Now, I went over the basics of lockpicking in Starfield in my previous guide so we’ll just quickly go over those parts. I’d highly recommend checking that one out first and then coming over to this one.
In 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. Of course, making the main goal simple we just want to check out the patterns and figure out which ones will take care of each of the circles and try to have it all planned out before we lock any of them in.
This will be easy at first, but as you take more points in the security skill, you’ll be able to take on harder and harder locks. They balance this a bit by giving you some extra tools and perks to help make the minigame easier.
For the ranks of the security skill, you can attempt novice locks right off the bat without putting any points into security.
With the first rank of security, you’ll be able to hack advanced locks and you’ll have 2 auto attempts that can be banked. When you use one of these auto attempts it will automatically pick one of the available patterns and place it in the position that it’ll work in the outer most ring.
The second rank of security will allow you to hack expert locks and bank 3 auto attempts. It also turns the rings blue when the pattern you’re on is able to fit somewhere on it. This is the really big one that you absolutely want to level up to pretty quickly.
Rank 3 will allow you to hack master level locks and bank 4 auto attempts.
And finally rank 4 will allow you to expend a digipick to eliminate the keys that aren’t required to solve the puzzle Plus you can bank 5 auto attempts.
Now let’s get into a master level lock so I can break down the thought process and how to get through these lock puzzles without getting stuck and wasting digipicks.
The biggest pro-tip I can give first though.. Save before attempting a high difficulty lock. Whatever difficulty you’re not feeling confident about make sure you save before picking the lock so you can just revert the save if you end up messing it up, or you want to reroll for an easier puzzle. Nothing wrong with that one.
Okay, so for this master lock we’ll have the lock pulled up, but a thing you can also do to help yourself out is to grab a piece of paper, a tablet, or whatever you can use to take notes on where the patterns go.
So, I'll do this to make this master lock easier. We'll start out drawing out all of the circles. You of course don't have to do it exactly like this, but this is what I thought helped the most for me.
We'll start with the first ring and try to find which patterns will work for it. After moving around a few it looks like I should probably be able to use the bottom right one in combination with the top right one to fill those out.
And just a reminder, as long as you have security 2 the rings will turn blue if the pattern you have selected can fit there so we know both of those can only go into the first ring anyway.
Then moving to the second ring it looks like the middle right pattern will fit so let's put that there and see if another one will fill in the rest.
The second one on the top row looks like the right spacing and it looks like it'll fit. With any of the ones that have a smaller number of notches in the pattern you want to be careful because those can generally fit in a lot of the circles, but we can go back and change it if we need to later as long as we don't slot any of these patterns in.
Normally I would then move on to the third ring, but when going over the third pattern in the middle I saw that it can only go on the fourth ring, so I went ahead and put it there to solve that ring. Then we have two spaces left over and I already saw which one would go there so we can mark it off as well.
Now the only one left is the third ring. Looking at the patterns left with 4 notches there's one that will fit on that ring, leaving only one gap left over and we happen to have a couple of patterns with only one notch. So, we'll mark this one off as well as one of the ones with only one notch.
At that point we have all of them solved and can just look at our notes to move over to those patterns and solve the lock.
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