I have to admit that I was get­ting kind of dis­ap­pointed with the gen­eral sim­i­lar­i­ties between the var­i­ous fes­ti­vals in LotRO. The Spring Fes­ti­val was always the best in my opin­ion, though. The new addi­tion of the Hedge Maze makes the Spring Fes­ti­val even bet­ter than it was and pretty much wiped away my dis­ap­point­ment entirely. I really hope that future fes­ti­vals see new, inter­est­ing things like this too.

For those who haven’t made it there yet, the Hedge Maze is in the Horse­fields by the Fes­ti­val Grounds in Bree-land. It’s north of Bree-town itself. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a maze made up of hedges. It’s pretty funny to see this huge maze pop up lit­er­ally overnight, but I’m not complaining.

The maze itself has 5 dif­fer­ent quest givers, all of which want you to do some­thing dif­fer­ent within the maze. Only one can be active at a time. The Man wants you to fin­ish the maze under three dif­fer­ent time lim­its; The Hob­bit wants you to find chick­ens in the maze; the Elf wants you to find wan­der­ing Elves in the maze; and the Dwarf wants you to post con­fus­ing signs in the maze.

How dif­fi­cult this is really depends on how good you are at mazes. My first few times I did it myself with no aids and pretty much got the hang of it. Just remem­ber that the exist is in the cen­ter of the East­ern­most end of the hedge maze. If you keep that in mind, you’ll fig­ure out which direc­tion to try to head in. If you come to a party in the dead cen­ter of the maze, you’re pretty much halfway through.

Of course, some of these quests are more dif­fi­cult than oth­ers: the tough­est Man quest requires you to find the exit in under three min­utes, which is cut­ting it pretty close. The chicken one can also be dif­fi­cult, depend­ing on whether or not you run into any chick­ens. Accord­ing to the quest text, they only appear for 15 min­utes out of the hour and it seems like if peo­ple grab them up, that’s that. I got lucky near the end.

There are maps float­ing around. The Brasse’s is pret­ti­est, but montecristo143’s is the most detailed’t that I’ve seen. Keep in mind that the chick­ens wan­der, so they could poten­tially be almost any­where. I had a lot of fun play­ing around with it, but after a few times I looked at the maps …  Doing it 10 times your­self to get the all the barter items you want doesn’t exactly excite me,  haha. Be sure you always go through the exit when you’re done with your quest, not the entrance.

The prizes are pretty neat this time around. There’s some new house­hold items, includ­ing some pot­ted plants for Farm­ers. The best things, how­ever, involve fish. You can get a new /fishslap emote (pic­tured above) or a Cold Fish weapon that you can equip. I think a Cold Fish vs. Cold Fish spar would be pretty funny.

In addi­tion to this, there’s all the typ­i­cal things to do: the pie eat­ing con­test in the Fes­ti­val Grounds, the Inn-League Quests in The Shire (and else­where, later on) and so forth.

I did men­tion that there is a fifth quest giver out­side of the Hedge Maze. He’ll only talk to you if you’re a mem­ber of the Inn League, though. You can start that quest line at the Party Tree north of Hob­biton, if you’re inter­ested. Be sure to do that first if you want your prize.

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