Lockpicking

Picks, tiers, and the risk you take every time you crouch at a lock — whether it's a door, a car, or someone's front porch.

Lockpicking shows up all over the city — a stubborn door, a parked car, a house someone forgot to lock properly. The tool in your hand and the target in front of you decide how it plays out, but the shape of it is always the same: a held pick, a skillcheck, and a roll of the dice on whether anyone official hears about it.

Picks: Buy Them or Make Them

Lockpicks come in three tiers, and a higher tier is the only thing that gets you through a tougher lock — it isn’t just about odds.

Basic picks handle the everyday stuff. Doors flagged with a tougher lock simply won’t yield to a tier that’s too low, no matter how good your skillcheck is — you’ll need to level up your weaponsmithing and craft your way to advanced or pro. See Crafting & Industry for how the bench and discipline levels work.

Vehicles use their own set of tools rather than the door tiers — a lockpick-type item to force a lock, a screwdriver to hotwire an already-unlocked car, plus separate tools for siphoning fuel or scratching a VIN. All of it is sold through the regular tool shops (see Shops & Services).

Carrying the wrong tier isn’t a soft penalty — the lock simply won’t budge. Check what you’re up against before you commit.

Picking a Door

Walk up to a door flagged as pickable and a 3rd-eye “Lockpick” option appears — it only shows on doors the owning system has actually marked pickable, so plenty of doors around the city won’t offer it at all. Select it and you’re into a lockpicking minigame with a held bobby-pin animation. Win it and the door unlocks; lose it and nothing happens except a wasted attempt.

Whether your pick survives the attempt depends on that door’s own policy — some consume it every time, some only on a failure, some never. A relevant perk can occasionally save a pick that would otherwise have been used up. Some doors also auto-relock themselves a while after you’ve picked them, so a job you thought was done can quietly seal itself back up behind you.

Farming the same lock for XP doesn’t work — a long cooldown per lock, per character, means repeat picks on a door you’ve already cracked recently pay nothing.

Picking a Vehicle

3rd-eye a locked car and pick “Lockpick” from the radial menu. You get the same style of minigame with a pick prop, but winning it isn’t the final word — behind the scenes the game weighs your lockpicking skill and the tool’s condition into a hidden success chance, so a minigame you nailed can still fail server-side, and a failed attempt wears the tool down. This works on both other players’ cars and ordinary parked traffic, which is locked by default.

Once you’re into an NPC car that isn’t running, a screwdriver and the “Hotwire” option start the engine — same animation-and-minigame shape, same hidden skill roll underneath. Get it right and that car is yours for the session, exempt from lock checks until you get out and move on.

Full detail on ownership, keys, and theft counterplay lives over in Ownership, Keys & Security; refuelling and servicing is in Fuel & Maintenance.

Breaking Into a House

Lockpicking is one route into an unoccupied house that staff have set up as robbable around the city — never into another player’s home, which has its own separate access system entirely (see Home Security & Access). A quiet pick, a smashed window, or just trying the door on a cycle where it’s rolled unlocked are your three ways in, and casing the place first quietens whichever one you choose. That whole loop — casing, getting in, what’s worth grabbing, and where to sell it — is its own article: House Burglary.

Skill, Perks and the Odds

Your lockpicking skill (tracked under Skills & Progression) improves the hidden success roll behind vehicle lockpicking and hotwiring, and eases the minigame difficulty on a robbable house. Levelling it is simply a matter of using it.

Spend perk points in the criminal Lockpicking branch (see Perks & Prestige) and you’ll pick up two things as you rank up: an occasional chance to keep hold of a pick that would otherwise snap or get consumed, and a reduced — never removed — chance of tripping a police alert while you work. Even at the top of the tree, there’s no perk that makes lockpicking silent.

Alarms, Dispatch and Getting Caught

Every door lockpick you resolve, success or fail, carries a chance of quietly pinging the police as suspicious tampering at that location, naming you and roughly how tough the lock was. It’s a dice roll on every single attempt — perks shave the odds down, they don’t switch it off.

Forcing a car’s lock can set off a loud alarm of its own, which does the job of drawing attention without needing a dispatch ping. And regardless of what pings or doesn’t, a scene worked over with a pick leaves a trace that can be read after the fact — see Crime & Consequences and Evading the Law for how heat, evidence, and getting away with it actually fit together.

Nothing about lockpicking is truly risk-free. Even a clean success can still trip the alarm — that’s the trade-off for skipping a key.