Not sure the best way of doing this though.

The only way that I can figured to do that would be to either have a "Zone Note" placed on the World Map in a given zone or have a ! icon over the quest turn in NPC indicating a quest that can be obtained via a drop.

Quest starts from items are stored in the Item_template.startquest field. From there you have to look up the groups for this item in the various *_loot_template tables (find everyone/everything using the loot-group the item is contained in, including other loot-groups). And after that you need to look up spawns for the creature/gameobject using the loot-group (I don't think there are items dropped by items which start quests, but haven't looked).

With this information you can place the icon on the NPC dropping the item.

I've been experimenting in this area in my fork. Here's what I have going so far:
Captain Sander's Hidden Treasure (which is actually simply listed as a monster with specific locations) looks like this:

The Unsent Letter starts from an item called An Unsent Letter dropped by Edwin VanCleef, whose location is listed as Westfall at the entrance to Deadmines. Looks like this:

The Key to Freedom is listed as startedType "item" startedBy "Grimeslit Outhouse Key" which drops of various mobs in Searing Gorge. Looks like this, with several duplicate exclamation marks:

I'll keep this thread updated with any progress I make.

Just managed to add "Dropped by:" to the tooltip :)

@Muehe I just found a quest-starting item which is dropped by an item. "Target: Hive'Ashi Workers" is started by "Combat Task Briefing III" which is randomly contained in "Hive'Ashi Dossier".

another one for the list if a system will ever be made :)

Container: https://classic.wowhead.com/object=2560/half-buried-bottle#contains -->
Quest starter: https://classic.wowhead.com/item=4098/carefully-folded-note#starts

Hey @AeroScripts,

Questie seems to have this functionality, mostly. Adding containers and drops to the corrections file seems to work OK. Is this still relevant or can it be closed?

@Gogo1951 This is still relevant, because we don't show quests that are started by item drops. Meaning there is no way to see which mobs drop an item that starts a quest. Also related to #1616

Hey @BreakBB ,

Got it, and I can see it's not easy to make a ton of changes to the data to support all this.

What if we added a Zone Quest List that we could manually define and add some notes around, and a Zone Notes spot for text notes, and then stuck those on the zone map? Sort of like this.

If you like this approach, I can work to create the list of quests for each zone, as well as the notes for what to bring. Cheers!

I personally see that it as a great idea! I will let the others know and report back :)