Upland Treasure Hunting - Clue Interpretation (Intermediate)

Written By Yudlugar, 15th February 2021.

1. Introduction

• Fill-in-the-Blank Clues. Fill-in-the-blank clues omit certain letters. You might be familiar with this type of clue from the game show Wheel of Fortune—except, in a treasure or scavenger hunt, your clue-solvers won't be done after they figure out the missing letters.
• The Treasure Hunt arcade activity is a minigame on a computer in the treasure house at The Land Of Great Discovery where you have to bounce Blue's Ball to get rid of the bricks and find a scroll while keeping the ball up with the bar. The arcade minigame's engine is a bit similar to WildTangent's Blasterball game series.

What is this guide:

Blue's Clues Joe's Scavenger Hunt Game

Blue's Clues Blue's Big Treasure Hunt Game

May 05, 2021 You found our list of scavenger hunt clues! Scavenger hunt clues are questions, riddles, puzzles, and hints that lead players to objects during scavenger hunts. For example, “if not for me, the birds would live in a hole in a tree” leads treasure hunters to a birdhouse.

This guide will provide an explanation of the treasure hunting clues in the property trading blockchain game Upland and provide Visual aides to help judge distances around the Upland San Francisco Area.

Who is this guide for:

This is aimed at intermediate level players looking to improve on their treasure hunting skills in San Francisco. It is considered that players at this level will have already looked to San Francisco for hunting to maximise returns, and that they are familiar with the basic mechanics of treasure hunting. Those looking to understand the basics of treasure hunting are referred to the excellent video tutorials produced uplanddata.com and Junjunpnoy57:

What will you learn:

The goal here is to give you the necessary understanding of the clue hints and distances involved to bring you to a level where you can regularly obtain Standard treasures within the 3 minute timer and start to be competitive for Limited and Exclusive treasure hunts. If you are already doing this, the information here may be helpful but likely you already have an understanding of it, even if you don’t know it!

2. The clue types

Image credit: Uplanddata.com, reproduced with permission - animated version here

These are the 7 different types of clue arrow which can face one of 8 directions. The ability to accurately (and quickly) interpret these clues are key to a successful hunt. The distances given on the image are approximate and there has been some discussion on the discord servers as to whether they may have been altered recently - for the purposes of this guide they are assumed to be accurate.

The main issue in the interpretation of the clues is being able to judge the distance. There is no distance scale inside the Upland UI and therefore players need to either learn from experience or from an in depth review of google maps. It is convenient to classify the clues into two types:

• Greater than 1km
• Less than 1km

The skill sets for these two types are slightly different - being able to interpret the blue arrows to narrow down an area is one part of the hunt, being able to then utilise the red arrows to get the precise location is another.

3. The Blue Arrows - Distances

Initially my attempt to get a better understanding was to put together a bit of code to draw arcs on the map to show me the locations - this was quite successful in narrowing down the areas in time for the standard hunts but wasn't enough to be competitive on the limited hunts. It does mean I can use it to provide some visual aides on judging the distances - having a reference like this will help to begin with and you will quickly get to pick it up.

For standard hunts, I'd recommend starting either in the centre of the map, or slightly north-east of here. This will decrease the chance of getting a 'useless' clue by narrowing the areas of the 3-10km arcs. For limited hunts, I've taken the approach of targeting a particular hotspot and starting nearby - I'll get onto the hotspots later. So, if we start at the middle of the map, what do the 1, 3 and 10km distance look like?

Here, from the centre point where the blue lines cross:

• Green is 1km
• Red is 3km

The first thing we can see is a >10km clue is unlikely (I have seen a treasure appear on one of the islands off the north coast - very unlikely, and if you do get that clue you can easily hit it in one send)!
So from our first clue we should be able to narrow it down to a reasonably small area - or you could also send to another of your property to get a second arc to visualise the cross section of the two arcs. I quite like to use the north-west or north-east areas:

Here, the orange arc line represents the 10km distance, which does come into play here. Again - this actually provides useful information as the possible region > 10km from the corners of the map is relatively small.

4. The Blue Arrows - Hotspots

In addition to distances, the other useful bit of information to have is hotspots. Uplanddata.com provides a handy treasure map of where the past weeks treasures have been located.

Image Credit: UplandData.com, reproduced with permission

Here Orange are exclusive and Purple are limited treasures. Note - this distribution changes over-time, so you can get an up-to-date version of this image at https://www.uplanddata.com/treasuremap.php.

