Quick answer: Find Lost Charts guarded by monsters in your maps, bring them to Valerie aboard The Sovereign, then descend in the Bathysphere and place up to 7 Allflame Lanterns to explore safely. Your first Voyage uses a 2×2 grid (4 charts); later Voyages use a 3×3 grid (9 charts) for the real money — corner tiles get two edge bonuses, the center gets none.
- free costs nothing
- cheap small cost
- setup needs preparation
- grind pays off slowly
- skip the thing to stop doing
4 voyage strategies at a glance
| Strategy | What it needs | Main payoff | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Currency corners | Charts with the "50% more Currency" edge modifier in corner slots | Currency drops, stacked from 2 edge bonuses per corner | Easy — just sort charts before placing |
| Scarab stacking | Charts with the "75% more Scarabs" edge modifier | Scarab income to reinvest into Atlas farming | Easy |
| Rare monster density | Charts with "100% increased Rare Monsters" + "Rare Monsters drop Dead Man's Sulphur" | Sulphur for the Allflame Crafting Bench, plus rare-monster loot | Medium — needs your build to clear density safely |
| Chart conservation | Charts with "30% chance not to be consumed" in the center | Keeps your Voyage supply running longer between charting trips | Easy, but weakest direct payoff |
How the league mechanic works, step by step
- Collect Lost Charts from map encounters. Each zone can contain a Lost Charts treasure guarded by Undead, Rival Corsairs or deep-sea creatures. Defeat them to loot a Chart, plus a faction-specific bonus for the rest of the area — the Undead chest, for example, grants a Possessed buff.
- Board The Sovereign and deploy the Bathysphere. Click "Chart Area" while talking to Valerie, or type
/boatin chat from anywhere, and enter the Bathysphere to descend. - Place Allflame Lanterns to explore. The first lantern places automatically; from there, place more at the edge of your oxygen bubble (or let Valerie auto-place them) to push further in. You have up to 7 lanterns per Chart.
- Harvest resources and clear encounters. Luminous Coral (marked by a green glow) gets harvested into Dead Man's Sulphur when a Lantern is placed near it — the fuel for Allflame Crafting. You'll also find Piles of Gold, a Chest of Valuables, and a Message in a Bottle that grants a random item.
- Return before the lanterns fade. Once all 7 Lanterns are placed, they start to flicker and the safe zones begin collapsing — rush back to the Bathysphere or lose what you collected. There's no portal out mid-dive.
- Combine Charts into a Voyage. Your first Voyage uses a 2×2 grid (4 Charts); later Voyages use the full 3×3 grid (9 Charts) once you've gathered enough. Each Chart's connector lines must link to its neighbor.
The Voyage board: corners, edges and the center
Sea creatures on the edges of the 9-tile grid show a modifier that applies to the adjacent tile when hovered — so corner tiles benefit from two edge bonuses each, while the center tile gets none. Known edge bonuses: 50% more Currency found in adjacent areas, Rare Monsters in adjacent areas drop Dead Man's Sulphur, adjacent Charts have a 30% chance not to be consumed when starting a Voyage, 100% increased number of Rare Monsters in adjacent areas, and 75% more Scarabs found in adjacent areas. A Chart's own implicit can affect the whole Voyage or only its adjacent tiles — since adjacent modifiers are generally stronger, put your best adjacent-modifier Chart in the center so its bonus reaches the most tiles around it, and save your strongest edge-bonus Charts for the corners where they stack.
Each Chart area contains an Allflame Capsule (9 total per Voyage) that stores loot in a 5×12 inventory you can't normally carry — useful since you can't portal out mid-Voyage. Find one to call the Bathysphere down when you're ready to leave.
Charts, Treasure Anchors and special modifiers
Chart types include Anchorfield, Diving Shoals, Sea Pillars, Sunken Totems and Undersea Groves, among others — completing nine different types clears the Comprehensive Charting challenge. Anchorfield specifically spawns Treasure Anchors, clusters of reward chests; a Voyage border modifier can add extra Treasure Anchors to an adjacent Chart, which is worth chasing if you're placing Anchorfield charts for loot rather than just variety. Rare Charts, marked by a colored line above their area level, guarantee bonus content — extra treasure chests, Kalguuran Shipments, Abyssal Pits and more.
Allflame Crafting and Ducats
Head below deck to Vesper's Allflame Crafting Bench. Place an item and a crafting currency (Exalted Orb, Orb of Annulment, a Fracturing Orb, and others), and the bench splits the outcome into up to four ghostly previews — pick the one you want to keep, at the cost of Dead Man's Sulphur. More powerful crafts cost more Sulphur. Ducats are a separate currency found only in special Charts, each with a unique effect unavailable anywhere else in the game: Kishara's Ducat acts as a four-way split (stronger than a Black Morrigan's three-way Bestiary split), and Brinehook's Ducat crafts a random Pantheon Aspect Skill onto an item. Several other Ducats exist beyond these two — check what you find in-game, since the full list wasn't confirmed pre-launch.
FAQ
How many charts make a voyage? Your first Voyage uses a 2×2 grid and needs 4 Charts. Every Voyage after that uses the full 3×3 grid and needs 9 Charts.
