Treasure Hunting is finding buried treasure. Get a map, follow it to the burial site, and dig it up! What you'll need: A treasure map A shovel Lockpick(s) A character with enough cartography to decode maps A character with enough lockpicking to unlock the treasure chests A character with enough Magery to recall/gate A character with enough bad-assery to kill monsters What's really nice to have: A character with Grandmaster Item ID A quick note on treasure maps: Treasure maps are an uncommon to rare drop from nearly every monster under the sun. They range from level 1 (easy) to level 6 (turbo difficult). The drop frequency and treasure map difficulty varies from monster to monster, but generally the harder a monster is, the more difficult the map it drops will be. The good news: higher difficulty treasure maps contain more and better treasure than lower level maps. The bad news: they are also guarded by more powerful monsters, they have tougher locks, nastier traps, and they're harder to decode. More on all that in a bit. Here's how you can tell what level of map you're dealing with: Level 1: a plainly drawn treasure map Level 2: an expertly drawn treasure map Level 3: an adeptly drawn treasure map Level 4: a cleverly drawn treasure map Level 5: a deviously drawn treasure map Level 6: an ingeniously drawn treasure map Step 1: Decoding the map To decode a map, your character with cartography double clicks the map. That's it. Really. For real. Your chance to succeed depends upon the map difficulty level and your Cartography skill, however there is no penalty for failing to decode a map. Just keep double clicking. Treasure maps that are 'tattered' have not yet been decoded. Once a map has been decoded, only the decoder can dig up the treasure. If you have enough Cartography skill to decode the map, but just failed on this attempt (keep clicking), you'll get this message: If your Cartography skill is too low and decoding the map is impossible for you, you'll also receive this message: Approximate minimum skill required to decode maps by level: Level 1: 0 Cartography Level 2: 60 Cartography Level 3: 73 Cartography Level 4: 91 Cartography Level 5: 99 Cartography Level 6: 99.2 Cartography (possibly 99.0, need confirmation) Step 2: Locating the dig site In the olden days of yore, this was always the hardest part of treasure hunting. You had to look at the map, figure out what part of the world you were looking at, then go to that location and dig for ages until you found the exact tile the treasure was buried on. Uh, it looks like a walrus humping a panda...? Oh, Serpent's Hold. Right. Not so any more. We now have the power of the Internet! (er, I guess we had the Internet back then too...) There are 200 possible locations your treasure could be buried at. Compare your decoded map against this database: http://uo.stratics.com/thb/info/maparch ... ive1.shtml Once you find an exact match, make a mental note of the corresponding number, and head to your nearest Treasure Hunting library. LesClaypool has a fancy one just west of Moonglow in a tower. Wise has one a screen or two East of the Moonglow bank. There's more out there, but those were the two that paid me advertising revenue. This advertising space for rent, 10K gold per week. Search through the library of runebooks for your treasure hunting number and recall to it. Blam, you're standing right on top of your treasure! You dang kids have it so easy these days! Step 3: Digging up the treasure To dig, double click your shovel and then target your treasure map twice. If you are not within one tile of the treasure, you make a hole in the ground. If you are within one tile of the treasure, your character will start digging like a madman for around 10 seconds. Your treasure chest will be slowly raised out of the ground. Note: Mining skill actually lets you dig up treasure from farther away. You of course don't need Mining as rune libraries lead you to the exact spot; this is just a fun fact. Additional Note: You cannot be standing directly on top of your treasure while digging. The game yells at you if you do this. Last Note, I Promise: Remember the digger has to be the decoder, so you can't just have a cartographer decode the maps and then stay at home. I Lied, Yet Another Note: You cannot be mounted to start digging. This is actually important, because... Step 4: Kill the monsters. Somehow monsters followed you! You really need to stop carrying around monster food in your backpack - they can smell that stuff from miles away. 4+ monsters will immediately spawn when the treasure chest is raised out of the ground. On higher difficulty maps, this means your digger might get eaten. While you must be on foot to start digging, as soon as the digging process starts you can jump back on a horse (thanks Red_Rover!). Another easy way to save your digger is to