Welcome to Elderfield in a Smelly Place Where Time Is Told

Start with the conclusion: this is not a quest name. It is a tip generated by the TV news buried-treasure rumour in Welcome to Elderfield. When the day’s broadcast runs Today, the rumors are saying that something could be found "…", the quoted sentence is your clue; read it on the TV at home, then take a Shovel to the matching spot and dig. Only three tips have ever been publicly mapped, and “in a smelly place where time is told” has no published location at all — so this page gives you the reliable procedure and a verification method instead of inventing an answer.

How the mechanic works

News events rotate randomly one per day and can be watched on the TV in your home. Buried treasure is one category inside that pool, not a unique storyline. The template is fixed and only the quoted tip changes, which means the same line can appear on different days and a single phrase is never a fixed quest ID.

The only hard requirement in the solution is: dig in the right place, and have a Shovel. Without one you can stand on the correct tile and still get nothing.

The three confirmed tips and their locations

These come from the community wiki’s line-by-line record of the news template, and they are the only publicly cross-referenced sample:

In all three, each is a short verse naming a kind of place and a distinguishing feature, pointing at one diggable tile rather than a whole region. The Steam forum confirms that this is how players actually use them. One thread is titled with the tip itself, because searching by the quoted line is the normal workflow. Its title: “Treasure Location for ‘In a dark, abandoned place, where a person should stand’”.

Where the Fancy House is, and how the phone inside it opens

People searching “fancy house” are usually after one of two things: the location itself, or the phone hidden inside it. Take them separately.

The location. The Fancy House is Pumpkid’s parents’ home. It sits in the Town area, west of the Library, between Edwin’s house and Ellie’s house. Walk in through the front door. No key needed.

The phone. The Fancy Closet inside holds a phone behind a lock. Three steps open it. Talk to Josh first to trigger the line about someone dropping a key in the sewers. Go down to the sewers and pick the key up. Come back and unlock the closet.

One thing trips people up here. The Fancy Closet is not the same closet as the treasure tip Is a shabby closet, locked and forgotten. That one points at the left-hand closet in Old Man Jackson’s house. It belongs to the digging system. The two open in completely different ways.

The location and the unlock order come from the community wiki’s Town entry and player answers on the Steam forum, with the earliest answer dating back to the demo. This page has not re-verified them under v1.0.1, so if the trigger differs in the released build, trust what the game does.

The dig procedure

1. Watch the TV that day. When the strange reports … about buried treasure story appears, write down the quoted tip.
2. Confirm you own a Shovel. Buy one if not; without it this step is void.
3. Read the tip as landmarks, not as mood. The nouns usually name real scene objects — counters, closets, staircases — so start your search among those landmarks.
4. Investigate or dig the target tile. The chance is used up once you dig; one broadcast will not let you dig twice.
5. Record what you tried. Note the tip, the date, the spots you checked and the result. That beats wandering.

The status of this specific line

We searched five places for smelly, time is told and where time is told. The community wiki’s full text, Google (including exact-phrase matching), DuckDuckGo, Exa semantic search and Reddit, and no public source maps this line to a location. This page therefore marks it unknown and gives a verification method rather than a plausible-looking guess:

• It is most likely a line added in a newer build or one the community simply has not recorded yet.
• Use the three confirmed tips to calibrate the writing style, then check places that are simultaneously smelly and able to tell time — a location with garbage, sewers or standing water near a clock, watch or broadcast.
• If you find it, post the result to the Steam forum or Reddit so the line moves from unknown to confirmed.

What players say

The difficulty of these tips shows in how players ask for help:

• A Steam thread is literally titled with the line: “Treasure Location for ‘In a dark, abandoned place, where a person should stand’”, and the author writes, “It seems to describe half the game. I haven’t a clue where I should even start.”
• On Reddit, player Taserbation summarised a related TV event: “This event has 3 variants. 1. There will be a bunch of fish people and a dying guy in the corner. 2. There will be a creep standing in the corner waiting for the spirit to talk to her. 3. The spirit herself will be there to talk to.” Another player adds: “When you get the variant of the event with the spirit, she will show up in that exact spot where your character is, so you won’t miss her.”
• A community round-up lists the Fish Door, Four Sacred Numbers, telephone, laundry-machine and Old Woods riddle solutions together as “not verified”, which shows how few of these tips have public answers — which is exactly why this page keeps an unknown status.

The above is player testing and community round-up material, not official confirmation.

Boundary

This page only covers the TV news buried-treasure tips. The die-roll investigation system and its locations are in the mysteries guide, Edwin’s four sacred numbers are on their own page, and the Treasure Map items are a separate system.

Facts checked 2026-09-12.