About Treasure Maps One of the more exciting ways of creating wealth in this game is by treasure hunting. On rare ocassions monsters will have a treasure map as part of their loot. Fishermen have also been known to get lucky and pull a treasure map out of the bowels of certain monsters of the sea. However all maps are not created equal. Higher level monsters will hold maps for treasure chests that are much more valuable than chests from maps that have been fished up or have been dropped by lesser monsters. But be very wary, every treasure chest will have a fair deal of creatures who will guard the treasure with their lives. As is the case with who drops the map, the higher level maps will have much more formidable guardians than lesser maps. Once you have acquired a map, your first order of business is decoding it. For this you will need the cartography skill. Characters with 0 cartography skill can decode level 1 (Plainly Drawn) treasure maps, they might fail a couple of times, but eventually will get it. This means any character can treasure hunt! But I digress. Once you have successfully decoded a map you need to find a way to get to its location. There are 200 confirmed locations for treasure maps, and they are all numbered out in a very handy guide. This guide can be found following this link. Also, I have found THB_Offline.v1.01.exe located here to be helpful. Most of the prestigious rune libraries in the land include a section for treasure map locations following the numbering on that guide. If you would like to enhance your adventure, you could get a boat or just run to its location. A sextant is a very handy tool to carry along, as it will provide you the exact coordinates of where you're standing, which can be compared to those on the stratics guide. Some other helpful gear to carry on your treasure hunt is a shovel, lockpicks, an axe (any type except war axe) or hatchet, and a container to bring back all your loot in (a pouch, bag, backpack work just fine). So you have found the exact location of a map, now what to do? First you must dismount so you can dig up your trasure. You dig up the chest by double clicking your shovel then targetting the map, and THEN targetting the ground. A common mistakes by unexperienced treasure hunters is failing to target the map after double clicking their shovels. The higher your mining skill, the wider your "dig" radius is. However mining is quite useless if you're using the stratics guide and a properly marked treasure rune library or sextant. (protip: You can double click your shovel, taget the map, and then target the map AGAIN, and it will automatically dig the treasure up if it's on a tile adjacent to you in any direction). As soon as the chest is fully dug out, a small army of monsters will appear. These will need to be taken care of. Keep in mind that treasure chests are locked AND trapped. Lower level chests can be unlocked by using the magic unlock spell with the sufficient magery skill. Higher level chests will require a character with lockpicking to pick the chest. Level 5 chests can only be unlocked by characters with GM lockpicking or 95 lockpicking AND 100 detect hidden skill (not sure about the level required for lvl 6 chests, so if anyone could confirm, it would be greatly appreciated). The chests' trap have been known to kill explorers, so that is why it is highly recommended to use the telekinesis spell on the chest once it is unlocked and before opening it. After disarming the trap, the loot inside the chest is freely lootable to anyone around. Keep in mind that as you remove items from the chest, there is a good chance of spawning more guardians by the chest. There are 6 levels of chests here, which are labled progresively: lvl 1: Plainly drawn lvl 2: Expertly drawn lvl 3: Adeptly drawn lvl 4: Cleverly drawn lvl 5: Deviously drawn lvl 6: Ingeniously drawn When you're done looting the chest, please take the courtesy of using an axe on it to destroy it, as this will allow other treasure hunters who come behind you to dig chests up at that same location. If you fail to do so, your chest will block the location for up to 4 hours. It is important to note, that only the character who dug up the chest can destroy it. TIPS for treasure hunters: Everyone has their own way of doing t-maps, so do not take this as gospel, I'll just share my way of doing them. (1) Template: My suggested build is: cartography, lockpicking, musicianship, provocation, magery, meditation and hiding. Stats: 100 STR, 100 INT, 25 DEX. Of course there are other builds who can t-map successfully. (2) When you start digging, the chest will have 7 "steps" between showing itself breaking ground and being fully dug out. The first of these is very hardly noticeable. This is important, because if