Bolonia

What it feels like

A wide Spanish beach with a Roman town behind it and a wreck out on the sand. The beach is deliberately kept clear of anything modern — no umbrellas, no dressing, nothing to place it in this century. The sea is the whole mood, and the tide turns exactly once. The seabed keeps its own colour below the old waterline, so when the water pulls back you can read where it used to be.

There is no pickaxe on this beach. Everything is dug with a hand sand scoop, pushed mouth-first into the sand with real speed, and that single change is what makes Bolonia feel like a different game rather than a new skin.

The expedition: Secret of the Tides

The most structured expedition in the game, in six beats, in order.

1. High tide — Free prospecting along the storm line. The beach is banded rather than uniform — a storm line, a dune edge and a wet wreck line — each carrying its own character of find.
2. The amphora — Four shell fragments come out of the sand at the wreck and snap into a half-buried base. They go in by shape, not by the order you found them, so each fragment fits only its own place.
3. The tide turns — The fourth fragment triggers it. Over about six seconds the sea draws offshore and slightly down, a ribbon of wet sand is uncovered, the surf changes its voice, and the boundary of the world moves out with the water.
4. The fisher crab — An oversized crab idles near the wreck at low tide, and fish lie stranded and flopping on the new wet sand. Feed it one, and it leads you across the beach — waiting whenever you fall behind — then digs at the sand where it stops.
5. The merchant coffer — Three scooped loads at that spot bring up a bronze-bound coffer at chest height. One large, forgiving latch opens it.
6. The colonnade — Five broken columns on the citadel plaza, and nine pieces lying visible around the site. No burial and no detector for this one. Bases, shafts and capitals are interchangeable within their kind, and each stack builds from the bottom up.

The colonnade pays the most: eight aurei and twenty-two ancient silver pieces across the five restored columns, around 1,840. The coffer adds another 535. The amphora fragments and the column pieces are themselves worth nothing, which is the point of them.

On the side

Free prospecting

Around 2,200 buried items along the storm line, the dune edge and the wreck, worth roughly 20,500 in all — the second richest destination in the game.

The real place

Baelo Claudia was a Roman town on the Strait of Gibraltar, built on salted fish and the garum trade, and its ruins still stand above the beach at Bolonia. The place and its history are real. The wreck, the crab and the people you meet are not.