In addition to this, keep in mind that treasures are more likely to spawn in highly-minted areas. If there are 1-5 properties surrounding by unminted properties, it's unlikely the treasure will be located there. My experience has shown that this applies slightly more to limited/exclusive than it does to standard hunts but is still worth keeping in mind for both.

So - combining the information on the above map, with the approximate arcs showing our distances and looking for highly minted properties, this gives us a good chance to get to the 'Red arrow zone' with 1 or 2 jumps.

In addition, the hotspot map provides a good idea of where to buy properties to help with treasure hunting - you don't need 100s of properties to be competitive, just a smart network of 10-15 properties is more than enough.

5. Red Arrows

Once you reach the red arrows, it's a little harder to provide graphical images - as there are so many areas that it could cover and on the scale needed you would have an atlas.

However, it is worth keeping in mind that one of the 'squares' in Upland when zoomed in is a 3m x 3m size so you can 'count the squares' to get a good idea.
I've generally used a rule of thumb of:

• 50 m = 6 small properties
• 200 m = 3 blocks
• 500 m = 8 blocks

On a standard hunt, once you can get to the red arrow zone relatively quickly you can then spend a bit of time here to try and minimise the sends used and maximising profit. I like to try and click on several properties within my block explorer range to try and better triangulate the location rather than rapidly jumping. In a limited/exclusive hunt there is not as much scope for doing this.

6. Getting Faster

There is no substitute for practice! Common advice is to practice on the standard hunts until you get fast enough - this is fine but I would also recommend looking at standard and exclusive hunts. This is because you can view where the treasure was in the history - so even if you don't send beyond your own properties you can see how close your estimations are to the treasure locations. I would suggest only going after limited or exclusive treasures to begin with if you start with the < 1000 m arrows. I'd also note that currently there is a relatively large disparity between number of hunters at peak and off-peak times, so you may have more success as a beginner during the American night-time.

7. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank EmGi (UplandData) for his kind permission to use some of his images and tools in this article, please consider contributing to support the UplandData site by visiting:

• 275 Steuart St in San Francisco
• 1475 Broadway in NYC
• 171 N Poplar Ave in Fresno

In addition, shout-out to the Upland Discord community who have helped get me up to speed on things in quick-sharp time, if you aren't already a member join here https://discord.gg/z8ej3wq7.
And finally - I would be amiss not to mention the Upland Fan Server and UPX.world, where the treasure hunt 3 minute notifications are a massive boost - check out the premium content which is very reasonably priced and comes with much, much more!

Blue's Treasure Hunt is another two-disc adventure in the world of Blue's Clues. A bug-ahem, TREASURE Bug invites Steve and Blue to the Land of Great Discovery. Instead of simply taking them there, he makes them go find scrolls from the various housemates and some neighbors at the park and school, and find out the favorite treasures of Paprika, Mailbox, and Magenta by playing Blue's Clues (instead of, you know...just asking them). When they finally get to the Land of Great Discovery, the only things they find are a blank landscape that can be decorated with stickers, a sticker creator where you can only save up to one sticker, and a very slow-moving Breakout clone.

Both discs share the same set of resources (the difference being that there are some rooms missing depending on the disc), so the below applies to both discs.

• 2Unused Graphics

Unused Subtitles

Like every Humongous game ever, this game has subtitles with no way to turn them on. However, unlike most games, 'TextOn=1' does not turn them on. They can only be viewed by using ScummVM's UI.

Oddly, they are disabled in the scenes with live-action video.

Unused Graphics

As mentioned above, both discs share the same set of graphics, the exception being disc-exclusive rooms. As such, anything used in only one disc goes unused on the other.

General/Miscellaneous

Sandbox

Kitchen - Refrigerator

School Closet (Disc 2)

Debug Rooms

Warping to Room 58 with ScummVM's debugger brings up an inventory debug screen, with the items depending on what disc and path you're playing. Clicking on an item or clue page places it in the inventory, clicking on a sticker places it in the map, and clicking the big object to the far right doesn't seem to do anything. However, adding a clue page to the inventory removes the item needed to get it, the stickers must be added in order, and the big object can only be selected if all three clues and all three stickers are in the inventory.

Warping to this screen while in the Land of Great Discovery simply brings up a blank screen.