ESO Antiquities and Scrying Guide: Finding Every Treasure

Digging up old junk is kind of a secret side game in Elder Scrolls Online, and it pays off way more than you'd guess. The Antiquities system turns the whole map into a treasure hunt, with leads pointing you toward buried relics, house furnishings, and some of the strongest single pieces of gear around. It showed up with the Greymoor chapter in 2020 and has only grown since, so it's a reliable way to make gold, decorate a home, or chase down a mythic item.

None of it is hard once the basics click. The flow is always the same too, find a lead, scry it, then dig it up. Here's how each piece fits.

Unlocking the Antiquarian Circle

The Greymoor gate

Before anything else, you need access to the Greymoor chapter, that's the one hard gate. The entire system lives in there, and there's no back door into it. ESO Plus subscribers get the older DLC zones bundled in, so if you've been subscribed a while, Greymoor is probably already sitting open in your Collections tab. If not, that's the one thing you have to pick up before the rest of this guide does you any good.

Finding Verita in Solitude

Head to Solitude in Western Skyrim. The Antiquarian Circle sits right between the Bards College and the Blue Palace, so it's a quick walk from the wayshrine. You'll probably spot a recruitment flyer called "Calling All Antiquarians!" floating around town, and grabbing that points you to the door. You can also just walk in and talk to the scholar inside, a woman named Verita Numida.

Finishing the intro quest

The intro quest is short. Verita hands you the Antiquarian's Eye and asks you to touch it. A little cyan flash later, you're in. Take your vows, and she unlocks the two skill lines you'll lean on for everything from here on out: Scrying and Excavation. Both sit under the World category in your skill menu.

That's really all there is to the setup. The whole thing is account-wide too, so once it's done on one character, your leads and codex progress carry across the rest of your roster.

One thing worth knowing up front. You don't actually need to have unlocked the system to start collecting leads. Killing bosses, looting chests, fishing, all of that can drop a lead into your journal before you ever set foot in Solitude. You just can't use them until the skill lines are active. So if you've been playing a while, you might already have a stack waiting for you.

How Scrying and Excavation Work

Antiquities is basically two mini-games glued together. Scrying narrows down where to look, and excavation is the actual digging. Both feed the same pair of skill lines, and both level up whenever you finish a dig.

The Scrying mini-game

Open your journal and flip to the Antiquities tab. Pick a lead in your current zone, hit scry, and you get a hexagonal grid inside the Antiquarian's Eye. The board is covered in little shape tiles called facets, and six empty spots called Foci sit near the edge. You start from the crystal at the bottom and grow your area of control outward.

The trick is that clicking a facet claims every matching tile touching it, so chains of the same symbol clear in one move. Your job is to reach the Foci. Claim at least one and the scry succeeds, but the more Foci you connect, the fewer candidate dig spots show up on your map. Grab all six and you get exactly one spot to search.

You're working against two limits here. You have a set number of turns, plus a smaller pool of Magicka Charges that power the special scrying skills like Coalescence and Farsight. Claiming two Foci tops off a charge, so smart play basically refunds itself. At rank 9 you also pick up Preemptive Power, which starts the board with an extra row already claimed.

Leads come in five flavors: Simple, Intermediate, Advanced, Master, and Ultimate. Higher tiers mean more facet symbols on the board and tougher puzzles overall, and you can't even attempt them until your Scrying rank is high enough. Each rank of the Antiquarian Insight passive opens the next tier.

The Excavation mini-game

A good scry drops a blue-tinted search area on your map. Ride over there, then use the Antiquarian's Eye from your quickslot. It throws out a comet of light, and you follow the thin tail end to a dirt mound glowing with gold motes. That's your dig site.

Once you start, you're staring at a 10-by-10 grid of dirt. The treasure sits somewhere underneath, and you've got a limited number of actions to get it out. The default is 40 actions, shown on a timer that reads "12h 0mins." That number stays the same at every difficulty. You also need five free inventory slots or the game won't let you begin.

You dig with four tools, and they trade speed against safety:

• Augur pings a square and lights it up by color. Red means the relic is five or more tiles away, orange is three to four, yellow is one to two, and green says it's directly under your pick.
• Hand Brush clears one layer from one tile. Slow, but it can't break the treasure, and it builds the Intuition you spend on the bigger tools.
• Trowel rips three layers off a single tile and costs two Intuition.
• Heavy Shovel strips a layer off a 3-by-3 block, also for two Intuition.

From Advanced difficulty on, the grid is seeded with fissures, little smoke vents that blow up if you dig on top of them. Each blast chips the relic, and every tier has a damage cap before it shatters: six hits on Simple, four on Advanced, and just two on Master and Ultimate. The good news is no part of the treasure ever sits directly under a fissure, so a smoking tile is also a free "not here" clue.

Whatever's left on the timer after the main find is yours to spend on bonus loot, more gold, style materials, and the occasional rune.

Leads, Zone Story Antiquities, and Mythic Items

Leads are the heart of the whole system, and they confuse newer players more than anything else.

What a lead actually is

A lead isn't the reward. It's a hint that some relic exists in a specific zone. Without one, there's nothing to scry. You pick them up from all over: dungeon bosses, world bosses, chests, fishing holes, crafting nodes, daily quests, even random containers. Because every lead has its own drop source, there's no single farm that covers everything. Want a specific mythic? Go do the activities that drop its fragments.

A couple of catches. Leads can drop before you own Greymoor or before you've joined the Circle, they just sit unusable in your journal. They're also quality-locked to your Scrying rank, so a gold lead you find at level 2 is staying greyed out until you've ground the skill up. And leads do run on a timer. Sit on one too long and it wipes, though you can always dig up another from the same source.

