What are Achievement IDs and how are they useful?

In November 2017, TibiaWiki admins Lee kun and Hunter of Dragoes discovered how to get achievement IDs and use that information to look for tips on undiscovered achievements. But what are these IDs and how are they useful?

A lot of things in the game have IDs. Basically, every type of data in the game has a numerical ID. There are sprite IDs, object IDs, outfit IDs, effects IDs, account IDs, character IDs, etc. Most of these IDs can be checked without any sort of hacking or illegal stuff. It comes as no surprise then that there are also Achievement IDs.

Achievement IDs can be seen on the HTML code of the character page when choosing the Achievements that will be shown on your page. The HTML code can be seen by using the browser’s “Inspect” feature, and each checkbox has its value as the corresponding achievement’s ID, as seen below:

<tr bgcolor="#F1E0C6">
<td align="center"><input type="checkbox" name="achievementlist[]" value="187" checked="checked"></td>
<td><b>Pyromaniac</b><img style="position:absolute;width:44px;height:20px;margin-left:12px;right:3px" src="https://static.tibia.com/images/global/general/achievement-secret-symbol.gif" alt="Tibia Secret Achievement"><br>Love ... fire! So ... shiny! Must ... buuuurrrn!</td>
</tr>

This “value” field is the achievement ID.

The thing about IDs is that they are not random. When creating achievements, the developers assign IDs based on some logical, sequential order. For example, achievements with IDs from 257 to 274 correspond to the many Hive tasks. Not only that, but they are ordered by task. By noticing that, Lee kun and Hunter of Dragoes contacted three top achievement hunters at the time (Firdeso, Mente Brilhante and Enduroman) and asked them to send them the IDs of the achievements they had.

After some find and replace work on the HTML codes, it was possible to obtain the list of all known achievements and their respective IDs. More importantly, the IDs of all missing achievements were discovered. The first thing they noticed was that  Achievement IDs from 183 to 188 are the ones related to Bewitched, with the “exception” of 187, which was missing. Achievement 186 is to use 100 Dry Pieces of Wood. Firdeso also got the idea behind this and tested the now-obvious theory that there was a second achievement for using Dry Pieces of Wood on the fire. It worked, and he confirmed that for Lee and Hunter, and also helped them getting it in gratitude. Pyromaniac was discovered.

Since then, other old achievements have been discovered, but no discovery was dependent on IDs as Pyromaniac was. Nevertheless, IDs are nowadays an important information about achievements, because they allow us to know in which update an achievement was implemented and assume (even if without certainty) what topic the achievement is related to when major updates are released.