A VR metal detecting game built around the signal

What detecting feels like in VR

The detector is the game’s first tool and its whole premise. Sweep the coil low over the ground and it reads the nearest buried thing, showing the signal on a faceplate modelled on a real detector’s: a strength bar, and a target scale where gold and lead deliberately overlap. A strong reading is never a promise. That ambiguity is the point — it is what turns a sweep into a decision.

Every tool is worked with your own hands. You hold the detector, you angle the coil, and when the tone rises you put the pickaxe to the exact spot you marked. Nothing is a button press standing in for the thing itself.

Detect, dig, stow, sell, travel

1. Detect — Sweep the ground. The signal tells you something is there before you break it.
2. Recover — Strike with the pickaxe until the find surfaces and rises to eye level. Each place changes this step — a pan, a sluice, a magnet, a brush, a sand scoop.
3. Stow — Bring the find to your chest. That gesture is what banks it, and the lifetime tally only ever goes up.
4. Spend — Open the marketplace from your wrist anywhere in the world and buy the tools, permits and consumables that open the next kind of ground.
5. Travel — Lifetime recovered value unlocks the next destination. Locked cards on the travel screen show how close you are.

A metal detecting simulator that is not about tedium

Real detecting is hours of nothing punctuated by a heartbeat, and a faithful simulator of that would be unplayable. Buried Worlds VR keeps the heartbeat and compresses the nothing: around two thousand buried items per destination, a signal that means something, and the pace set by you. There is no combat anywhere in the game, no survival pressure and no clock. The tone is calm and curious.

Play seated or standing, teleport or move freely. Meta Horizon Store rates the game’s comfort as Moderate; the seated-play page below says what that means in practice.

Five real places where real treasure was found

Each destination is drawn from a documented find, and each changes the tool in your hand. The places and their history are real. The people you meet are not.

• Ballarat, AustraliaPan and puddle. Open from the start.
• Coloma, CaliforniaSluice and blast. Unlocks at 1,000.
• Carcassonne, FranceFish the wells. Unlocks at 5,000.
• Hoxne, SuffolkBrush the block. Unlocks at 8,000.
• Bolonia, SpainScoop the sand. Unlocks at 12,500.

Read next

• Gold panning in VRThe pan, the sluice and the puddling machine.
• Playing seatedWhat the Moderate comfort rating means here.
• How the game worksThe loop, the travel hub and the unlock order.