that’s something I was wondering about recently, one of Sméagol’s characteristics is curiosity, when Gandalf describes him in the book he said that since even before he had the ring, he was always looking for secrets and answers to riddles. so why was he content to basically sit in one spot for hundreds of years? wouldn’t he get bored, wouldn’t he want to look around and try to find things nobody else knew about?

How do you think he ended up in the cave?

(Also, do we actually know he stayed in the same spot for hundreds of years? He traveled a bunch after losing the ring to Bilbo; I don’t recall Tolkien ever explicitly saying he didn’t travel before, too. Maybe he was the greatest cave explorer of all time.)