Somebody buried a chest, drew a map, and then arranged for something horrible to sit on top of it. You have the map, the shovel, and a worrying amount of optimism.
Monsters drop treasure maps, and a treasure map is a small adventure in a box. Cartography decodes it into a real location. You sail or ride out there, dig with a shovel, and the chest comes up — along with several guardians that spawn specifically to stop you, scaling with how good the map was.
Then the chest fights back on its own. It's locked and it's trapped, which is where Lockpicking and Remove Trap earn their place on the sheet. A trapped chest opened carelessly does real damage, and a chest you can't pick is a chest you carried a shovel across the world for nothing.
What's inside is the best loot-per-minute in Britannia outside of a boss: gold, gems, scrolls, regs, magic gear, and on the high-level maps genuinely rare things. A treasure hunter is a generalist — a bit of digging, a bit of fighting, a bit of lockpicking — and the variety is the whole appeal.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Cartography | 100 | Decodes maps. The skill the entire profession hangs on. |
| Lockpicking | 100 | Opens the chest. A treasure hunter who can't pick locks has a very heavy paperweight. |
| Remove Trap | 100 | Disarms the chest before it takes a chunk out of you. Pairs with Tinkering if you'd rather. |
| Magery | 100 | Travel to dig sites, plus heals and Invisibility when four guardians appear at once. |
| Meditation | 100 | Mana for the Magery half. |
| Mining | 100 | Lets you dig, and it's handy — but this is the flexible slot. See the note below. |
| Wrestling | 100 | Melee defence while the guardians are chewing on you. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
Mining and Wrestling are the two softest lines here. Swap either for Swordsmanship + Tactics if you'd rather fight the guardians properly than survive them, or for Detect Hidden if you want to spot trapped chests more reliably. Treasure hunting rewards a build you've tuned to your own taste.
Both can disarm a chest; Tinkering also makes your own lockpicks and tools, which a treasure hunter gets through steadily. If you're already a tinker, use that and spend these points elsewhere.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
NPC trainers for Cartography, Lockpicking and Magery to 30. Then start hoarding every treasure map you find — you can't use the good ones yet, but you will, and maps don't spoil.
Lockpicking trains beautifully on locked boxes made by a tinker. Get a friendly tinker to make you a stack, put them on the floor at home, and pick them over and over. This is far faster and safer than learning on real chests.
Start digging. Low-level maps have gentle guardians and forgiving traps — exactly what you want while you learn the rhythm: decode, travel, dig, disarm, pick, loot, run. Cartography trains off decoding, so every map is progress.
The guardians get serious and so does the loot. This is where Invisibility stops being a luxury: dig, let the guardians spawn, vanish, and let them wander off before you open the chest at your leisure.
The best maps spawn things that will kill you alone. Bring the family. A high-level chest split between four people is still a better evening than almost anything else on the shard.
Modest kit, and almost all of it is consumable. The real investment is the stack of maps you've been quietly collecting since level one.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| A shovel or pickaxe | Provisioner or blacksmith | For the digging. Carry two; they wear out at the worst time. |
| Lockpicks, lots of them | Tinker, or any provisioner | They break when a pick fails. Fifty is not excessive. |
| A mapmaker's pen | Mage shop or scribe | For decoding. Buy spares. |
| A spellbook, reagents, runebook | Mage shop | Recall to the dig site, heals, and above all Invisibility. |
| 200 bandages | Tailor | Guardians hit, traps hit, and you're a long way from a healer. |
| A tinker's locked boxes | Ask a tinker friend | Not for adventuring — for training Lockpicking at home. The single best training shortcut in this guide. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
Where you grind Lockpicking on tinker boxes. Unglamorous, and it'll save you a week.
Maps come from loot, so every dungeon trip is also map shopping. Dungeons near Britain and Covetous are easy sources.
A great many map locations are out here, and they're less travelled. Mark runes liberally — some dig sites are a long walk from anywhere.
The appeal of the profession: maps send you to corners of the world you'd otherwise never visit. Keep a runebook with spare pages.
Do not learn this skill on real treasure chests. Locked boxes from a tinker, picked repeatedly at home, will take you from 30 to 70 in a fraction of the time and without losing a single chest.
A trapped chest opened without Remove Trap can genuinely kill a mid-level character. Make disarm-then-pick an automatic habit, every single chest, even the small ones.
You don't have to beat the guardians — you have to outlast them. Dig, go invisible, wait for them to lose interest, then loot in peace. This single trick doubles the map level you can handle.
Shovels break, lockpicks snap, pens run out. Nothing is worse than standing on a decoded X with no shovel. Pack doubles of all three.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.