Treasure Hunting

Treasure maps are obtained via Fishing, Dungeon Treasure Chests, Paragon Treasure Chests, and from many higher-end monsters throughout the world.

To decode a map it requires use of the Cartography skill. To dig up a treasure chest, you need a shovel.

There are 5 levels of difficulty for the treasure maps and each requiring higher skill than the other.

When you try to decipher the map, it will give you a general region for where the treasure is buried. Seek out the general region on the map and determine the area. Once you've located the general region/area it is in, you can study the map and it will begin to reveal how close you are from the treasure and give you a direction to travel. Continue to "study" the map until it says that it's nearby.

At this point you can begin using a shovel to dig around and try to find it. When you shovel the ground around you, it will take several tries usually to find the exact spot that the chest is buried. -- Some maps have higher accuracy, and others were drawn by complete drunks and the chest could be drawn a few meters off. :smile: -- Don't give up! Keep trying!

Once you've dug up the treasure, it will spawn locked, and a group of monsters will appear to protect the loot. -- It's your job to kill the monsters and pick the lock in order to get to the loot.

Details

 * You can only have 1 treasure map in your main backpack when attempting to locate/dig them up -- keep others in a pouch, and the one you're working with in your back pack
 * Maps do lose durability and destroy after too many attempts like it does on official-server
 * Treasure chests will decay after 1 hour from being dug up
 * Of the spawned monsters, only Gazers are capable of seeing through Hiding/Stealth/invisibility.
 * Monsters will have a chance to spawn every time you loot an item
 * Treasure chest locations rarely will end up inside of a rock or another unpassable area; we're currently working to improve.
 * Chests are trapped and currently the only way to avoid the damage they deal is to move back and open the chest with the third circle spell Telekinesis.

Map
The original Legends of Aria map is better for treasure hunting, as the maps reveal the original names of areas.

Map Categories
Maps require Cartography to decipher, and each chest needs Lockpicking based on the map's level. Alternatively, Skeleton Keys can be used to open a lock of any level once before breaking.

Mining bonus*
Mining gives an increasing bonus to the search radius of the shovel when looking for treasure. The numbers below illustrate the thresholds at which each increase is gained.


 * 30 Skill: + 1.3
 * 60 Skill: + 4
 * 80 Skill: + 6.6
 * 90 Skill: + 9.3
 * 100 Skill: + 12

As a reference most spells have a 12 tile range. This means GM mining adds a radius of about the size of a screen to the existing radius built into the treasure map. Different level maps will have different base radius.

'' *It is believed that this bonus is bugged and not currently functional. ''

Buggy Treasure Maps
Gorgan posted this in mid 2019:

We have a couple of problems with the built in Citadel Studios treasure map system.

The first problem with the system is that it's using a faulty location-acquisition function. When the server boots up there are several errors that occur. Mainly the problem is because the function is attempting to look at zones that are not available on the current region (due to having maps for other regions).

The second problem is that there are occasionally some maps that players obtain that upon use freeze the server for several seconds, causing a disruption. This is directly related to the same location-acquisition function from the first problem we noticed.

Due to this, it's been discussed previously and planned that we would redesign the system from scratch and use UO-style pre-designed locations for maps. Then the maps would randomly pick from one of these locations. This would require a little work on our part to go around the map and hand-pick locations to be used for this.

In addition, one idea to add to this is that when it picks one of the locations at random, from there it would add a small variation by searching for a nearby (say 15 steps or so) valid location to put the treasure at; so that the maps aren't always at the exact same spot.

Right now the treasure map system looks for and tries to avoid putting treasures at locations where water, towns, or house plots exist. We would make sure that the new system accounts for those things as well, even if it involved blocking house placement at the designated locations.

And yes we are aware that at this time occasionally maps may fail to put the treasure outside of a house plot or Guarded zone, we will improve on this.