today I went to complete a black trench bounty and found I could not enter the gate, due to the cellar gate key not spawning. so, I abandoned bounty in case it prevented the enemy or chest from spawning, seeing as I had found an exploit to get to the Darak boss fight without using the gate key or raising the water.
The exploit is this: when given the black trench quest: if you run off the southeast platform with the water pump, near the save point, you can land on the lower southeastern edge of an area with one enemy. Then you can edge up on some rock to the north and climb up the segmented pipes until reaching the upper platform area, which then unlocks your access to the tunnel and bonfire that leads to Darrik further north.
I did this without first grabbing the cellar gate key from the crabs in the far north lower sewer area, and after beating Darak( thus gaining the ability to get black trench bounties), I found that the cellar key or chest just wasn’t there.
now I am hoping this was due to the black trench bounty overwriting enemies in the area. but I am very fearful I soft locked the area, because I have clearly noticed significant enemy and map changes, seeing as defeating Darrick changes the map and world level of enemies and drops.
as of now, I am attempting to go far north into nameless pass to attempt to reset the black trench area. if that fails, I will proceed to complete the godless quest to get my world level to 3, in hopes again of resetting the black trench area.
But reporting this as a bug, and if the jump, pipe climb exploit is the trigger to this bug which removes the cellar gate key (by defeating Darrik without raising the water level or opening the gate), I am reporting it as well.
I game from GeForce now cloud so I don’t have access to player logs, but I will recreate the exploit w photos and also show the missing key location and locked door. I am also not sure if key is gone due to the patch which removes duplicate key spawns?