Lockpick Rebalanced - Loot and Skill FINAL

Lockpick New Balance

Lockpicking that respects what's actually in the chest.

Vanilla treats a crate of rusty junk and a warlord's strongbox the same way: same puzzle, same fiddling, same reward. This mod reads what is actually inside every chest and scales the lock, the difficulty rating and the XP to match.

Cheap chests stop wasting your time. Rich chests stay worth cracking. And once you've trained the skill, you can spend real Lockpicks from your inventory to skip a lock outright.

⚙️ What it does

• []Loot-aware locks — every chest is graded into five tiers by the total ore value of its contents. Connections are removed from the lock based on that tier and your Lockpicking skill.[/]

  []Honest difficulty pips — the in-game difficulty rating is rewritten to match what the lock will actually feel like, so the icon stops lying to you.[/]

  []Instant open — press Y to preview the Lockpick cost, Shift+Y to spend them and bypass the minigame.[/]

  []XP that scales — better chests pay more, and skipping a lock pays too. No more losing XP because the mod made the lock trivial.[/]

  []Doors included — flat per-skill easing, plus their own Lockpick-spend cost.[/]

  []Fully configurable — every number lives in one plain data file. No code changes.[/]

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  📦 Chest Tiers (by total ore value of contents)

  • []Tier I — under 75 ore[/]

    []Tier II — 75 to 149[/]

    []Tier III — 150 to 399[/]

    []Tier IV — 400 to 899[/]

    []Tier V — 900 and above[/]

    Easier locks only kick in once you've learned Lockpick II.

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    🔓 Lockpicking Skill Tiers

    Lockpick I — Untrained

    • []Tier I chests get an easier lock. Everything else stays vanilla.[/]

      []Doors: 1 connection removed.[/]

      []You can still buy your way through a lock — see the spend table below — but it's deliberately expensive.[/]

      Lockpick II — Skilled

      • []Tier I chests open instantly — no puzzle at all.[/]

        []1 extra connection removed on every lock.[/]

        []12% chance of one more on top.[/]

        []Chests worth 150–399 get a further connection removed.[/]

        []Doors: 2 connections removed.[/]

        Lockpick III — Master

        • []Tier I and Tier II chests open instantly.[/]

          []2 extra connections removed on every lock.[/]

          []25% chance of one more on top.[/]

          []Chests worth 150–399 get a further connection removed.[/]

          []Doors: 3 connections removed.[/]

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          🗝️ Instant Open — spend Lockpicks to skip the minigame

          Focus a locked chest or door. Press Y to see what it would cost. Press Shift+Y to commit — the Lockpicks are consumed from your inventory and the lock is gone.

          Chests:

          • []Untrained — Tier II: 3 Lockpicks - Tier III: 5 Lockpicks - Tier IV+: not available[/]

            []Skilled — Tier I: free (automatic) - Tier II: 1 - Tier III: 2 - Tier IV+: not available[/]

            []Master — Tier I & II: free (automatic) - Tier III: 1 - Tier IV: 2 - Tier V: not available[/]

            Doors: Untrained 4 · Skilled 2 · Master 1

            Untrained costs are steep on purpose — an early-game Lockpick sink, and a reason to actually buy the skill.

            How it resolves: Shift+Y queues the charge. The Lockpicks are spent and the lock cleared the next time you interact with that chest or door. Pressing Shift+Y alone never opens anything by itself, and a failed charge never becomes a free open.

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            ⭐ XP

            The game only pays lockpicking XP through the minigame's own success path — which never runs for a lock this mod removes. So removals grant their own XP through the game's real XP function, with the same level-up handling and +XP popup as any other source.

            • []Tier I — 15 XP[/]

              []Tier II — 30 XP[/]

              []Tier III — 60 XP[/]

              []Tier IV — 120 XP[/]

              []Tier V — 240 XP[/]

              []Doors — 40 XP[/]

              Picking a lock manually pays too. Because this mod usually lowers difficulty, and vanilla XP scales with difficulty, a manual pick would otherwise pay far less than a skip. So a successful manual pick is topped up to roughly the same