Zone story antiquities

Most every zone has a small set of fixed antiquities tied to it, usually one Simple, one Intermediate, and one Advanced find. The Advanced one is a one-time deal. These are the bread-and-butter digs you use to level both skill lines, and a lot of them plug into the zone's story quests, so they're a nice reason to actually read the local lore. Finishing one also unlocks a codex entry written by one of the Circle's scholars, a short flavor note about what you just pulled out of the dirt.

Mythic items

This is where the system pays out for most people. Mythic items are one-piece sets, and a bunch of them are flat-out best-in-slot. You can only wear one at a time, but the payoff is real.

Every mythic is split into five fragments, and each fragment needs its own gold-quality lead. They're all Master difficulty to excavate, which means you need Scrying rank 7 and the Antiquarian Insight IV passive just to scry them. A few also demand extra DLC. The Ring of the Pale Order, for instance, ships with Markarth but still needs Orsinium access for one of its fragment leads.

The effects are what make the grind worth it. Belharza's Band pumps your Light Attack damage by 900 and builds toward a line stun. Death Dealer's Fete stacks up to 30 times, adding 88 to your max Magicka, Stamina, and Health per stack, so you're looking at over 2,600 added to each pool in a long fight. The Harpooner's Wading Kilt cranks both your crit chance and crit damage, which is why it shows up in basically every group DPS build. For solo players, the Ring of the Pale Order heals you whenever you deal damage, at the cost of shutting off healing from your teammates. And if you just want a quality-of-life slot, the Ring of the Wild Hunt is hard to beat for open-world roaming.

Best Traits and Skills to Speed Up Digs

Both skill lines are passive-only, so "build" here really just means which perks to rush first. A few of them shave a ton of time off every dig, and they're worth pointing early.

Scrying skill line priorities

• Antiquarian Insight is the big one. Each rank opens the next difficulty tier, and you can't scry anything above your rank. Push this toward rank V as soon as you can.
• Scrier's Patience hands you extra turns, first one, then two. More turns give you more room to grab Foci, so you end up with smaller search areas and less riding around.
• Future Focus does the same for Magicka Charges. More charges mean more uses of your special skills, and that lets you clear boards faster.
• Coalescence, Dilation, and Farsight are your active board-clears, and each one helps on the tougher tiers. Dilation at rank II is a favorite since it scoops up every connected tile of one type.
• Preemptive Power starts you with a free row claimed. Small thing, but it adds up across hundreds of digs.

Excavation skill line priorities

• Excavator's Reserves bumps your action count from 40 to 45, then to 50. More actions mean more bonus loot, simple as that.
• Keen Eye: Dig Sites lights up mounds from 20 meters away at rank I and 30 at rank II, with a faint hum thrown in. Huge for spotting the site without running laps.
• Augur rank II reads through six layers of dirt instead of three, so you waste fewer actions clearing dirt just to get a reading.
• Hand Brush rank II doubles your Intuition cap to 4, so you bank more fuel for the Trowel and Heavy Shovel.
• Trowel rank II lets you safely set off fissures and start dirt-clearing chain reactions, which is how you pull extra bonus loot fast.

A repeatable dig flow

Once the perks are in place, the loop gets quick. Drop an Augur in the middle of the grid, read the color, then move toward green. Clear the bulk of the dirt with the Heavy Shovel and Trowel, then switch to the Hand Brush once you're close so you don't crack the relic. If you've got Trowel II, line up two fissures at the same depth and pop them for a chain that eats a whole strip of dirt, bonus loot and all.

There's also a neat quirk at the top end. Once both skill lines hit level 10, the game treats Simple and Intermediate digs the same as Advanced ones for excavation purposes. That makes high-level farming way smoother, and it's why the common advice is to camp one zone and burn through its simple digs over and over to power-level early.

Selling and Using Antiquities Rewards

So what do you actually get out of all this dirt? A fair bit, and the rewards split into a few different buckets.

Gold and vendor loot

The bulk of common leads hand you a treasure item that you sell straight to any merchant. It's not glamorous, but it's steady income while you're grinding the skill lines, and the bonus loot you dig up along the way adds gold, style materials, and runes on top. The Indeko runes from bonus loot are worth a mention, excavation is one of the only sources for them outside of trading with other players.

Furnishings and codex entries

A lot of antiquities are furniture for your house, and digging one up adds it to your inventory and unlocks a codex entry. The codex is a short lore note from one of the Circle scholars (Amalien, Gabrielle Benele, Reginus Buca, Ugron gro-Thumog, or Verita Numida), and it's honestly most of the fun if you like the worldbuilding. Finish the full codex on a furnishing antiquity and you can also buy extra copies from the Achievement Furnishing vendor in the zone where you found it.

Styles, motifs, and collectibles

Higher-tier leads tend to drop the fun stuff instead of vendor trash. You can pull ancestral motifs that open up new armor and weapon looks, outfit styles, mementos, and even mounts and pets. The mount and pet ones come as fragments, same as mythics, so you assemble them piece by piece.

Mythic gear

And then there are the mythics, covered above. They take one equipment slot and can't be traded, so the Antiquities system is the only way in. For a lot of builds, one good mythic is worth more than an entire crafted set, which is why people keep coming back to dig even after they've cleared the codex.

Last concrete tip before you head out. The vendors in each zone pay the same flat rate for vendor treasures, but the bonus loot you fish out of higher-tier digs sells for more per piece, so it's usually worth grabbing those extra gold motes before the timer runs out rather than closing the dig the second you see the relic.