Opened Treasure Chests and Missing Items
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Destiny of an Emperor, like any other Nintendo game which has been played to death, has revealed some bugs. Unfortunately one of those bugs isn’t quite as cool as duplicating weapons in Destiny of an Emperor II or Final Fantasy IV. If you’ve played Destiny of an Emperor numerous times odds are you have encountered the dreaded ‘opened treasure chests’ bug. If you are going through the game and find a new chest which is already open, you’ve probably just encountered it.
Destiny of an Emperor’s Open Treasure Chests Bug
The open treasure chest bug manifests due to unknown conditions. We’re pretty sure it has something to do with some choices or paths taken earlier in the game, or perhaps it has something to do with the number of random encounters you have fought in prior to a certain point or points. In any case, this bug has been a show stopper for many and has been perhaps the only thing in the game which has turned new players off.
Here are some of the most common instances of this bug:
Here in Guiyang, the final city of Jingzhou where you fought Liu Du, you find a Pang Tong lookalike (he’ll look like someone else in Destiny of an Emperor 2.0) who asks you to ‘search the area around him’. If you search in front of him you are supposed to find a sword. If you run into the open treasure chests glitch at this point you won’t find anything. If you encounter the glitch at this point you will almost always encounter it again later in the Wei caves when getting the magical swords and the halberd.
Here in a Shu cave (in the middle of Liu Zhang’s territory) you are supposed to find the Iron Ore for a blacksmith. With the Iron Ore he hopes to forge some incredible weapons for you. If the opened treasure chests bug manifests here this chest will be empty when you arrive, and you won’t be able to get the Iron Ore! This is worse than it might sound, though. Without the Iron Ore you cannot trigger a necessary storyline event and you cannot even continue playing the game.
This is perhaps the cruelest manifestation of the opened treasure chest bug. You’ve arrived at the end of the game and are looking forward to obtaining the finest weapons available, especially the halberd which is a vital tool in taking down Sima Yi, but when you reach this coveted treasure chest you find it is already open. Imagine our disappointment years ago when we had to complete the game without the halberd or start over from the beginning for a second shot? Fortunately you will know if this is going to happen early in the game because one of the clubs in Dong Zhuo’s territory will be missing and the sword in front of the Pang Tong lookalike will also be gone.
What do I do to fix this?
Fortunately a way to reverse this nasty bug has been discovered. I’m not quite sure who first discovered it, but it gradually started to circulate in discussions whenever this bug came up. All you have to do, according to many people, is fight between 75 and 100 random encounters and the bug will undo itself (and the chests will re-populate). You will commonly hear other numbers, particularly in the smaller range, but we’ll go with the 75 to 100 range as it was offered up by a poor bloke (thechieftain) who has encountered this and reversed it through this strategy numerous times.
If you don’t want to do this, though, restart your game. It isn’t worth the trouble of finding that things aren’t sorting themselves out, and it certainly isn’t worth risking the Iron Ore glitch, or missing out on the finest weapons in the game.
If you do happen to encounter this bug, though, please send me an email. I would like to ask you some questions about it. If you reverse the bug with the technique above please let me know how it turned out and where the bug was encountered.
But good things can happen too?
This glitch doesn’t always cause bad things to happen. Sometimes it can actually re-populate good treasure chests (or rather, items in general) which you have already obtained. People are most familiar with this happening thanks to the recent discovery that you can find Chi Tu Ma twice, but only if you are lucky. All you have to do is return to the beginning of the game at a later point and search in that spot. You might be rewarded with a second Chi Tu Ma!
It is possible to find other treasure chests twice. I have, for example, returned to the cave in Wu and found a second copy of the magical sword there (and it’s one of the good ones, too). Other people have found duplicates of the magical swords. It may be safe to say that most of the items that can vanish thanks to this bug can also be found a second time, though to the best of my knowledge nobody has recovered a second Halberd. Watch out, though. You don’t want to pick up a second Iron Ore or you’ll never be able to get rid of it!
Copyright © 2001–2008 James Peirce