Reviresco wrote:I'd like to combine a few and then go find an X on the ground and win a prize, but that's just me.
The way it was done in UO is... (memory is a bit hazy, but roughly speaking) you needed a certain skill to be at least high enough to be able to read the map which showed a kind of rough slightly zoomed out minimap overview of the area it was in with the treasure being exactly in the center, then you needed it to be even higher to be able to actually dig it up...
Depending on what difficulty level of monster you found the map on was the difficulty level of the chest.
So you'd find the area on the map, go there, stand around with your buddies and dig around trying to find where it is, once you found it the chest appeared and so did a lot of monsters depending on what level the map was. The chest was locked and/or trapped depending on the difficulty, and more monsters appeared after opening it and/or unlocking it depending on the difficulty of the map.
Obviously I'm not suggesting we try to get the devs to copy another game exactly, but I think it's useful to look at similar systems and that one was quite fun. Maybe a Salem corollary could have one skill for seeing a minimap overview or prospecting-like arrow or tracking arrow or something like that, which unlocks a more difficult other skill for actually excavating it which everyone who wants to try to help digging would need to have, and maybe there could be an unusual concentration of darkness monsters that would be spawning while attempting the excavation... The closer you get the more frequent the spawns... Something like that?
Could also be done similarly for entrance to a new type of world (maybe a cave, underground ancient native ruins, something like that?) as Planck suggested or some trigger for the initialization of the next expedition as JC suggested rather than simply a chest.