Map of important features and regions. We show the X-ray image of the LMC, overlaid with smoothed intensity contours (dark blue) and cyan markers indicating bright compact features: LMC X-1 (plus), SNRs N63A (star), N49 (cross), N132D (triangle), and H II region N11 (diamond). The white lines mark important extended regions, which are used for spectral extraction in Sect. 3.2: X-ray spur (A), SGS LMC 2 (B), 30 Dor (C), X-ray dark region (D), SGS 17 (E), stellar bar (F), southern outskirts (G), and SGS LMC 4 (H); The regions numbered 1 to 3 are used for background extraction.