have a bystander pre-cast Invisibility. As soon as the monsters pop up, make the digger invisible. The digger can even cast Invisibility on themselves when timed right. If your cartographer has nothing to contribute to the fight, they can subsequently hide and just stay AFK until they're needed again. As previously mentioned, the types of monsters you'll face depends on the map difficulty. Here's what you can expect to face: Level 1: Skeletons, Zombies, Headless Ones, Ratmen Level 2: Earth Elementals, Gargoyles, Gazers, Hell Hounds, Orc Magi Level 3: Fire Elementals, Air Elementals, Liches, Ogre Lords, Dread Spiders Level 4: Elder Gazers, Dread Spiders, Lich Lords, Poison Elementals, Daemons Level 5: Poison Elementals, Lich Lords, Blood Elementals, Titans, Balrons Level 6: Ancient Wyrms, Shadow Wyrms, Lich Lords, Blood Elementals, Balrons Step 5: Unlock the chest Double click lockpick, target chest. Yep, lockpicking gets harder and harder the higher the difficulty of your treasure map too. Here's what you'll need in terms of Lockpicking skill: Level 1: 35 Lockpicking Level 2: 77 Lockpicking Level 3: 80 Lockpicking Level 4: 95? Lockpicking Level 5: 100 Lockpicking Level 6: 100 Lockpicking Important Note: Detect Hidden currently grants a 5% passive bonus to Lockpicking on UOR. So GM Detect Hidden gets you +5 lockpicking. This is rather lovely if you're lazy like me, because training Lockpicking to 95.0 is easy, and going from 95.0 to 100.0 is a nightmare and a half. Extra Important Note: This is one of the very rare times in UO where your real skill matters. The bonus applies to your REAL lockpicking skill, not your shown lockpicking skill. So if you have 95.0 shown lockpicking skill, 93.8 real lockpicking skill, and GM Detect Hidden, you will NOT be able to pick a chest that requires 100 skill! Step 6: Trigger the trap Old Captain Blackbeard thought it would be cute to install traps on all his buried treasure chests in an attempt to blow the faces off unsuspecting treasure hunters like you. Luckily, you don't need the Remove Trap skill to foil Old Blackbeard. Stand back and cast Telekenesis on the treasure chest. It will trigger the trap and no one gets hurt, though Captain Blackbeard will be a bit sad. Of course, you could just take it like a man. This pleases Old Captain Blackbeard. Step 7: Loot the chest As you move items around in the chest or take them, monsters will continue to spawn. Tamers excel here, as their dragons can immediately jump on the newly spawned monsters. Bards do not excel here, as they generally need a second target to provoke a monster onto. If you are a bard and are running the treasure chest solo, try leading the monster away from the treasure chest, hide/invis yourself, then come back and spawn another monster so that the first one has a friend to play with. If you're treasure hunting with more than one character, note that you should party up before grabbing your loot. Taking someone else's treasure is a criminal offense. Stealing from dead pirates is OK. Stealing from thieves, apparently, is not. As of patch 41, characters with 100.0 Item ID can use the skill on a container and it will identify every item inside. As the higher level chests often have 20+ magic items, this saves you a lot of tedious clicking and clerical work. You of course don't need 100.0 Item ID to treasure hunt, but it's super nice to have. Here's about what you can expect, in terms of loot: Level 1: 1000 Gold, ~5 Magic Items, ~5 Scrolls, ~10 Gems, ~30 Reagents Level 2: 2000 Gold, ~10 Magic Items, ~10 Scrolls, ~20 Gems, ~40 Reagents Level 3: 3000 Gold, ~25 Magic Items, ~15 Scrolls, ~30 Gems, ~60 Reagents Level 4: 4000 Gold, ~20 Magic Items, ~20 Scrolls, ~40 Gems, ~80 Reagents Level 5: 5000 Gold, ~25 Magic Items, ~30 Scrolls, ~50 Gems, ~100 Reagents Level 6: 10000 Gold, ~30 Magic Items, ~30 Scrolls, ~60 Gems, ~150 Reagents, 3 platinum coins There is a small chance to find a platinum coin in any level of treasure chest. At level 5, there is a 20% chance to get a platinum coin. There is also a small chance to find masks so you can play dress-up. Note: You can use Razor restock agents to quickly loot some types of items. I generally do this for the 8 reagant types, just to speed things up a bit. Simply activate your restock agent and target the chest. Step 8: Clean up shop Finally, you can use an axe on the treasure chest to destroy it. This clears up the spot for anyone else that has a map to the same location. If you recognize Woodsy Owl in the above picture, you are officially old. Though I suppose if you're chopping up a treasure chest and just leaving it out there, that's still polluting. Treasure Hunting Strategies & Character Templates: There are a couple ways to approach treasure hunting. One route is to have an all-in-one character that will do the map decodes, lockpicking, and killing all