Across the desert floor and deep trenches, independent scavengers and military fleets risk their lives to dig up three specific types of ancient, old-world treasures:
THE DECANTERS <-- Lost Water-Magic (Worth a literal king's ransom)
THE SEA-IRON <-- Rust-Resistant Metal (Coveted by Blacksmiths)
THE REEL-STONES <-- Ancient Memory Crystals (Sought by the Archive)
The Decanters of Pelagia: Highly coveted, legendary magical relics from the Pre-Evaporation era. These are ornate porcelain or brass jugs sealed with ancient elven runes. If unsealed, they magically produce infinite fresh water. A single functional decanter can power an entire settlement or buy a fleet of land-galleons.
Sea-Iron Salvage: Normal surface iron corrodes rapidly when exposed to the intense salt-winds of the basin floor. True Sea-Iron—a rare alloy forged by ancient deep-sea dwarves before the cataclysm—never rusts and never dulls. Factions aggressively raid shipwrecks just to pry sea-iron nails and structural plates from the hulls to reforge them into weapons.
The Reel-Stones: These are glowing, fist-sized pearls found inside the fossilised shells of giant prehistoric molluscs. They act like medieval memory crystals. When a spellcaster touches a reel-stone, they experience a vivid, sensory projection of what that specific part of the ocean looked like five hundred years ago. The Chronologers of the Drift buy these at staggering prices to map out the old world's underwater topography.