Quests

There are 21 treasure hunts in Yara and every one of them is marked with a purple diamond on your map. None are missable and none need unlocking. Which means finding them was never the problem, and a guide sorted by region just repeats what the map already shows you.

So this page is sorted by the kind of lock standing between you and the chest. Six families, running from the ones you cannot really fail to the one that spans two separate sites and a chain of keys, which makes it a difficulty ramp as well as an index. If you are stuck right now, find your hunt in the table below and the fourth column tells you what you are missing.

All 21 hunts at a glance

What to bring

There is nothing to unlock, but the 21 descriptions repeatedly demand the same handful of things, and turning up without them is what turns a fifteen-minute hunt into an hour.

• The grappling hook. Six of the 21 are unfinishable without it, including both Triada relic hunts that end in a swing, La Princesa, Crocodile Tears and Liquid Courage.
• Grenades. High Supply blocks the route up with rock that has to be blown.
• A gun you can shoot a lock with through a gap. The Long Drop, Parting Gifts and Sweet Fifteen all hide a door behind a window, a fan grille or a wall.
• A vehicle you can call. The Emerald Skull begins with a long drive, and Parting Gifts needs a truck to tow a generator.
• A tolerance for swimming with things that bite. A Rising Tide has sharks under the dock and La Princesa has jellyfish in the cave.

Lock 1: something alive is holding your key

Three hunts hide the key inside an animal, which is why searching the room finds nothing.

The Mongoose and the Man starts at a note on a wooden pole outside a house at Siniestra, on the left side of Costa Del Mar, next to a greenhouse. Follow the notes down the right side of the house until a locked fence stops you. Break it open, and the key sitting to your right will open the shed. A very aggressive mongoose jumps you the moment it does. Kill it, loot the Stash key from the corpse, then go inside the house and take the chest on the top floor. That chest holds the Lethal Dose pistol, which is covered in our unique weapons guide.

Crocodile Tears at Ardiente Cay in Aguas Lindas asks you to vault into the crocodile pits, then look left for a blood trail. It leads to a room with a crocodile carrying the key on it. Kill it, loot the carcass, survive the few more crocodiles that come for you, then grapple across to Luis's Room for the chest.

Mimo Abosi's Triada Relic is just below The Long Drop, near a construction site in La Joya. Read the note, destroy the generator, then head into the cave and take the fan room keycard off the body on the left before you go any further, because the door below will not open without it. Keep descending to a cavity in the cliff and the chest is in the middle of the open room.

Lock 2: no puzzle, just do not fall

The easiest family. Nothing here needs solving, only navigating, so if you are new to hunts these are the five to start with.

High Supply sits above Palma Forest, beside a dead body. The start is at the foot of a mountain and the objective is the top: grapple, vault and blow rocks apart with grenades until you reach the yellow flare. The Legend of La Princesa is at Espiritus Cay, directly above Revmia in Costa Del Mar. Read the note, jump into the water in front of you, dive and swim to the underwater cave, then work through it dodging jellyfish and use the grapple near the end.

Ida's Triada Relic starts near an offering at Dos Monjas Mogote in Lozania. The rule for the whole route is to follow the white markings painted on the mountain to reach the far side of the caves, then switch to following the pink lights in the deeper section, using the grapple lines to cross. The Missing Muse at Burros Bay in Cruz Del Salvador is short: take the key off the wall, go to the lookout point, zipline across, walk to the edge of the rock and dive into the water for the chest.

A Little Birdie Told Me at Promise Peaks is the gentlest hunt in the game and the only one with a bird as a guide. Feed Danilo, follow the pelican as it flies across the island, feed him again at the far end, and the chest is yours.

Lock 3: find every switch, then the master switch

This is the single biggest cause of being stuck, and the reason is that all five hunts use the same shape without ever announcing it. There is a dead console or a locked door, there are two to four satellite switches hidden around the site, and the master control only responds once every one of them is on. If you are standing at a console that will not react, you have missed a switch.