What are Treasure Anchors in Allflame? Loot-chest clusters that spawn in the Anchorfield chart type specifically. A Voyage border modifier can add extra ones to an adjacent chart, multiplying the reward if you're placing Anchorfield charts deliberately.
What is the Curse of the Allflame league mechanic in Path of Exile 3.29? It's a seafaring mechanic where you find Lost Charts in maps, descend to the ocean floor via Valerie's ship The Sovereign and the Bathysphere, explore with Allflame Lanterns for oxygen, then combine 9 Charts into a large multi-area Voyage for amplified rewards.
How do charts work, and why do I keep drowning? Each Lantern you place creates an oxygen bubble; once all 7 are down, they start to fade and the safe zone collapses. If you're dying underwater, you're likely over-exploring after your last Lantern instead of rushing back to the Bathysphere the moment it starts flickering.
Is Curse of the Allflame worth doing? Yes as a currency and crafting layer — it adds a clear loot loop (Sulphur, Ducats, Voyage modifiers) on top of normal mapping rather than replacing it, and the Allflame Crafting Bench's preview-before-you-commit crafting is a genuine quality-of-life improvement over blind currency use.
Sources
Core mechanic steps (Lost Charts, Bathysphere, 7 Lanterns, Voyage board and edge modifiers, Allflame Crafting, Ducats) verified against Grinding Gear Games' own 3.29.0 patch notes and Maxroll's 3.29 Curse of the Allflame reveal summary. The 2×2-then-3×3 Voyage grid detail and chart-type names are corroborated by AllThings.How's Curse of the Allflame challenge reference.
Read next
- PoE 3.29 Challenge Guide — the Curse of the Allflame league mechanic challenges
- PoE 3.29 Atlas Passive Tree Guide — Atlas progression alongside Voyages
- PoE 3.29 Atlas Anomalies Guide — the other new 3.29 reward layer
Frequently asked
What is the Curse of the Allflame league mechanic in Path of Exile 3.29?
Curse of the Allflame is built from three layers. Allflame encounters appear inside your normal maps and drop charts. Charts are short exploration missions you complete by placing every lantern. Nine completed charts are then loaded onto the Plan your Voyage board to create a single large zone — the voyage — which is where the great majority of the mechanic's rewards come from. You access all of it from the ship, the Sovereign, by typing /boat in chat.
How do charts work in PoE, and why do I keep drowning?
A chart is finished the moment you place your last lantern — that is the only completion condition. Placing the final lantern also starts the extraction, and the bubbles collapse in reverse order: the last lantern you placed collapses first, working back toward the first. Drownings almost always come from laying a long, winding trail and then having to run it backwards through collapsing bubbles. Either keep a few lanterns in reserve to lay a short path home, or place your final lantern right next to the Bathysphere.
Charts do not use map tiers — each one carries an area level (81 and 79 in the examples in this guide) plus a required character level, and slightly under-levelled charts get boosted when you place them on a voyage board.
How many charts does a voyage need, and where should the best one go?
Nine, on a 3×3 grid. Position is the entire game here: a corner slot touches two neighbours, an edge slot three, and the centre slot four. An on-screen note in the source video states the middle slot is "2x as good as any other slot for adjacent" — so your strongest Adjacent Modifier chart belongs in the centre, with high-quantity charts in the slots around it where the rewards will actually spawn.
Adjacent Modifiers do not need paths or borders connecting the charts. Adjacency on this board is purely positional.
Is Curse of the Allflame worth doing?
The in-map Allflame encounters are worth doing unconditionally — they are fast, drop loot and map-long buffs, and they are the only source of charts. Whether the rest is worth it depends on your appetite for planning: charts on their own are modest, and the video's advice is explicitly to rush them rather than loot them carefully. The payoff sits almost entirely in voyages, and a voyage is only as good as the board you built. If you are not going to plan adjacency, you are leaving most of the value on the table.
There is no published loot table for charts; what they drop scales with the quantity, rarity, gold-find and Dead Man's Sulphur modifiers rolled on the chart itself and granted by its neighbours.
What are the best voyage rewards to farm in 3.29?
Four strategies carry the mechanic, and most boards mix them.
- Strongboxes — Arcanist's, Operative's and Diviner's. Centre a chart whose Adjacent Modifier adds several of them; four adjacent zones turns a "four operative strongboxes" modifier into sixteen boxes.
- Golden lanterns — now stack quantity as well as rarity. Stack them at the starting boat so the buffs cover the whole voyage.
- Rare monsters — pair modifiers that add rares with modifiers that make rares drop extra scarabs or Dead Man's Sulphur.
- Dead Man's Sulphur — the steadiest earner, in constant crafting demand and instantly sellable.
The crew you deal with aboard the Sovereign are Valerie, the Corsair, who charts your areas and can identify your whole inventory at once, and Vesper. Prices quoted anywhere in this guide are early-3.29 and decay quickly.
What are Treasure Anchors in Allflame?
Loot-chest clusters that spawn in the Anchorfield chart type specifically. A Voyage border modifier can add extra ones to an adjacent chart, multiplying the reward if you're placing Anchorfield charts deliberately.
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