Dinkum

Where to Find Old Keys in Dinkum

So you’ve managed to hit the point where you’re hungry for keys to feed your treasure addiction.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, I’ll go over the best places to get old keys so you can go right back to unlocking treasure rooms and getting treasure maps.

Crab Pots

Crab pots are currently the best sustainable way to get keys, with a 40-50% chance that you’ll get a key after baiting crab pot. Crab pots need to be placed on a two or three deep water tile and then baited with some sort of meat item.

The game’s algorithm will determine based on certain percentages what to fill the crab pot the next day. This algorithm is also dependent on where the pots are. If you place them on an ocean tile, the algorithm will include nearly worthless seashells into the equation. If you place the pots in a river, shells are excluded from the outcome. This should reduce the number of non-keys you get; however, it will likely reduce the overall value of the non-key items you get because being in a river. High value ocean critters like the bay bug and eleven-armed starfish will not be placed in the crab pot and low value freshwater critters like yabbies will fill your pots. There is a chance of a mud crab in rivers, but it’s extremely rare. Critter sale value is a consideration, but if you’re purely after keys, place your pots in the river. You may also want to place a chest/crate/barrel/furniture/cooler next to John’s shop to hold the critters from the crab pots to sell to John.

You’re still going to get at least some thongs/slippers/flip flops regardless of where you place them. People in the Dinkum world seem to lose theirs so often that they wash up in crab pots daily. Just use them to complete NPC clothing requests. Maybe that’s just returning the thongs/slippers/flip flops to their original owners?

So how do you find the meat to bait these crab pots? Hunt roos, raw grub meat from the Undergrove, and drumsticks form bush turkeys are all good sources. Remember, you can stun animals at night with the bat zapper or flashlight and then unalive them rather than chase them down during the day.

Metal Detecting Riverbeds

This one is a bit of a secret and requires the diving helmet to work. The game gives a hint that rivers are rich in resources, but until the diving helmet came out, harvesting those riches was impractical as you’d have to fill in the rivers first and then dig them out to find the tech and amber buried under years of silt and sediment. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The diving helmet now lets you metal detect and unearth the rich resources that lie in the rivers of your town. Simply strap on a dive helmet, grab a shovel, and a metal detector and start walking around metal detecting the riverbed. Note, this only works for rivers/billabongs not ocean tiles and if a water plant is growing on a tile, no tech will be under it, but your metal detector should be fast beeping nonstop on seemingly empty river tiles.

Remember, this isn’t sustainable and once you dig out the tech, relics, and amber from rivers, the game won’t repopulate at the same high rate or possibly ever, but this is a fast way of getting large amounts of tech and keys. Just don’t get eaten by a crocodile in the process.

Trade

Why bother spending the time to find keys when you can just trade for them? Make someone else do the work! The Dinkum Discord has a very lively trading community with traders in various parts of the map, many willing to trade keys for whatever they may need. Some people loathe going to the mines with a fiery passion that would make a knife holding scorned cheated on woman look calm. So, their keys usage is minimal to non-existent. Trading for their keys may be fruitful, especially if you can offer them treasures from the mines. They pay you in keys to go treasure hunting and they get treasures from a place they refuse to visit, and everyone wins!

Some players are desperate for dinks and being rich in keys, solve each other’s problems by trading dinks for keys. You probably don’t want to pay Jimmy’s per key price, but some sort of fair arrangement can be made.

Pro tips

Do not buy from Jimmy. Jimmy is the rogue, unlicensed, unsanctioned, tax evading nomad who sells keys for a whopping 1 million apiece. Do not pay that price as it is ridiculously exorbitant.
In the Undergrove, walk around the treasure room’s exterior to make sure you’re entering from the side that only requires two keys to access the green chest and not three. A key saved is a key earned!

Quarries can provide keys, but the rate that quarries pull up technology and relics via old barrel/wheelie bin is low and the rate of keys within the old barrel/wheelie bin is also low. To get lots of keys from quarries would require hundreds of quarries. This is obviously a huge use of land and time to regularly mine the quarries as well as massive investment of resources.

If you have a good relationship with an NPC, they’ll send you gifts in the mail. This includes on occasion, keys. It’s not often, but it does happen. It won’t make you rich in keys, but it will help add a few over the course of a year. Get to work on better NPCs friendships to ensure you’ll get more keys in the mail.

Keys can be found in the green and blue chests, meaning you must spend keys to get keys, via the Undergrove or the Island Reef.

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