Getting Into The Zone

Remember when I said that if I ran out of things to write about, I might start an irregular series on The Zones of EverQuest II? It's time to make good on that threat  promise! The question is... where to begin?

First of all, how many zones are there in the game now? Yeah, like that's an easy question to answer. I suppose I could go round the game and count them. Maybe we could meet back here in a few months?

Or I could look at the wiki. They have lists by various definitions there - level, tier, update and more - and none of them is either complete or up-to-date. The wiki, once transcendent, is fading slowly away.

Still, it's a start. I count 68 outdoor zones on the "By Level" list, which doesn't include the last two expansions so let's say about 75ish. That's way, way more than I'm ever going to cover even if I run this series for the life of the blog. But it isn't even all the outdoor zones, not really.

That count collates the Freeport and Qeynos starting zones into two bundles for a start. And it doesn't include any of the open dungeons, which I'd say count as "zones" rather than "instances", even if they aren't always outdoors. Although some of them are outdoors anyway.

Those are listed separately on the wiki as "Shared Dungeons" and there are 34 of them, a count that stops at the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion, which came out a decade ago. I know shared dungeons have been out of fashion for a while but I'm pretty sure we've seen a couple of new ones since then.

Just sticking to open and shared zones and avoiding any mention of solo, duo, single-group or raid instances then, and the count is already over a hundred. Except that for most of the life of the game the bulk of content has been instanced. 

I'm not about to start counting all of those but maybe one of our friendly AIs could do it for me. That's exactly the kind of thing they're meant to be good at, isn't it? 

I asked Google "How many zones are there in EQII in 2026?" and the AI Overview, which I assume is powered by Gemini, replied instantly

"Based on information leading up to early 2026, EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, with some estimates in previous years exceeding 900, including overland areas, dungeons, and instances."

Previous years? Just how previous? And even at that Gemini wasn't convinced, covering its imaginary backside with the caveat 

"For the most precise number, players typically rely on community-maintained wikis like eq2.fandom.com to track specific zone counts across the numerous expansions."

Well, shoot! That takes me right back to where I started, doesn't it? If I wanted to check the wiki I could have done it myself. I did do it myself! And these things are going to take all our jobs? Something, something, keep a dog, something, something, bark yourself...

How about Co-Pilot, then? Certain bloggers I follow claim Microsoft's AI is better than the rest. Let's give it a chance to prove it. Same question:

"Short answer: EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, and by 2026 the total sits at roughly 867 zones, based on the most complete public listings available. This number comes from the major zone index used by the EQ2 community and continues to grow with each expansion and event update."

Okay, that's a lot more specific. I'll let that fatuous "roughly" slide. It's just trying to pass for human, I guess. A lot of people would give a highly specific number like that and then claim it was approximate. You literally cannot have "roughly" 867 of anything unless you can also count that thing in fractions of a unit, which certainly doesn't apply to zones of Norrath, either before or after the Shattering.

And now here's a twist. I'd finished the post, added the pictures and was about to do the final edit when I noticed Blogger was idling and not updating. The Preview Panel was working normally, showing the complete post with pictures but there were no screenshots in the edit. 

If Blogger fails to update to its cloud servers, it always gives an error message and there hadn't been one so I figured something was glitched locally. I closed the Preview and the Edit and guess what? When I reloaded I'd lost the second half of the post. Everything above the last screenshot was here. Everything below was gone.

Usually I keep a copy of the text outside of Blogger but nothing like this has happened for several years so I'd gotten slack. My bad. Still, it was a pretty short post. I could remember most of it. Just needed to bash the second half out again. 

Only I'd also closed the AI result tabs and apparently Co-Pilot, unlike Gemini, doesn't automatically keep a record of the ongoing conversation, not if you aren't logged in, anyway. I just ran the query in Firefox anonymously and it was as gone as the rest of the post.

Never mind. Easy enough to ask the same question again. I have the exact wording there in the text that didn't vanish. Just need to run it past Co-Pilot again and... get a different answer.

