UESP Forums

I'm posting here since there's no Blades subforum yet, since Blades is still in "early access." Hopefully, when it's officially released and a subforum is created, all of the Blades-related posts can be moved there-- hence why I added "Blades:" to the start of the subject line.

Anywho, I've been playing Blades a lot during the last several days, and they've been awarding more silver, golden, and legendary chests.

For those who aren't familiar with how chests work in Blades, there are (AFAIK) five types of chests-- wooden, silver, golden, elder, and legendary.

With the exception of chests which are given out as daily login awards-- and maybe chests which are purchased from the store, but I've never bought one so IDK-- you can't just open a chest when you find it; you must "unlock" it first, which takes different amounts of time for the different types of chests:
- 5 seconds for a wooden chest
- 1 hour for a silver chest
- 6 hours for a golden chest
- 12 hours for an elder chest
- IDK for a legendary chest

If you're impatient, you can open a chest immediately by spending some of your gems, with the cost in gems varying based on the length of time required to unlock the chest. This cost is prorated, so for example if you start unlocking a silver chest but after half an hour of waiting you decide that you can't wait any longer, it will cost only half as many gems (I think) to go ahead and open the chest as it would have cost to skip the entire 1-hour unlocking procedure.

This might seem like a horrible way to do things, and I won't argue against that opinion, but I can see how parents could use it to teach their kids about such things as time management, budgeting of resources, etc.-- that is, if the parents are allowing their kids to play Blades. (I'm not sure if it's supposed to have an age restriction on it the way the main Elder Scrolls games do.) What I mean is, unless you want to spend all of your gems on opening chests, you quickly learn to save the chests as you find them, rather than unlocking each chest as it's found (although you should unlock and open wooden chests as you find them, unless you're already unlocking another type of chest), and then open the wooden chests first, save the silver chests for when you're actively using your tablet to do other stuff-- that is, start unlocking a silver chest, then switch to some other app, then go back to Blades when you get the notification that the silver chest is ready to be opened, start unlocking another silver chest, go back to the other app, etc. Golden chests are best saved for just before you go to sleep, go to work, or something like that, when you won't be using your tablet at all for 6 hours or more. I guess elder and legendary chests are best saved for when you don't plan to play Blades at all for a day or three.

After playing Blades a lot over the last several days, I had amassed 11 silver chests, 5 golden chests, and an elder chest. I've finally unlocked and opened all of the silver chests, and am now working on the golden chests.

If you don't open your chests right away, they start to pile up, and there's a limit to how many chests you can have in your inventory. Inventory is similar to ESO, in that you have a certain number of slots, and some things (raw materials, potions, etc.) stack together but other things (armor, weapons, etc.) do not. But the slots for treasure chests are separate from the slots for other stuff. If you want, you can buy more slots for the two types of inventory by spending gems. There are also perks you can buy with points as you level up which let you carry more stuff, although I think they're just for the items inventory slots, not for chests inventory slots.

So to get back to the gist of this post, IIRC they recently announced that they would be giving out more silver, golden, and elder chests as rewards. That sounds like a great thing, right? I'm starting to think it was really just part of a strategy to get people to spend more real money in the in-game store to buy bags of gems in order to spend gems on opening up all of those awesome chests and yet still have gems for all the other things that you need to spend gems on.

[EDIT: Corrected the time for an elder chest, should be 12 hours, not 24 hours]