you can time this well, you can hide as soon as the chest pops up, and buy a bit of time before the monsters aggro on you. This is particularly helpful in higher level maps where the initial spawn include balrons and poison elementals which can spell immediate death for the digger. It will hardly save you however in lvl 6 t-maps...sometimes you just have to accept your fate. (3) Since you need to dismount, and monsters will spawn immediately with the chest, it is sometimes helpful to order your mount to stay, and casting invisibility on it. This will give you two minutes in which you might spare its life while you can bring it out of hiding and remounting safely. UPDATE: You can start digging and remount before the chest pops up. (4) Once you have unlocked the chest and popped the trap, drop your loot bag next to the chest, open it and place the "open bag" right next to where the "open chest" is. Instead of dragging all the loot from the chest into your backpack, drop it in the loot bag. This will make it faster to loot, as your cursor needs to "travel" less between the loot and the bag, vs. the loot to your backpack. It also helps you not get encumbered (overweight) in case you need to make a hasty retreat from the chest if a large monster spawns. And if you do eventually get over weight, it makes it easier to gate-hop the loot out. (5) Chests have a good amount of guardians left after you're done looting the chest. If you want to "milk" the chest for maximum profit, you can leave the gold in, and pull it out one gp at a time. If you're looting 1 gp at a time constantly for a couple of minutes and no monsters are spawning, you have probably milked it dry and are ready to leave. (6) It is a shame to waste high level treasure maps, so it is highly recomended that if you are not a VERY experienced treasure hunter that you get a group of people together to do lvl 4+ treasure maps. A highly skilled and experieced treasure hunter might even be able to do lvl 5's solo, but lvl 6's are an imposible proposition to do solo.
The gauntlet has been thrown down!!! I dare say.... Impossible??? I will dedicate a forest song from the Village of Paws to the first person who can successfully meet Pirul's challenge!!! (you must hire a bard/artist to record and properly document your victory. or in other words, pics or it didn't happen) (also, a small plug for UOAM UOAM Guide as it is AWESOME for finding treasure in combination with the THB_Offline tool mentioned above)
Can you provide more detail on this? I guess you're dismounting offscreen from the chest, casting invisibility on it, then high-tailing over to the chest to dig it up? Or perhaps you can mount the horse while it (and you) are invisible?
I have not found a way to mount it while it is invised and you're hidden. Personally what I do is park it 2 tiles away from where I'm standing, dig up the treasure, hide, use the 10s cooldown to drag out health bars and think up a strategy (what to provo first and such), then I say all follow me, making the mount break invis when walking 1 step toward me, mount as fast as I can, and start provoing and running for my life. I've done hundreds of maps (mostly on another shard), so I kinda have the timing down fairly well, but the first few times, expect your mount to die and you with it.
One thing to add, with regards to "milking" the chest for all its guardians... I believe when you try to pull an item out, into the air for example, and let it snap back in, that counts as having a chance to spawn a guardian. So you can just do this over and over until you see it stop spawning stuff. No need to pull out one gp at a time.
I did a level 6 solo last night. The monsters included 2 ancient wyrms, 4 shadow wyrms, 5+ balrons, a blood elemental, 3-4 poison elementals, 4 titans. I killed all spawned monsters by myself except for the last Shadow Wyrm which got away. (You cannot provoke that it attack itself!) I didn't document at all - so I'll need to get another map in order to make this accomplishment official. That being said, you may want to begin preparing your forest song!
I shall immediately dedicate my time to draft prose of sufficient splendor to sing of this glorious feat!
if a character decoded a map, can another character dig it up? Or it has to be the character that originally decoded the map.
Nope, you must decode to dig it up. Unless something changed in a recent patch, I got a message saying I couldn't dig because I was not the one who decoded. If another person has already decoded or used magic ID on it, you can decode it again and still dig it up. Also, great guide... only wish I had seen this when I was starting out lol.
As Keza said, the digger has to decode it. It doesn't really matter if it has been decoded by someone else before.