"Short answer: There’s no authoritative public source that states the total number of EverQuest II zones as of 2026. The game has hundreds of zones accumulated over two decades, but no official 2026 count exists. The closest reliable figure comes from large fan-maintained databases."

Hmm. Look at that. The whole very specific, not rough at all, "867" is gone, replaced by the much more wooly "hundreds of zones". And there's a plain statement that "no official count exists".

So where did the 867 come from? Co-Pilot is only to keen to explain:

🧭 What We Can Say with Evidence

📌 1. The largest maintained zone list shows 867 zones

The Fanbyte/ZAM EverQuest II database lists 867 zone entries in its public index. This is the most complete zone list available, though it is not guaranteed to be exhaustive or fully up to date for 2026.

For some reason, Co-Pilot thinks ZAM is the resource most EQII players use. I'm certain that's not true. The ZAM EQII zone database , linked in Co-Pilot's reply, ceased updating with the Age of Discovery expansion, which came out in 2011. No regular EQII player is going there for anything after that.

That "867" number is the count that appears on the first page of ZAM's thirty-five page list of zones, where it warns you you're "Viewing 1 to 25 of 867 entries. You may want to add some filters.". A quick flip through the pages shows quite a few of those "zones" aren't adventure areas at all. The list includes Housing and the Dungeon Maker for a start.

Co-Pilot is happy to build on that shaky foundation all the same:

📘 Best Estimate

If we combine:

• 867 zones listed in the major database (pre‑2026)

• Dozens of new 2024–2026 zones from expansions and updates (e.g., Rage of Cthurath and 2026 map additions)

…it’s reasonable to estimate that EQII has well over 900 zones by 2026, though no source confirms an exact number.

Yes, I guess it is reasonable to assume that, especially given there have been fourteen expansions since ZAM last added any new zones to their database. Not to mention at least twice as many biannual Game Updates.

 

It is interesting that both Gemini and Co-Pilot come up with the same estimate of something over 900 zones, although neither really makes a convincing case for it. Still, it's probably about right. And even if it's not, I sure as heck don't plan on counting them, so I suppose it'll have to do.

 

This wasn't intended to be another post about how flaky AIs can be, even after all the supposed improvements and Great Leaps Forward, but it's always useful to remind ourselves just how unreliable they still are. I do sometimes get sucked into believing the AI summary at the top of the results although for anything that isn't totally trivial. Convenience trumps caution, occasionally.

 

Then again, as this seems to demonstrate, even the trivial is well beyond the AIs. In fact, the more trivial the topic, the worse the information. The problem with the question I posed isn't so much that the AI's can't answer it; it's that it can't be answered. And since AIs don't like to admit when they don't know something...

 

Someone must know, of course. It's not ineffable. I imagine Darkpaw know how many zones there are. Maybe some players do, too. I bet there's someone out there who still keeps a ring-binder file with every map printed out. And speaking of maps, I guess someone at EQ2Map might have a pretty good idea.

 

Whoever does know, they're keeping it to themselves but it doesn't matter much anyway. It's not like I was going to write a post about every last one. I'm not going to live long enough to do that, even I was crazed enough to try.

 

What I'll most likely do is cherry-pick my favorites and the ones I have something to say about. If I get through a couple of dozen I'll be surprised. In fact, since I'm only likely to post at all if I have absolutely nothing better to write about, I guess the fewer I get through, the better.

 

Not to mention so far I've managed two posts about the feature without ever saying a word about any of the actual zones! I wonder how long I could keep that going?

 

I'll try to close that worrisome possibility down by saying here and now that the first post in the as-yet unnamed feature will either be Antonica or The Commonlands. I did think of starting with the old neighborhoods and city-based starting areas or the two major cities, Qeynos and Freeport, themselves but if I went with that idea, I might never get out of the cities at all. 

 

In fact, now I think about it, when I first thought of this project, if I'm going to glorify it with the name, I was in Antonica. So that's where I'm going to begin.

 

When? That's entirely another question.