Can you break open locked treasure chests without failing the quest?

[Pumathang]

I didn't have any lockpicks so I hit the chest until the bar was empty. I didn't destroy the chest - it let me loot the chest and showed the "looting" animation, but rather than displaying the contents when it finished, it just failed the quest. Did I fail the quest automatically because I opened it without using a lockpick? I thought it was okay to brute force locks this way, as long as you didn't destroy it... but maybe treasure quest are an exception? Are you required to use a lockpick in order to get the treasure chest contents?

[seven]

Breaking them open with a pickaxe is the way I usually do them, so no something else happened.

[Crater Creator]

This sounds like a bug as described. The only ways that quest should fail, I think, are if you leave the area, the chest is destroyed, or you manually cancel the quest.

I’ve definitely done these quests where I brute force break open the chest. I know, because I remember complaining about the tedium of having to repetitively hack at the chest right after all the repetitive hacking at blocks to get to it

[Khissi]

There was an issue, back during a18, where the box would sometimes spawn with a void beneath it, and, once opened, and it spawned the second time, it fell and destroyed itself. I would hope that had been fixed, but more information would be helpful, as in... multi player server, or solo.. and did it appear to have any sort of issues under it?

I almost always use an axe to open those locked chests since I can't be arsed to remember to carry lockpicks all the time... lazy bum. But, I've not had anything like this happen since a18.

[Pumathang]

It was a single player pregen01 save created during a19.4... I haven't really figured out how to use the yellow circle to narrow down the location (i.e. which side of the yellow circle to dig on) so I just dig around the area until I find the chest. The yellow circle was still visible (not sure if it eventually disappears once you get "close enough")... but the chest was clearly visible. There was still some dirt next to it on the sides... I was trying to avoid digging out too much dirt and accidentally destroying the chest, but maybe I was supposed to completely clear out the area around it? I never left the area during the time I was digging, either.

I've dug up some merchant chests without issue, but those weren't locked, and I'm not sure whether the chest being locked had anything to do with it, because the chest was definitely intact after breaking the lock, and the quest suddenly failed at the end of the looting process instead of giving me loot.

Most likely it was a bug of some kind... I just wanted to see if it was avoidable or if I should use a different tactic for future treasure quests.

[seven]

The yellow circle tells you the area where the treasure or buried supplies is buried. It can be anywhere inside the circle. As you dig out dirt, the circle will shrink. So, you dig some, there will be a bell sound, then you can look at the circle again and see a smaller area. Sometimes it is buggy and the final circle will be outside of the original circle. There are perks to make the circle smaller, and make it shrink faster with less digging.

Treasure quests are locked and you have to break them open. When you grab the loot, the quest is over. It seems this is the part that bugged for you. Buried supplies quests from the traders are not locked, and you get a package that you must return to the trader. They also spawn a small horde.

[Khissi]

This certainly sounds like what happens when the chest is destroyed in the creation process as you open it. The chest you dug up is ONE type of spawn, but, the one you open will have changed to a chest containing the loot relevant to your game-stage, etc, so, is it possible that it destroyed itself, somehow, once it spawned the loot? It would be a great idea to go to the main TFP forums and put in a bug report because this is NOT how these treasure missions should go.

[Pumathang]

Originally posted by seven:

The yellow circle tells you the area where the treasure or buried supplies is buried. It can be anywhere inside the circle. As you dig out dirt, the circle will shrink. So, you dig some, there will be a bell sound, then you can look at the circle again and see a smaller area. Sometimes it is buggy and the final circle will be outside of the original circle. There are perks to make the circle smaller, and make it shrink faster with less digging.

I get the basic idea, and it's easy enough in the beginning with a horizontal circle on a flat surface, but once you dig out a big hole, you end up with a distorted vertical outline and no indication whether you should be digging on the left or right side of it, so you kind of just have to pick a direction and start digging. I stopped trying to "follow" the circle and just started digging randomly in the area and happened to find the chest right away.

The "getting closer" messages always confuse me, and they seem almost random... I honestly can't tell if it's tied to a certain block or just destroying x number of blocks in the area, but you're not necessarily digging "toward" the chest when you see it displayed, and might even be moving further away if you continue to dig in the direction you were facing at the time the message displays. (Since I knew where the chest was, I didn't keep digging near the yellow area to see if there were more "getting closer" prompts... not sure if that's a factor here or not.)

[Teresa]

You get the "you're getting closer" message every 10 blocks you destroy, which you can improve by perking into treasure hunter.

I consider buried supply/treasure quests as a clay harvesting quest as well. I dig the top layer evenly until the circle shrinks to include all i have dug, then start on the second layer doing the same. Generally i find it on the third layer. Everything is neat and tidy and easy to get out of.

[seven]

Yeah, the getting closer message just means the circle shrunk, not that you're going in the right direction. In early game, I'll dig out in layers like Teresa says. Later, when I can dig faster, I'll just go down 4 blocks in the center, then start digging tunnels in a "+" pattern towards the compass points. When I hit the circle, which does show underground too, I'll go the other direction. I can narrow it down pretty quickly this way. When I find the chest, before opening it I make sure I can get out quick. Don't want those zombies trapping me in the tunnel. I also will have a turret by this time and I leave it guarding the hole I dug down.