method for these kinds of "needle in a haystack" quests, especially if they're in pine mires or coniferous forests;

I'll be grinding climbing to 100 at the cap of 3 points per day (which is very easy, Climbing really seems to be the easiest skill to raise) and donning some good blunt resistant armor. On each map tile I'll climb the nearest big tree and do a 360. It takes little time, gives great vision over most of the map tile (great for spotting people, animals, shelters, bloodscapes, loop snares - not so much tracks as you need to be within ~10 meters of a set of tracks to see those even with perfect vision and conditions) and your armor will likely be negating most damage from occasional falls that may still happen.

Most objectives end up being very close to the center of search areas, so estimating the center map tile and searching each map tile in a spiral pattern from there looks to have the best chance of success in the shortest time (thanks to Miriel in another thread for pointing me towards that!). Last few quests of that kind I ended up finishing in one or two days using those combined tricks.

Thanks for trying out those "unconventional means", it's good to know that if all else fails, there's always that!