Archaeology 🦴
The Expedition Site is a special expedition link. See Expeditions for how links work.
Archaeology is a dig-site expedition. You land at a desert excavation camp with two free tools: the Detector, which finds buried fossils, and the Knocker, which warns you about buried explosive charges. Dig fossil fragments out of the staked-out sites, bring four fragments of one animal to the Curator in Blossom Village, and he turns them into a placeable museum mount plus 1,000 gold. There’s no combat involved, and everything you need is supplied at the camp.
Quick reference
| Thing | The rule |
|---|---|
| Dig site size | 7 × 5 × 7 (245 blocks) |
| Fossils per site | Up to two, always in rock (stone or sandstone), only in the bottom three layers |
| Charges per site | Four, visually identical to normal blocks |
| Charge blast | Destroys a 3×3×3 cube, damages through armour, blinds and slows you |
| Fossil recovery | Pickaxe only. A shovel or bare hands destroys the fossil |
| Knocker limit | Two taps per block. A third tap on a warned block sets off the charge |
| Set turn-in | 4 fragments of one animal → museum mount + 1,000 gold at the Curator |
| Animals | Tyrannosaurus, spinosaurus, velociraptor, sabre-toothed tiger, dodo, coelacanth |
The camp
You land at an excavation camp with a tent, a field table, and a supply chest holding everything the dig needs: two Knockers, two Detectors, copper picks and shovels, bread, and the Archaeology Guide with the rules written down. Around the camp, roped off with survey lines, are the dig sites: squares of gravel and stone set in clean sand, seven across and five deep.
What is down there
Each dig site hides, somewhere in its 245 blocks:
- Up to two rare fossils. Finds sit in rock (stone or sandstone), and only in the bottom three layers. Never in sand or gravel.
- Four buried charges. Explosive blocks that look exactly like every block around them. Breaking one destroys a 3×3×3 cube, including any fossil inside it, and takes a good chunk of your health.
Neither the fossils nor the charges have any visual tell. The two tools are how you find one and avoid the other.
The Detector: where to dig
Right-click the ground with it. It detects fossils, and only fossils:
- A slow pulse means the fossil is far away; a quicker pulse means closer.
- Within four blocks the pitch starts climbing, one step for each block closer. The highest note marks the exact block the fossil sits in.
- Silence means there’s nothing to detect: either you’re off the site, or the site’s fossils are already gone. The two cases sound identical.
A few pings from different corners narrow a fossil down to a single column. Then you can sink a shaft down that column instead of clearing the whole site, which is about 40 blocks moved instead of 245.
The Knocker: where not to dig
Right-click a block and it tells you about the danger nearby. A dull knock means settled earth. The other sound means one of the blocks touching that block is a charge. It won’t tell you which neighbour, so the Knocker maps out the danger area without ever pinpointing the charge itself. A charge block answers exactly like the innocent block beside it.
The Knocker itself never breaks anything. It’s the only completely safe way to touch a dig site.
The dig itself
- Shovel the soft stuff. Sand and gravel clear quickly and never hold a fossil.
- Pick the rock, and only with a pick. Rock is the only material fossils sit in, and a pickaxe is the only tool that brings one up intact. If you break a fossil block with a shovel or your hands, the fossil is destroyed for good, and the whole party gets a message about it.
- Sink shafts instead of stripping the site. The sand here doesn’t collapse, so a shaft stays open. Clearing everything means running into every charge in the ground.
- Listen while you work. Rock sounds different from soft ground, and a soft break right next to a charge sounds noticeably wrong.
When both fossils are recovered or destroyed, a message tells everyone the site is spent: nothing left in this ground worth the digging.
When a charge goes off
The blast removes a 3×3×3 cube of the site, damages everyone nearby straight through armour, and briefly blinds and slows you. Any fossil in the cube is destroyed with it.
Charges caught in a blast are destroyed rather than set off in a chain, so one mistake can’t cascade. It costs you a corner of the site, and since every site holds two fossils, that’s a setback rather than a wasted trip.
Beyond the digs
Walk out past the dig sites and you may find the hamlets the first diggers lived in: small reed houses around a common fire, joined by trodden paths. Each one has a hearth by the door, a woven partition, and behind it the household larder. There’s always something to eat in it, and sometimes something better: a piece of the archaeologists’ own decor, a potted plant, a fountain, or a crate of tools, still in storage where somebody left it.
The fossils, and the Curator
Digs turn up set fragments. There are four pieces per animal and six animals to find: tyrannosaurus, spinosaurus, velociraptor, sabre-toothed tiger, dodo and coelacanth. Each set is tinted to match the rock it came out of, so you can identify a fragment by its colour first and its bone shape second.
Bring four pieces of one animal to the Curator in Blossom Village and he trades them for a placeable museum mount and 1,000 gold. He also buys loose fossil finds one at a time, which pays less per fragment than completing a set, but more than any other vendor offers.