Buried Treasure

Designing for events is always tricky business. A mixture of content, systems, and crazy; an event requires you to please characters of all levels and design outside the box. I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of this content, and today I’m here to talk about our latest offering; the Buried Treasure event.

The Buried Treasure event tests your mettle in the search for, well, buried treasure! Players will hunt alongside each other to excavate dig-sites in a search for the coveted Huge Treasure Cache. When the event is live, swift travel NPCs will be available in Bree, Michel Delving, Thorin’s Hall, and Celondim to transport you to the Low-lands of Ered Luin to begin your adventure. The event utilizes public instancing to prevent overcrowding, but you can expect to encounter a number of players of all levels in the Treasure Field.

The art of treasure hunting may seem daunting at first, but don’t fret! The dwarves of Ered Luin are willing to train neophytes in the use of a few specialty tools to help you along the way. Upon first arriving, a short introductory quest will guide you through the use of treasure hunter’s picks, dowsing gems, and trained cave-claws. Treasure hunter’s picks are required to excavate a dig-site and can be obtained via repeatable quests and randomly inside dig-sites. They are also available from the LOTRO store.

Having finally perfected a breed docile enough to reduce the dangerously high number of nipping incidents, the dwarves have trained a companion to help sniff out treasure. Trained cave-claws are used in the field and will lead you to the best treasure cache in the vicinity and will reserve the site they discover for you for a period of thirty seconds.

The dwarves are also sharing the ancient art of dowsing, giving players the ability to judge the quality of a dig-site before unearthing it. Dowsing gems are used from your inventory while selecting a dig-site. Using a gem will tell you the quality of a dig-site to prevent you from excavating a disappointing treasure cache.

Both the dowsing gems and trained cave-claws are available from the supply vendor in the Treasure Hunter’s Camp as well as found randomly inside dig-sites.

So what else will we be finding in these dig-sites? Each site will contain a treasure cache of varying size; barter tokens; and the aforementioned chance at a trained cave-claw, dowsing gem and even more treasure hunter’s picks! The treasure cache may contain a unique cosmetic item, housing item, new themed emote or even a mount. The rarity of the item will depend on the size of the cache. Barter tokens can be spent on trained cave-claws, dowsing gems, or saved to be used to purchase unique cosmetic items. Some cosmetic items are exclusive to the treasure caches while others can only be found on the barter vendor.

The treasure hunt is played in rounds, and there are a limited number of dig-sites on the field. Large and medium caches are limited, but there’s only ever one huge cache on the field at a time. A round ends when more than half the dig-sites have been excavated, the huge cache is discovered, or by an hour passing since the last round reset. At the beginning of each round, the dig-sites are reburied at random locations.

You’ll notice that I’ve not called this a festival event. This is because Buried Treasure is seasonally agnostic and will be active periodically throughout the year. This should give you plenty of opportunities to dig for buried treasure or save up your barter tokens for some of the most well-crafted and fun festival rewards to date!

Just how fun is this stuff you ask? Take a look at some of the amazing screenshots and concept art our artists have put together for you.

Good luck and happy hunting!