While you spend the first few hours of Dune: Awakening avoiding the open sand unless absolutely necessary, the game starts giving you reasons to brave the desert and risk becoming worm food after you complete a few quests. Buried treasure is one of the biggest draws of the sand, but the game does a poor job of explaining its treasure hunting mechanics.
A quest in the Vermillius Gap region (aptly named "Buried Treasure") requires you to dig up some buried treasure using a set of fancy new Fremen toys that you unlock after completing the Second Trial of Aql. With the Handheld Scanner and Static Compactor in hand, you can become a desert prospector and sift the sands for riches—if you can figure out how they're supposed to work.
How to locate buried treasure in Dune: Awakening
Buried treasure can be found anywhere underneath open sand in Dune: Awakening. If you see the sandworm meter pop up at the bottom of your screen, you're in the right place.
You should already have both a Handheld Resource Scanner and Static Compactor by this point in the questline, but if you need new ones for any reason, search for Fremen materials in moisture-sealed caves. Both recipes require EMF Generators, which are fairly common Fremen loot.
To locate buried treasure, point the Handheld Resource Scanner out at the sands and scan for any anomalies. If something is buried underneath the sand, it'll get marked with a [[link]] diamond icon. It'll probably take a few scans before you find something, so don't freak out if you don't stumble across treasure right away.
Once you see a diamond icon, approach it and toss a Static Compactor at the marked location on the ground. Give it a few seconds to clear the sand and a container will emerge from the ground below.
These buried treasure caches can contain anything from Solaris to new gear, but not every chest is a winner. Sometimes you'll walk away with a few chunks of ore and nothing more. You can find buried treasure like this all over Arrakis as long as there's open sand, so it's a good idea to scan regularly as you travel between regions.
As you'd expect, the sandworms really don't take kindly to people looting their dunes. Walking around and scanning the sands is already noisy enough as is, but the Static Compactor makes a bunch of thumping noises on top of that. It may as well have a mounted speaker that yells "come eat me." Be ready to run for the rocks at a moment's notice unless you want to lose your backpack in a sandworm's stomach.
If you're having trouble finding buried treasure in Dune: Awakening, look for wide-open patches of sand in between major regions. You can find treasure in the small sand channels between rocky mountains, but there's not nearly as much surface area for treasure to spawn compared to the open dunes.
It's much harder to find treasure in areas with quicksand and drumsand, too. Look for undisturbed areas without any hazards. Places where Flour Sand spawns are a good starting point since those tend to be calmer and have much more open sand for you to scour. Look for white wisps of sand kicking up from the dunes to track them down.
How to get a Sandbike Scanner
You should really invest in a scanner for your sandbike if you want to stay safe while treasure hunting. The Handheld Resource Scanner is great and all, but having to dismount and walk around is just asking to get gobbled up by a sandworm. With a vehicle-mounted scanner, you can check for buried treasure without even having to slow down.
You can research a Sandbike Scanner pretty early in Dune: Awakening, and it's a great investment. To craft it, all you need are Iron Ingots and some Advanced Servoks, both of which can be easily obtained in the starting regions of the game. Iron Ore can be found all over the Vermillius Gap, and Advanced Servoks are found within Imperial Testing Stations all across the map.
Scanning on the move isn't the only advantage that a Sandbike Scanner grants in Dune: Awakening. The Handheld Resource Scanner uses [[link]] up a lot of energy, but the Sandbike Scanner has a fixed cooldown that doesn't drain any juice from your Power Pack. A Sandbike Scanner is a requirement for serious treasure hunters, and you can research improved versions of it with increased range and faster recharge times to make the search even smoother.