Lockpicking

Locks all over the city can be picked: parked car doors, house and business doors, cash registers, vending machines, apartment doors and handcuffs. Every lock is Easy, Medium or Hard, and each kind of lock plays its own little game.

Lockpicking is a skill with five levels (Beginner to Master). Every lock you open gives XP. Harder locks give more, and easy locks stop teaching you anything once you're good. At Master you open Easy locks without playing at all.

What you need

Tool	Opens	Notes
Bobby Pin	Easy locks	Cheap, sold at 24/7 stores and found in bins. Bends easily
Lockpick	Easy and Medium locks	Hardware stores and locksmiths. Can snap
Advanced Pick Set	Every lock	Black market or crafted. Plays one level easier and rarely breaks. Needed for Hard locks

Use the pick from your inventory while standing at the lock. You always use the best pick you're carrying.

The games

Game	Where	How it plays
Shim timing	Registers, padlocks	A marker slides along a track. Press `E` while it crosses the gap
Rake	Boxes, lockers, crates, vending machines	Mash `A` / `D` to fill the bar, but keep the tension needle inside the moving band. Too much tension for too long and the pick snaps
Wafer slide	Car doors, trunks	Drag each wafer with the mouse until its notch sits on the centre line, before the tension bar runs out
Pin order	House, business and apartment doors	Tap a pin (number keys or click) to probe it. Only the binding pin clicks. Press `Space` to set it. Setting the wrong one drops a pin you already set
Listen	Hard locks, handcuffs	Nothing to see. Move the mouse along the line and listen: the ticking gets faster and higher as you get close. Click to set

Hard locks chain two games: set the pins, then listen for the last one. Class S cars finish with Listen too. Backspace gives up.

When it goes wrong

Your pick can snap (a bobby pin bends).
Cars sound their alarm. Elsewhere someone may hear you and call it in.
You may leave light tool marks for the police.
Fail the same lock three times and it jams for a few minutes. A crowbar or a gun still works on it.

Crowbar

Hold a crowbar and walk up to a lock: [E] Pry open. Hold E to build up strain and keep the needle inside the lilac zone until each stage is done. Max it out and the bar slips. Slip too often and the crowbar bends.

Works on Easy and Medium locks only. Hard locks are too solid.
It's loud. People nearby are likely to call it in.
It leaves pry marks. The crime lab can match them to the crowbar that made them.
What happens to the thing you pried depends on how clean the pry was. On a car, a clean pry bends the door. A messy one smashes the window or tears the door off. A pried register stays broken.

Shoot the lock

Aim a gun at a lock (registers, padlocks, door locks, car doors, boxes). A strip shows your odds: the weapon's open chance and your ricochet chance. Fire while the ring is on the lock.

Shotguns work best. Pistols are a gamble and SMGs waste ammo.
It always counts as shots fired, and you leave casings behind.
A ricochet can hit you: 15-40 HP and your blood on the floor. Very rarely it puts you down.
A shot can wreck the lock for good, and a shot-up register pays out less.
On a car you might hit the fuel tank or pop a tyre.

Shooting and prying train the Brute Force skill: higher levels mean cleaner pries and fewer ricochets.

Handcuffs

Cuffed, with a pick somewhere on you? Press 6 to work on your own cuffs. You can also walk up to a cuffed friend and use [E] Pick their cuffs. It's a Hard lock (advanced pick set) and the Listen game. If an officer comes near you get a warning, and if they get close the attempt stops. Zip ties have to be cut, they can't be picked.

Picking together

On Medium and Hard door locks a second player can help. Walk up to someone who is picking and use [E] Hold tension. You get a tension band to hold with A / D. While you keep it steady, the picker's time drains slower and a wrong pin doesn't count as a miss.

Better locks

Locksmiths sell Security Lock (Medium) and High-Security Lock. Use one at a door you're allowed through and its lock becomes Medium or Hard. Bobby pins can't open a Medium lock, and a crowbar can't open a Hard one.

Covering your tracks

Carry a Tool Rag (hardware stores). Tool and pry marks you leave are smudged, so the lab can't match them to your tools. Rags wear out.

For the police

Tool marks and pry marks show up with a flashlight like other evidence. Bag them and run them at the crime lab. Clean pry marks name the crowbar's serial and who is holding it.

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