Sweet Fifteen is worth the most detail because it pays the most. The hunt starts above Higado Lake in Sierra Perdida, at a note beside a large quinceanera billboard, and the warehouse behind it holds the four switches. The first is in the left room behind a wall of pallets you break through, next to a gasoline tank. The second is up the ladder beside it and left along the catwalk. Before the third, hop onto the wooden platform further down the catwalk and shoot the lock off the door on the far side, because that is where the fourth switch lives. The third is right of the podium across a floor covered in live wires, so cross on the boxes and press the red button to cut their power. Then the fourth, and back to the podium. The prize is El Unicornio, the unicorn horse.

Parting Gifts, directly below The Emerald Skull at Sombredo Gorge, is the fiddliest of the five. Kill both power sources, unlink the truck outside, tow the orange generator onto the nearby platform, and get clear before your own truck starts taking current. Then turn the fuel lever back on, shoot the office lock through the gap in the fan, and reach the hidden room from the roof to collect the key for the locked room below.

Lock 4: the order or the code matters

Three hunts where doing the right things in the wrong sequence gets you nothing.

A Rising Tide at Torrero Beach is the clearest example and the one most people get wrong. Inside, five switches wait, one per legendary guerrilla fighter, and the codes for them are painted on five boats scattered around the village. El-Tiger Del Mar sits just outside the puzzle location marked 1. Papi Chulo is up on the rooftop and across a zipline to the southwest, and instead of a number it says "Not equal to 5", which means 2. El-Lucky is flipped over on a greenish house on the northeast side, marked 3. Clarita is to its right on the far corner house, marked 4. And Rojo Victoria is underwater beside the dock, past the sharks, reading "Greater than 3", which means 5. The switches have to be pressed in the order you found the boats: El-Tiger Del Mar, Papi Chulo, El-Lucky, Clarita, Rojo Victoria. Our A Rising Tide guide has the full route to each boat.

Cache Money at Oasis Plains in Aguas Lindas starts at the security gate. Climb onto the house roof and hit the red button, which opens Bunker 2's gates. Blow up the fuel barrels that are now exposed, then get inside from the bunker's roof. The chest sits in the officer's room, whose key is stashed behind a separate locked door right opposite it, and that is the step that catches people.

Sword-Crossed Lovers, listed on some maps as Star-Crossed Lovers, is around Tormentoso Bay in Barrial. Climb the stairs to the top and come back down the other side following the cartoon lady's picture. She leads to a sunken ship, and firing the cannon on its deck is what reveals the path to the chest.

Lock 5: change the room, then take the chest

Three hunts where the chest is visible or nearly so, and the environment has to be altered before you can reach it. Two of them drain water. One of them electrifies it.

And the Beat Goes On is the standout, set in an underground nightclub beneath Arroz Flatlands, in Cruz Del Salvador. A note at the entrance starts it, then you break the door open and head down to a flooded dance floor with the power out. Restoring the power is the first job: grapple onto the disco ball, swing to the platform with the switch, flip it, and come back down carefully. The twist is that the water you have been wading through is now electrified and does serious damage.

From there it is a route across rocks above the waterline to the door opposite the switch, then ledges up the wall, then a second flooded room where you hug the right wall to reach more ledges. Time those jumps, because the waterfall beside them electrifies on a cycle. At the top, grapple the hook above, descend without dropping into the water, swing forward, take the stairs and grapple again, and this last swing goes straight through a waterfall that is also periodically live. On the far side the DJ booth holds a USB stick and the chest holds the 1911 pistol. The full walkthrough is in our And The Beat Goes On guide.

The Long Drop at Pequeno Reservoir in La Joya opens with a person falling into the water carrying the shed key. The only way to get it is to drain the dam. Break into the blue office at the far end by shooting the lock from outside, then hit the button and throw the lever to power the console before pressing it. Take the key off the body once the water is gone. The Truest Yaran near the Lake of Lions in Noventarmas is the same idea in miniature: shoot the pipes around the room to lower the water, which lets you reach the control room, whose lever opens the office.

