Bethesda’s been going with the same lockpicking system for their past few games and most other games have copied their homework, but now they’ve brewed up something a bit more complicated, and a lot cooler.
Now the first thing you’ll need to even get started lockpicking is a digipick. These can be obtained by purchasing them at general stores in cities or just by looting them. Generally, you’ll be able to find plenty of these sitting on tables, shelves, or by safes. They seem to really like giving you one any time there’s a safe to unlock. You’ll even occasionally find them sitting on the bodies of pirates you kill, so make sure you’re checking those bodies.
Once you’ve got a digipick and something that’s locked you can get into the lockpicking minigame. Of course, you can only attempt to pick locks that are at or below your skill level, meaning you’ll only be able to unlock novice level locks at first, but gain additional difficulties with each level you put into the security skill. This also gets you additional tricks and abilities to make lockpicking easier, but we’ll go over that in a more advanced guide.
Now getting into the minigame we have our lock wheel in the center, our digipick patterns on the right, as well as our number of digipicks in our inventory right above them.
Our lock wheel will have a number of rings with notches missing in the rings. Our goal is going to be to use the patterns on the right to fill in these missing notches. But… there are two catches. Well, I guess kind of three. We can only work on the outside ring until that is filled and then we can move on to the inside ring, and when we use one of the patterns it will no longer be an option. That means you can very easily run into scenarios where you used the wrong pattern for the wrong spot and have to start over, or undo, and waste extra digipicks. The patterns can also ONLY be used if there is a gap for every one of its notches to go into. They have to be a perfect match, or they can’t be used.
So, with the basic rules in place we can solve it. Our top priority is going to be to cycle through the patterns on the right and figure out exactly where each one will fit, but don’t slot any of the patterns in until after we’ve confirmed where they all go. Pro tip - the patterns retain their positioning as you move through them, so you can plan it all out ahead of time, and then go through and confirm them all once you’ve solved it.
So, starting with this first one we’ll move it around and see if it fits on the outer ring. It doesn’t, so we’ll start looking at the inner ring. It looks like it would slot in right here, so we’ll leave that for now.
Moving onto the second pattern we can check if it will work in the outer ring. It looks like it could fit right here, so we’ll leave it there for now.
Same thing with the third pattern, we’ll see where it can fit. No where on the outer circle, but it looks like it can go on the inner circle and fit into the notches where our other inner circle pattern didn’t go. Perfect.
Now for the last pattern we just need it to fit in the outer circle on the left side. Yep, it looks like it does, so this lock ended up being fairly straight forward.
With the positions all figured out we can go ahead and slot each one in to unlock this lock and take all of the valuables inside.
As you get to the advanced and harder locks, you’re going to start being introduced with some patterns that aren’t actually going to be needed, and then an additional ring with the expert locks.
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