by themselves. This is nice and lightweight and has no gating involved, unless you have dragons to cart around, of course. You can mow down lower level maps quite quickly with this kind of setup as well. The main downside to this method is you may have to give up Item ID and other combat relevant skills, depending on your build. The initial spawn can be a little harrowing to escape, as well. Another strategy is to run two accounts at once and split the workload - this is my preferred method. For this, you just need any old PvM character (bard or tamer of course preferred) and then your treasure hunter. Once the treasure chest is out of the ground and open, you can leave your treasure hunter hidden and AFK until the dust settles. This method lets you use a complete PvM specialist and its quite safe. And if your treasure hunter dies, eh, they had nothing on them but shovels anyways. The main downside of this method is that it's clunky playing two accounts at once. I have to gate in my treasure hunter; I have to gate out my treasure hunter. It slows things down. (Though two monitors really helps!) You can of course always bring friends along as well. It's a fun bonding experience. Especially when you cast Paralyze instead of Invisibility on your friend as they're digging up the treasure chest. Those spells are really close to each other in the spellbook; an honest mistake! An All-in-one Treasure Hunter Template: Magery Meditation Cartography Lockpicking Musicianship Provocation Item ID / Detect Hidden / Hiding Team Player Treasure Hunter: Cartography Lockpicking Hiding Detect Hidden Item ID Cooking? Begging? Feel free to yell at me and tell me my numbers are wrong. I've been piecing this together from a variety of sources and personal experience.
Re: Treasure Hunting I no longer role play woodsy the environmentally conscious owl, thus no advertising fees should be incurred.
Re: Treasure Hunting Dude, this is an awesome guide!! If you feel there's anything from my guide you'd like to include, feel free to copy/paste and blame it on me. I believe one perfect guide is better than 1 great and 1 so-so one. Great job!!
FYI, you can definitely decode a level 6 map below 99.5 Cartography. I think I did one around 99.2 or so. I'm at 99.3 right now, and have a map I decoded a few days ago. It wouldn't surprise me if you merely need 99.0 skill and a whole lot of patience. This is a very clever trick. I use this as well, for reagents, gems, and weapons/armor (three separate restock agents). Careful though... sometimes you can get a string of monster spawnings like 3 in a row, and be in some hot water. This is one of the many reasons I don't use "Auto-Queue" in the More Options tab of Razor.
Awesome guide! I have dug up many...MANY tmaps and would like to contribute a little more here. This is not the case on this server. I tested it just a few minutes ago with a lvl 1 tmap. I was not partied with the person that decoded the map. I decoded it with one of my miners and then gave it to my thunter and he was able to successfully dig up the treasure. Also, when was still new to this server, I inadvertently purchased a decoded map from a player vendor. I figured I was out the 3k I purchased it for as it was my understanding only the decoder could dig it up. I was pleased when I tried to dig it up and I was able to get the treasure. My next tid-bit is....although you cannot be mounted for the initial, first hit with the shovel, RIGHT after that first hit, you can mount back up and you will continue to dig. And finally my last....if you have magery on the character digging up the treasure, you can start casting Invisibility BEFORE the monsters spawn. In the digging process, there is a point where the the chest is out of the ground, but there is 2-3 seconds before the monsters spawn. During that time, you can start casting Invis. You will hear the last 2-3 dig sounds, and then the monsters will spawn. I personally created an In-Game macro that will Cast Invis->WaitforTarg->TargetSelf. Once you are invis'd, you can grab health bars for all the mobs.
Awesome tips, sir! I will add them to the guide. I thought for sure I tested using another person's decoded map and I couldn't get it to go. Will try again.
See disclaimer! Hehe, that said, 71 shown skill or real? If it is shown, what is your real skill? (is it below 70?)
Just opened one with 77 real skill. So probably 75 lockpick required?! Maybe the lockpick values currently in the guide were with GM Detect Hidden?
Just tested. Anyone can read, re-read a level one map (plainly drawn). From level 2 maps up (expertly drawn).. if you didn't decipher the map (no longer tattered).. you get this message. Love the guide!
LP requirement on lvl4 is higher than 90; I was just trying to do one with 91.2 real and getting the "cannot tell how that lock can be manipulated" message
