Occasionally when attempting to befriend another faction in Pioneers of Pagonia you'll be asked to deliver items to a 'Mysterious Location'. These are friendly - but non-aligned - buildings, and they're almost always a long ways away from your settlement. Your Carriers won't travel outside your borders, so you need to figure out a way to connect the Mysterious Location to your settlement.
This guide will help you deliver items to Mysterious Locations in Pioneers of Pagonia. The answer to this problem is pretty much waht you'd expect, and not as daunting as it seems at first glance.
Step 1: Reveal Mysterious Locations
Chances are good you've already done this, if you're reading the guide, but we'll cover it anyway. In order to reveal Mysterious Locations on the map you first need to establish formal contact with the faction that's connected to the location. This means sending your Explorers out and letting them roam around until they notice the borders of a foreign power.
Once you've more or less figured out where the faction's village lies, click on your Explorer's Hut and set the focus point in the middle of the faction's village. Eventually your Explorer will discover the village's Trading Center, which opens up Objectives for that faction - and reveals any Mysterious Locations connected to the Objectives. You'll see the exact location of the Mysterious Location on the map, but you won't see anything between you and the Mysterious Location.
Step 2: Expand your territory
The only way to deliver items to a Mysterious Location is to put it inside your territory. Yes, that means pushing your borders aaaaaall the way across the map, and directly over the Mysterious Location.
This takes less time than you'd think, so long as you work strategically. Figure out which section of your borders is closest to the Mysterious Location, then place a Garrison on the border. Click the Garrison, and set its focus point to the Mysterious Location (or as close as you can get, depending on how far it is from your Garrison's influence). The Guards assigned to the Garrison will then get to work expanding the border directly towards the Mysterious Location, rather than spreading the border in an even circle around the Garrison's circle of influence. Your Stone Mason should provide a steady supply of Border Stones.
Don't have enough Guards? Get more! You can cheaply and quickly convert Carriers into Guards via a Military Academy. To get the cheapest of the cheap you'll also need Wooden Spears, which you can create at a Wood Workshop. Be careful, however - as the maps get more difficult you'll potentially run into Bandits and Bandit Camps, and normal Guards are no match for Veteran Bandits. You'll probably have to upgrade to Veteran Guards if this happens.
Step 3: Create items for delivery
As you're expanding your territory you should get to work creating the items desired by the Mysterious Location. What you need and where you'll need it depends on the Objective, so you may need to either trade with the faction for the item (via a Trading Post) or make it yourself.
It's worth noting that occasionally an Objective will call for you to deliver an item to a Mysterious Location - and then provide two identical Mysterious Locations, in different areas of the map. If this happens you'll need to deliver the items to both Mysterious Locations, likely splitting the order in half. You can't just deliver everything to the nearest Mysterious Location and call it a day.
Step 4: Build a road
Once you've set up your borders around the Mysterious Location - and cleared any Bandits out of your path - you'll need to build a road to the Mysterious Location. Depending on the geography this can get a bit annoying, but it only takes a moment or two and costs you nothing. Note that the entrance node on the Mysterious Location must be inside your borders to extend the road to it - just extending the road to beside the Mysterious Location doesn't count, and won't work.
Assuming you've got Carriers available who can access the item, one or more of them should now begin delivering the items to the Mysterious Location. They need to cover a lot of terrain, so this may take a while. Keep an eye on the road, or just watch the total number of items delivered on the Objectives menu, to make sure they're going where they need to go.
If all is well this will complete the Objective for you. If not, you may need to check a few things:
- Is your settlement connected to the Mysterious Location by road? Are there any gaps that you missed?
- Is your settlement not properly connected by road?
- Do you have any Carriers available to transport the items?
- Do you need to make more of an item? Was it used by someone else before it can be picked up?
The mechanic of delivering items to Mysterious Locations does work. If for some reason it doesn't, you may need to do some fiddling. Good luck!