Expedition

Expedition is one of the more straightforward league mechanics to engage with at a basic level, you place explosives, blow up monsters and chests, collect artifacts, and spend them with the four vendors. The important thing comes from how you scale it and which vendors you prioritise. This guide covers what you need to run it efficiently.

How Expedition Works

When you encounter an expedition in your map (hard to miss) you'll see hidden runic monsters (skulls on pikes), chests, and remnants (little stone alter things) scattered across the area. You place your explosives to detonate in sequence, triggering the monsters and rewards along the chain. Unless you take extreme archeology, known to me as Big Boom, always take Big Boom!

Remnants apply modifiers to the encounter: some buff rewards, some make monsters more dangerous, and some make specific damage types immune. Read them before you place your explosives. Placing a chain through a remnant that makes monsters immune to your damage type can brick your run entirely.

Runic monsters are the high value targets. These drop the bulk of your artifacts and are the primary reason to invest in expedition scaling.

The general approach is simple: clear the map, complete your altars, then place the big boom and collect the rewards. Expedition is not a heavily micro-managed mechanic, the more you invest in scaling it the more it pays off without requiring complex in-encounter decisions.

Rewards and Vendors

Expedition rewards are primarily artifacts, currency specific to each vendor that cannot be traded between players. You spend these artifacts to engage with the four vendors after each encounter.

• Dannig: Generally considered the best vendor for versatility. You use his currency to buy artifacts from other vendors, purchase vendor reroll currency, and occasionally logbooks. His flexibility makes him the most universally useful regardless of what you are farming.
• Tujen: The haggler. He presents a window of loot, mostly currency, with a listed price that you can attempt to bargain down. A reasonable approach when moving fast is to scroll the offer down a little and settle for whatever he lands on without overthinking it. Tujen logbooks are among the most valuable because of the volume of currency on offer.
• Rog: Sells items that you then use his currency to craft. He was a premier league start item printing option before the Genesis tree and Kingsmarch options became available. With those nerfed in 3.28 he has a real opportunity to reclaim some relevance for early league crafting.
• Gwennen: A gamble window. Generally considered the weakest vendor at this point. Skip unless you are specifically chasing something from her pool.

Logbooks

Logbooks are a separate map instance tied to expedition. Each logbook generates a tile-based layout filled with chests, artifacts, and ruins to blow up. You get a few layout options per logbook to choose from before entering.

Each logbook is tied to a specific vendor and artifact type. Dannig and Tujen logbooks sell for more than others because of their reward quality. Logbooks with guaranteed bosses in the implicit are also more valuable since bosses drop a significant amount of vendor reroll currency.

Atlas Tree

• Extreme Archeology: The core node. Increases explosion radius significantly, a quality of life and efficiency upgrade that is almost always worth taking. Makes the encounter faster and more consistent.
• Ancient Writings: More remnants and more mods on remnants. Since remnants directly scale rewards on runic monsters this is a near automatic include for anyone investing in expedition.
• Buried Knowledge: More logbooks and more runic monsters. No reason to skip this if you are running expedition seriously.
• Hunt for Answers: Guarantees an expedition encounter in your maps. Take this unless you are using the base expedition scarab to guarantee encounters instead, which is generally a less efficient use of a scarab slot.
• Distinguished Demolitions: Increases explosive radius and adds more explosives. Most useful when combined with the Verisium Powder scarab for maximum explosion scaling. Only worth taking alongside that scarab investment.
• Lucky Guess / Scratchin' Up the Ground / A Noble Quest / Rather Not: Vendor preference nodes. Priority order is Dannig, then Tujen, then Rog, then Gwennen. Take accordingly based on what you are farming for.
• Ancient Decay: Makes expedition monsters have less life. Generally not worth the passive points since expedition monsters often have regeneration and the 20% less life does not meaningfully change how encounters play out.

Scarabs

If you are investing in expedition the general approach is to stack all the expedition scarabs except the base one and adjust based on how much difficulty you can handle.

• Expedition Scarab: Guarantees an expedition encounter. Redundant if you have Hunt for Answers on the atlas tree, which you almost always should. Generally not worth a scarab slot.
• Expedition Scarab of Runefinding: Doubles the number of runic monsters. Limit 2. One of the strongest expedition scarabs for raw reward scaling, runic monsters are your primary artifact source.
• Expedition Scarab of Verisium Powder: More explosives and a larger explosion radius. Scales additively with Distinguished Demolitions on the atlas tree. When you run both together the explosion coverage becomes very large, so be careful with placement because it becomes much harder to avoid remnants that could brick your encounter.
• Expedition Scarab of Archeology: Adds two additional prefixes and suffixes to all remnants. Makes every remnant significantly more impactful in both directions: higher rewards and higher difficulty. A strong scaling scarab for builds that can handle the extra challenge.
• Expedition Scarab of Infusion: New in 3.28. Makes logbooks always drop with four implicit modifiers and causes expedition monsters to gain increased difficulty and reward for each remnant detonated. Slots in cleanly as an additional juice layer, and with the open scarab slot from dropping the base expedition scarab there is room for it in most setups.

Complementary Mechanics

• Delirium: Scales well with expedition. Running a Delirium Mirror, Unending Nightmare, or a Delirium Orb on your maps adds a meaningful multiplier to expedition rewards. Worth considering if you are building a dedicated expedition setup.
• Harvest: Pairs well with expedition if you want to run a hybrid strategy. Both mechanics reward high pack size from well-rolled maps, harvest uses very few scarabs mostly just for doubling, and the combination lets you get solid value from both without overcommitting scarab slots to either.