Home Security & Access

Locks, guest permissions, cameras and the audit trail that keep your front door genuinely yours.

Owning or renting a place (see Property & Housing) is only half the story — the other half is controlling who can get in, and knowing who has. Every property comes with a lock, a guest list, and a permanent record of who’s been through the door.

Locking and Unlocking Your Door

Every property has one lock, controlled from the door itself (or the interior exit target if you’re inside): a simple Lock / Unlock toggle. There’s no separate PIN pad and no remote-lock gadget on your phone — if you want it locked, you (or a guest with the right permission) need to be at the door.

Anyone who isn’t authorised at a locked door only gets one option: Knock. They can’t pick or force their way in — your front door doesn’t expose the lockpicking or breach options you’ll find on doors elsewhere in the city (see Lockpicking). For a player-owned home, security is entirely about who’s on your guest list, not about defeating the lock.

Motel rooms work the same way under the hood — the room door is a lock tied to your tenancy, and it updates automatically the moment you rent, renew, or give up the room at reception. You don’t need to do anything extra at the door itself.

Left your door unlocked and someone wanders in uninvited? They’ll get an on-screen warning that their entry has been logged, and you’ll get a notification if you’re online — unless you’ve muted that property.

Guests and Access Permissions

Owners and co-owners manage everything from the door’s Manage Property panel. Add someone by their National Insurance number or character ID, then flip on exactly the permissions you want them to have:

None of these are bundled — a guest with Decorate doesn’t automatically get Open Doors, and so on. Changes take effect immediately, including on any physical door in the world, so pulling someone’s access the moment things go sideways actually works in real time.

Knock, Knock — Doorbell & Visitors

Every door has a doorbell built in — there’s nothing extra to install. When someone knocks at a locked door, it rings the owner’s phone or tablet with View / Grant / Deny options, so you can let a friend in (or leave them outside) without ever getting off the sofa. A grant only holds the door open for a short window, so don’t wander off mid-answer.

Cameras and the Wall Tablet

Owners can place property cameras — fixed, PTZ, or motion-alert security types — up to a limit set by the property’s tier (raise it with the camera-slot upgrade, see Decorating & Upgrades). A single wall-mounted tablet gives you a one-tap way to open the camera viewer without carrying your own device, and guests with the View Cameras permission can watch too. Motion on any camera sends you a notification if you’re online.

You can also carry and place your own personal camera — bought or crafted, same fixed/PTZ/security-with-motion choice — anywhere in the world, useful for covering an angle your property cameras can’t reach. There’s a tight cap on how many you can have placed at once, and unlike property cameras it can’t be repaired if destroyed; you’ll need to pick up what’s left for a refund or get another.

A determined criminal with the right hacking gear can attempt to breach a camera and knock its feed out for a while — you’ll see it drop to a “signal lost” state before it recovers on its own, so a live camera is a strong deterrent rather than an absolute guarantee. If a camera gets shot or smashed instead, get a repair tool, stand near it, and use the repair option (or the Repair action on the tablet) to bring it back online. For everything the footage is actually used for once it leaves your property, see Investigations & CCTV.

The Security Log

Every lock, unlock, knock and entry against your property is written to a permanent log — there’s no way to switch it off, and it’s the real backbone of home security. Open it from the Properties app on your phone or tablet: it merges access events, doorbell activity, and camera motion alerts into one feed per property, alongside live lock-state, bill history, and one-tap pay-rent / toggle-lock / open-cameras actions. You can mute notifications for a property individually if you don’t want pinged every time a guest lets themselves in.

Stashes and PIN Codes

Your default stash (and any extras you place, see Decorating & Upgrades) can be left open — anyone currently inside the property can use it — or locked behind a 6-digit PIN you set from the stash’s own menu. Owners, co-owners, and guests with the Access Stashes permission skip the keypad entirely; everyone else needs the code. General storage mechanics (weight, grids, giving/dropping) are covered in Inventory & Storage.

Keeping Burglars Out

Here’s the important bit: the break-in system covered in House Burglary — casing, lockpicking, smashed windows, police dispatch — only ever targets abandoned, NPC-owned houses that staff have specifically placed around the city. It never touches a property you actually own or rent. Nobody is going to lockpick your front door.

That means your real security work is guest-list hygiene: don’t hand out Open Doors to people you don’t fully trust, pull access the moment a friendship (or gang) sours, keep the door locked when you’re not home, and check the security log if something feels off. A camera covering your entrance and a wall tablet to check it from are cheap insurance on top of that — but the lock and the guest list are what actually decides who gets in.