Hidden chests

[Chaos]

Why would someone go to the trouble of burying a 100 chests the size of a small cars to hide a rotten mushroom and a tomato? Theories?

[Raggle Fraggles]

For the lolz.

[Icevail]

I'd say the devs, and for lols.

[アンジェル]

I am the one who put arrows into blue chests.

[Rex is back, baby!]

Originally posted by Chaos:

Why would someone go to the trouble of burying a 100 chests the size of a small cars to hide a rotten mushroom and a tomato? Theories?

Well, 200 or so years ago, when the chests were buried, the mushroom and tomato were very rare legendary fruit that were rumored to make any who ate them greatly endowed.

Sadly, Father Time ruins all things, and being carbon-based products, they inevitably expired and by the time our lucky hero finds them, they are a shell of their former selves.

[ManBroCalrissian]

My mom told me once that my great grandpa used to bury apples at harvest wrapped in newspaper and burlap. He would dig them up at Thanksgiving so everyone could have apple pie. The lack of light and the constant temperature kept them pretty fresh. This was obviously before you could just buy apples at the grocery store in November.

Maybe these "Chest Buryers" should wrap their tomatoes and mushrooms in newsprint and burlap

[ACS36]

It's just a feature that wasn't developed beyond it's early implementation. Some developers love to stuff ideas into their games that never really get worked out to their full intent. This happens because developers start to get bored with the project or run out of money.

Conceptually it's a cool idea, but if you don't actually put in the work to make sure it feels good, then stuff like you describe happens. I'd guess the developers wanted to add weight to the world with exploration and make finding cool stuff feel more meaningful, but it becomes problematic when the world is full of empty crates/vases/chests and majority of the good items can be easily obtained from vendors.

In a pen and paper setting, DM's regulate the amount of searching and exploration the players can do. This keeps the game moving along and interesting. A good DM would never allow a player to sit there and shuffle through a bunch of empty crates over the course of many actions, unless it was a very specific scenario involving the story or characters background. Good DM's also consolidate searching spaces and rooms to as few as actions as possible as to not waste the players or parties time with meaningless actions.

The simple reality is the developers for BG3 got the reward to player action ratio all wrong in this game when it comes to exploring spaces.

[Ka-mai19]

The Cabbage dude from AtLA would have saved many of his cabbages if he had preserved some in hidden chests underground, I'll tell you that