Could Someone Please Fix the Lockpicking Problem

[jayrichardm]

It has never made any sense that you only get Lock picking skill credit the first time you pick a lock. It is just as hard to pick the lock the second and third time you pick the same lock after it has reset. We should be getting a skill credit bump every time we pick a lock.

 

Trying to fix every lock as I ask above might be too much and too complicated. If we could just limit that to a fix for locked chests, that would be fine.

[Shadeybladey]

But if it worked like that, we could sit there failing, failing, failing, failing for hours on end and get massive skill boosts!

 

My view is that we should only get credit when we successfully pick a lock, but the credit should depend on the difficulty/quality of the lock vs our lock picking skill.

 

There are several "Stealth Skills Rebalanced" types of mods available. Did you have a look through them?

 

I have not made any mods since about 2014, but I am tempted to take a look some time.

 

:)

[MFitz56]

But if it worked like that, we could sit there failing, failing, failing, failing for hours on end and get massive skill boosts!

 

My view is that we should only get credit when we successfully pick a lock, but the credit should depend on the difficulty/quality of the lock vs our lock picking skill.

 

There are several "Stealth Skills Rebalanced" types of mods available. Did you have a look through them?

 

I have not made any mods since about 2014, but I am tempted to take a look some time.

 

:smile:

Interestingly, it actually works like that. When you attempt to pick a lock and fail your lockpicking skill does go up. It will not show as increasing the skill LEVEL until you actually succeed. I discovered this early on with a Master level lock. So, it is possible to keep failing for hours and see the level go up BUT that would be massively boring.

[Shadeybladey]

So, it is possible to keep failing for hours and see the level go up BUT that would be massively boring.

 

LOL! Yes, it would! And expensive on picks!

 

Especially when, if you don't mind cheating yourself, you could just enter incpcs lockpicking 100 times in the console and get Maxed skill and a good few character level rises!

 

But ya gotta lave Bethesda and their broken equations...

 

:D

 

My new character is trapped in the basement of Anise's Cabin, downstream and the other side from Riverwood. My Alchemy mod edited it and put some ingredients and recipe books in there. So after making 60 picks at Alvor's forge, I went back and got killed 4 times en route by a bandit, a wild boar and then twice by by a wandering sabre cat and a Flame Atronach. No wonder she was dead when I first got there!

 

So I decided to leg it, and time seems to stop while picking locks, as I broke three on the novice lock, but got in and snaffed the loot.

 

Now I have to get out...

 

:D

[jayrichardm]

I'm not talking about when you fail to pick a lock, miss ShadeyBlady. I'm talking about when you successfully pick a lock, like the five chests in the Thieves Guild, and then after a while the locks reset and you come back and successfully pick them all again. The vanilla game doesn't give any lock picking skill credit the second time you pick them and I think it should.

 

No, I haven't tried any "Stealth Skills Rebalanced" mods because I haven't known what to look for. If I can find some of those, I'll give them a try. Doing a Mod search on the word "Stealth" and again on "Skill" I didn't see anything that sounded like what I'm looking for.

[Shadeybladey]

Oh, you mean a specific set of dynamic, resetting locks? Most locks, once you pick them, they do not reset and stay open. Good thing you mentioned that! That would need a modification of those chests

 

Yeah, that would make sense for training purposes at the Thieve's Guild.

 

If we can improve magick skills by casting over and over, and improve missiles and melee by hitting targets and dummies, and sneaking into a wall when people are around improves your Sneak skill, it would make sense to be able to practice and train lock picking and pickpockets in a similar way.

 

And you're right, MFitz56! I found a chest with an Expert lock on it and broke many picks, and saw my skill increase each time. When I finally opened the thing, I got 3 levels of lock picking! I never noticed before as I usually used a spell, but I am playing a Thief this time.

 

:D

[jayrichardm]

Also the four locked display cases in the Jarl's quarters in dreagonsreach. Almost all locked chests, locked display cases and locked jail cells reset after 30 in-game days when the cell resets, but locked doors no. That is if the location resets at all. The doors on most houses are locked at night or when the occupants are away, no matter how many times you unlock them if the occupant has gone through the door. I would think there would be some general game perimeters that could be fixed instead of having to deal with each individual lock.

[Shadeybladey]

Also the four locked display cases in the Jarl's quarters in dreagonsreach. Almost all locked chests, locked display cases and locked jail cells reset after 30 in-game days when the cell resets, but locked doors no.

 

Ah, OK, that makes more sense. I only started re-playing recently after about a 6 year break, I am still a bit fuzzy.

 

Yes, cells reset after 30 days; plants regrow, new animals wander in and NPCs lock their doors and chests. You'd think the rich ones would place a new lock when they discovered they'd been burgled!

 

And yes again, there is probably a script or something to which all the locks are linked, or a set of scripts for each difficulty level. And probably some way the game has of tracking which locks have been picked and how many times.

 

But I agree, if you come back and pick a reset lock, I don't see why you would get no experience. It's probably that the game considers each individual instance of a lock as an entity and when it respawns it is the same entity, and the lock on the Jarl's cabinet is a specific, tracked instance of a lock, whereas another wolf than spawns near Riverwood is a new instance of a different wolf. So you get XP for the 2nd wolf but not for picking the same lo ck the 2nd time. Or something like that.

 

If we can work out exactly what makes the respawned, re-locked locks remain the same instance of a lock already picked, and other things, we could probably quite easily do something about it. It could be a script keeping track of when a lock has been unlocked and toggling the No XP effect.

 

 

"Stealth Skills Rebalanced" is by kryptopyr, who made several excellent mods. You can find it here:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/28418

 

I don't know if it does what you want, and if you are using SSE it may (possibly) not work properly, but it works perfectly with Legendary Edition.

 

You could also try asking at AFK Mods, as there are people there far cleverer than I.

[jayrichardm]

I'll give Kryptopyr's mod a try when I'm able to, it will be a few days before I can do that. I am using SSE but I need to reinstall it. Thanks for the tip.

[jayrichardm]

I finished playing with Kryptopyr's mod. It doesn't do what I hoped it would do, give lock picking skill credit for picking locks that you'd opened before. I went to the Thieves Guild and opened the five chests in the training room again. My lock picking skill meter didn't budge. He does drop your current lock picking skill by 40 points which makes it considerably harder to pick a lock. That's what he means by making picking locks more "challenging". To me that is going backwards. I look for mods that make the game easier, not harder. Besides Lock picking in Skyrim is already 3 times harder than it is in Fallout 4. It doesn't need to be any harder.

 

I didn't notice a lot of difference in the sneak and pickpocket skills other than a few miner changes to the skill trees.

 

It's fun to check out different mods, but I won't be keeping this one.