The map, region by region.

The clue is a photograph, and a photograph is only as useful as the things in it that are rare. That ratio changes completely depending on which region the Playlist names, which is why the region is worth reading before the picture.

Snow country is the worst case. Sotoyama and Hokubu are white in every direction, so a shot of a wooden building beside a snow-covered road describes several hundred square kilometres. PC Gamer called the Hokubu clue “a pretty broad search area” and meant it — the chest was by a house past the fields at Shikisai-no-Oka, and the only thing separating that house from every other house was scenery you had to already recognise.

Coast is the best case. A beach gives you a coastline, and a coastline is a one-dimensional search instead of a two-dimensional one. The Ito chest sat on the beach at the northeastern tip, past Ine; once you know it is on sand, you are driving a line, not sweeping a field.

City and industry invert the problem. In Tokyo City the chest was on an exterior track on a port warehouse, and finding it was never the difficulty — getting a car up there was. Nangan does something similar with the silos by the space centre: dense, easy to identify, awkward to enter. If the photo shows concrete and structure, budget your time for the approach rather than the search.

Rolling countryside sits in the middle. The Minamino hunt was marked by a white flag on a hill by the golf course — a landmark that is distinctive within the region but invisible from the map. On this kind of ground the region name plus one recognisable object is usually enough, and nothing else is.

Counting our own entries and every published write-up we could verify, a chest has been placed in Tokyo City, Sotoyama, Ito, Minamino, Ohtani, Nangan, Hokubu at least once. That is 7 of 10, across 7 documented weeks.

The ones with nothing on record are Takashiro, Shimanoyama, Legend Island. We are not going to read a pattern into that — 7 weeks is a small sample and the rotation has no published rules. Legend Island is the only one where there is even a reason to speculate: its sources describe it as gated behind the Gold Wristband. Whether that keeps the weekly hunt out of it is not something we have seen anyone state either way, so it stays a question rather than an explanation.

If you are trying to guess next Thursday from this, do not. The useful version of the same information is narrower: when the Playlist names a region you have never driven, the region page tells you what it looks like before you go, and whether anyone has ever found anything there.

Each of the 10 pages behind the list above is built around one question: has anything ever been hidden here? Ones with a record open on the finds — where the chest was, how people got to it, whether we went and re-checked it ourselves. Ones without a record open on the terrain instead, because that is genuinely all there is to say and padding it would be worse.

Every page also carries the region's Japanese name where we have a sourced one. That is not decoration: the Playlist entry is named after the region, so a Japanese client shows the Japanese name on the challenge card, and it is not always a transliteration of the English. If you are following an English guide with a Japanese game, that mismatch is the thing that wastes your evening.