Lock 6: two sites and a key chain

The Emerald Skull is our own pick for the longest hunt in the game and one of the hardest, and the reason is simply that it spans two separate locations. It starts in Concepcion, in the Conuco part of El Este, with a letter on a table. Call a ride to the marker, follow the path into a small cave opening, and grapple platform to platform until you reach the top.

Drop into the water on the left and you find a dead body holding an Unlucky Skull. Picking it up drops a grenade, so back away immediately; the blast is what opens the way out of the cave. A second marker appears. In that cave, kill the alligator in your way, put the skull into the statue to open the door behind it, then deal with a few more alligators. Go up the stairs on the right and swing across the cave to interact with the statue there, then return to the foot of the staircase and interact with that statue again to open the final door. Climb the ledge quickly, break the barricade, and jump the gap by the central statue for Ida's War Dance Charm.

Oku's Triada Relic at Fort Oro in Cruz Del Salvador is the other chain, and it has a condition on it: go at night. Inside, head right towards the dining room, where the mirrors shatter; break whatever is left to expose a switch. That opens a hidden door, and the buttons on the table inside open the next step. Upstairs, the note on the piano reveals a secret room holding a key. Take it downstairs, open the locked door, break the wood panels to crawl through, grapple to the top, ride the roof zipline to the well and jump in for the chest.

The three relic hunts are one quest

Ida's, Oku's and Mimo Abosi's relics appear in the list above as three separate purple diamonds in three different regions, and nothing on the map says they belong together. They do. All three are the Triada Blessings chain, started by a letter beside the altar in the Oluwa Cave near Acunana Farmland, and running them in isolation means carrying three relics around with no idea what they open.

Take all three back to that altar and the payoff is the largest of any hunt in the game: a chest holding the Triador Stealth Supremo alongside La Varita, the Resolver that shoots through walls, plus a panther that attacks you and joins you once revived, and the Triada Stealth Armor Set once the chain closes. We cover the recruitment side in our Amigos guide and the armour side in our Triada Stealth Armor guide.

What each hunt pays

The other 15 hunts pay unique weapons and gear drops that our source does not name individually, so those rows are deliberately empty rather than filled with a guess. The full list of all 21 with a short solution for each is on our treasure hunts page.

Purple diamond or not: telling Yara's chests apart

Four other things in this game get called treasure hunts and are not, which matters because they follow completely different rules.

The GDP oil rig is the one people file under treasure hunts most often. It is a Yaran Contraband container in the northwestern part of Aguas Lindas that is physically blocked by a second container hanging from a crane. There is no puzzle: the crane's control room is directly opposite, a white room with the number 16 on it, and pressing the red button on the yellow control unit inside lifts the blockage. The container holds the Supercharger shotgun.

Paradise Lost is the one full story mission we walk in this bucket, an operation Clara Garcia hands you after Blood Ties, started by speaking to her at Mercurio Mecanico in Esperanza. It is three explosive charges, then a rendezvous with Juan, then the hotel assault, and the third charge is the difficult one because the area has a tank and an alarm. The move that makes it manageable is to grapple onto the building southeast of the tank, kill the sniper on its roof, and clear the rest with a silenced weapon before you touch the alarm.

Are treasure hunts worth doing?

For the rewards in the table above, yes, and the case is stronger than it looks because several of those items have no other source. There is no second way to get the Lethal Dose, El Unicornio, Ida's War Dance Charm or the entire Oluso and Triada Stealth package. They are also completely safe to leave: all 21 sit on the map permanently, nothing is missable, and nothing gates them.

If you want a sequence, do the Lock 2 hunts first to learn the traversal vocabulary the game expects, then Sweet Fifteen for the horse, then the three relic hunts as one session. Leave the Emerald Skull until you are comfortable, since it is the longest, and treat A Rising Tide as the fiddliest rather than the hardest, because the only thing standing in your way there is the order.