Treasure Hunt Festival Tips and Tricks

I caught this festival at about midnight/1am EST, which is to my knowledge almost right when it started. I also just tried on my wife's Mini. First, let me advise you, dont attempt this during the day. Find a low traffic time, or it is going to take a LOT longer. In the wee morning hours I was against 10-15 people. The rounds lasted about 4-5 minutes until someone found the huge cache. Just now on the wife's mini, the rounds were lucky to last a full minute, with easily 50-75 people hunting for the single Huge Cache that spawned in an area about the size of Archet. However, onto the meat an po-tay-toes.

I should note, first, this guide goes forward with the assumption you are trying for 1 or more of the Mounts first. There are three mounts. A treasure-laden goat, treasure-laden horse, and cave-claw mask horse. All the mounts are 68% speed, 250 morale. The treasure-laden horse/goat also has the cool effect of when they run, gold coins fall out of the treasure/saddle bags. I'll post pics of all 3 mounts and the best pic of the coin effect I can at the end.

I haven't gotten the Cave-claw mask horse, and honestly don't care to.. It looks positively bizzare and demonic. But I do have a pic from the forums. I did this write up this way because, while some of the cosmetics, housing items, and emotes are cool, you can find them as drops from mediums, large, and huge dig sites. I have two jeweler's helms, two wooden cave-claw masks, and a gem inspection emote as well as a treasure-hunters pack all from dig sites. Plus, my level 28 champ now has a 68-250 goat AND horse. There doesn't appear to be a minimum level for this event either.

The first little 'Run here, talk to X, click Y, talk to X. Rinse and repeat' intro quest gives you 10 treasure picks, a caged cave claw and a dowsing gem. You also have two repeatable quests that cooldown every 15 minutes to get the special 'treasure picks' you need. One involves picking five berries scattered around the Training Grounds/Treasure field. In the low population times, this one was VERY cut and dry. In the high pop times, you have people literally sniping from under each other on purpose, and reports of a berry gathering quest taking 1 hour +... This quest is *key* to how I did this festival, as it is the *only* quest to give you a cave claw. The other just involves talking to one person out on the hill or in the Training Grounds and then talking to another person to receive two picks. Keep a weather eye out, and ALWAYS do these quests as soon as they are able to be done. These two quests are the *only* way to get picks after the intro, as the Turbine Store wants 50tp for 1 pick, and 200 for 5. I bought one pick because I found a huge dig site with a cave-claw, not realizing I had 0 picks.

After the intro quest, you run out into a field where there are glowy spots on the ground that you need 1x of the treasure picks to dig at. A dowsing crystal used when you select a dig site will give you a weak to very strong feeling. This is vague, but lets you know approximately the size of the site. A caged cave claw, when used, immeadiately runs to the biggest dig site within 20 meters. You want at least a large generally.

I use the dowsing crystal only if the round is dragging on, and the dig sites are no longer in large or medium clusters and getting spread out. This is because a cave-claw works best when you plop yourself in the midst of 4-5+ dig sites minimum. They go immediately for the biggest dig site within 20 meters of where you release them. The other plus is, once they ID it, it is yours. No one else can dig it. There may be a time limit to this 'hold' on the dig site though. I've not tested that! You do want to pay attention, as once they are released, they move FAST.

The dowsing crystal is much less precise, but still useful because it goes from 'weak' to 'very strong'. The stronger the reading, the bigger the dig site. This is useful in longer rounds, as I said, because the dig sites space out and using the cave-claw becomes a bit wasteful, but the crystal can help you evaluate that one random site way out in the distance.

The Huge Dig sites drop the Huge Treasure cache, which is the size you need for a mount, though it is NOT a guarantee of one. I got two Huge Treasure Caches where I only got 12 treasure coins and 16 coins. The next two gave mounts. Small Dig Sites usually only drop a few treasure coins(all sizes of sites also drop treasure picks), which can be bartered for emotes, cosmetics, housing trophies/decorations, and more. I reccomend mining Large or Huge dig sites, as those drop the cosmetics and emotes more frequently.

5 tokens gets you a caged cave claw or dowsing crystal, so i'd save and spend the barter coins primarily on cave-claws, and keep about 3 or so dowsing crystals on hand, and a minimum of 5(I kept close to 10 if I could) cave claws. Good rule of thumb is, if you hit a Large Site, dig. You'll likely get upwards of 10 coins and some festival gear. Otherwise, most of the 'cool' festival gear is anywhere from a minimum of about 90-300 treasure tokens. Which would go a LONG way towards getting more caveclaws for those awesome mounts.

Better pics coming in just a moment when Photobucket takes my files and uploads them and lets me crop them.



















and a pic courtesy of the LOTRO Fashion Blog ( I think)

Nice post... that's my brotha from anotha motha!

The treasure hunt is over for now ... It was just an unannounced stress test to make sure the event is working properly. I'm cool with that, yay for Ald getting 2 mounts, and Mike for getting at least 1 Well done guys! (now you can stay off the map for the rest of us to hunt next time mwahahah! )

Anyhow, here is more official information for those interested:
(I am not allowed to post a link I guess, so here it is cut and pasted)

Yesterday 04:52 PM #22
Sapience


Re: How long will the Treasure Hunt event last?

Quote Originally Posted by Kazze View Post
I haven't seen an announcement on the timeline of the Treasure Hunt. I checked the forums and the community calendar and did not see any information about it. I am enjoying the event and wondered how long it was going to last.

We made no major announcement about this as we wanted to do a low profile stress type test on it. We did a similar thing for about two hours last time we ran it. This time we wanted to get a feel for how the system behaved over a couple of days.

Quote Originally Posted by Thorcar View Post
Can you do me a favor and extend it until I have a day off on Thursday? Many thanks
Sorry, no can do. It will be back very soon though. I can say that much. It will also be fully announced and it will take place over a weekend the next time we run it. In general, it will usually be a 48 hour event.

Quote Originally Posted by Sthrax View Post
Whether or not it comes back isn't the point... You have to let people know when it is, and how long it is lasting ahead of time.

Something for you all to consider is an in game calender like they use in Star Trek Online. It shows when events occur, often at least a month in advance, and for how long they will last. And for some events, you can click on the event and be transported to its location (not necessarily needed here). The calender is easy to find in-game, so there is never the need to go to the forums and dig around patch notes to see if something is going on.
Something to consider is that we intentionally do not announce things on occasion. Like when we want to get a feel for how a system performs without overloading it by driving a crush of players to it. Especially one we've changed a bit since we last did an unannounced test on it.

Future dates and times will be announced and you'll be made fully aware of what and when.

This event will end tomorrow. Today is the last full day. Any picks, gems, or cave claws you have left over can be stored and used during a future event. As noted previously, this event is intended to be run at various times throughout the year and isn't tied to any other festival, time period, or Holiday. It's just a fun event we can turn on for a couple of days.

Sight bump to update, this event will be taking place this weekend!