Rogue: Lockpicking in the Bethesda RPGs

Note: This article is to be used purely for educational and hobbyist purposes. You should never pick a lock that isn't yours and never attempt to bypass the security of any lock you're not willing to break.

To play a different theme of game is to participate in different activities, and the Bethesda RPGs are as good an example of that as any. All of these roleplaying experiences contain similar features: inventory management, first-person dialogue, attribute systems, etc. However, each offers you something the others can't. When we choose to play the fantasy epic Elder Scrolls, we're choosing to save the world with swords and sorcery, but playing Fallout is opting to shoot and jury-rig our way to greasy survival. Then there's Starfield, which is a whole other kettle of fish, set in the only one of these universes where we can pilot a spaceship and survey planets.

While these RPGs are worlds apart, there's an activity Bethesda views as so enduring that it's performed everywhere from Cyrodil in the Third Era to Alpha Centauri in 2330: lockpicking. It leaves me asking why this form of interaction, rather than any other, is a trademark of Bethesda's empowerment fantasies. Or if we're to empathise with lockpicking, why is it always a tenant in Bethesda's RPGs? I could respond by saying that the Maryland-based studio grows that strain of interactive fantasy in which we can find plenty of non-lethal resolutions to the tension. Yet, we could say that about any number of other immersive sims and most of them don't get so hung up on what you can do with a hook and a tumbler. So, the original question rebounds back at us: why breaching locks? My take is that the perennial lockpicking is a byproduct of Bethesda's commitment to detailing their worlds and systemising the lives of their NPCs.

Most non-playable characters in games are assigned to a post and forbidden to abandon it, but Bethesda's go about daily routines with circadian rhythms set by the day/night cycle. In most virtual economies, you need to check in with a merchant or kill a vagabond if you want to fill your supply bag. In Bethesda RPGs, everyone has an inventory, and anyone can be pickpocketed. Most video game homes are empty facades, but Bethesda thinks if there's a structure, the player should generally be able to enter it. The developers are also unsatisfied to fill factories and fortresses with ornamental containers. If you storm one, you find every chest and lockbox filled with belongings you can examine or remove.

As most other video game buildings don't have interiors, they have nothing to protect with a lock, but given that Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield have hundreds of "insides", they warrant protection. And because Bethesda does the work to fill these interiors with delectable goodies (on shelves, in containers, and in pockets), it must make you sweat a little to get into them; the lockpicking minigame is that sweat. What's more, non-playable villagers and soldiers acting out a full day are going to come home and lock their door at night, whereas a character without an everyday schedule won't. Lastly, and very simply, the lockpicking is a systematisation of one of these worlds' little details: security mechanisms.

We have to remind ourselves that when game mechanics imitate real-world systems and objects, they take on their names. However, those virtual mechanics and items are not the same real systems and objects that bear their titles. This also means that when two different games have systems or mechanics that wear the same name tags, they may not be identical. In Bethesda RPGs, "lockpicking" refers to the act of overcoming a lock's defence mechanisms, but also to a number of distinct simulations of that breaching. Likewise, Bethesda's "lockpicks" narratively fulfil the role of real lockpicks, but in the context of these systems, that word also refers to a variety of items, each with their own specific purpose relevant to the unique systems of their given game. The point of this article is to describe those homophonic lockpickings and lockpicks.

What Are Locks?

There wouldn't be much point discussing the locks in Bethesda's RPGs without understanding the technologies they're based on. There's no single real lock design, but the mechanism that holds sway over the public's idea of this device, and the lock that you likely have on your front door, is a pin tumbler or Yale lock, invented by Linus Yale Sr. in 1848.^[1][2] I'll describe a modern, although not universal, version of the pin tumbler lock.

All locks have a keyway: a thin hole into which a key can be inserted. Above or below the keyway of a Yale lock is a row of chambers. Each chamber holds a small metal cylinder: a key pin. Resting on top of each key pin (although not connected to it) is another cylinder called a driver pin. Springs attach the driver pins to the end of the chamber furthest from the key pins.^[3][4]

Both driver and key pins extend into the "core" or "plug": the part of the lock that turns when you turn the key. The pins enter the plug through a series of small holes, and as long as a single pin is passing through a hole, the pin acts as a bolt that prevents the lock from turning.^[3][4] Non-Yale locks may use levers or discs instead of pins to prevent unauthorised opening.^[6][7] Any part which prevents a lock's opening mechanism from acting is called a "tumbler".

Because pin tumbler locks place one set of pins on top of the other, if the line between the top and bottom pins lines up exactly at the edge of the plug, the plug can be turned without the pins jamming it. In other words, the core will be able to rotate because all the driver pins are above the holes in it, and all the key pins are below those holes. No pin is passing through a hole, so the plug can spin, retracting a metal block that extends from the door into the doorframe. The lower key pins move with the core, while the upper driver pins stay in their chambers. The line on which the gap between the lower and driver pins must be located for a lock to open is called "the shear line".^[4]

Lower and upper pins in the same lock are cut to different heights, meaning they must also be raised to different heights for the gap between them to line up with the shear line. The teeth on a lock's corresponding key are cut to raise each pin to this "correct" height and open your sesame.^[4][8] If you inserted a different key with different teeth or "bitting", it would raise the pins to another set of heights, and the tumblers would not assemble along the shear line.^[4][8][9]

You'll notice that while I said the pins have to line up on the shear line and a key can command them to, I didn't say you can't use another object to align the pins, and that's what a locksmith does. First, they apply "torque" or rotational force to the plug using a tension tool. This allows them to make a small ledge between the outer cylinder and the inner plug that the driver pins can catch on. Secondly, they feel around in the keyway with a pick and use it to push the key pins upwards, which in turn pushes the driver pins above them upwards. The driver pins will eventually click into place on the lip between their chamber and the core, while the key pins will stay below that lip. After this process is completed for all pins, the gaps between the top and bottom pins will end up on that shear line, the tension tool will then turn the plug exactly as a key would, and the door will swing open.^[10] The act of jamming a pin into place along the shear line is called "setting" it.^[11] While I've only covered the basics of picking in this section, we have enough information to contextualise the activity in the first of our Bethesda games, where we can also grapple with some intermediate lockpicking concepts.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

While players could pick locks in Elder Scrolls I-III (1994-2002), they did this with the roll of a die; there was no lockpicking as a minigame until The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006. It's useful to discuss games' simulations of real-world systems and activities through what they depict or ignore about those systems or activities. Elder Scrolls IV's and The Elder Scrolls Online's takes on lockpicking seek to give a window into the mechanisms of locks, and these games specifically ruminate on the pins. In the real world, a lockpicking kit contains a host of items: rakes, bump keys, tension tools, etc.^[12][13][14] The lockpicks we hold in Elder Scrolls are otherwise known as "hook picks", which can take various lengths and shapes in the real world and are the fingers with which we "set" the pins.^[15] Remember, "setting" is jamming pins into place along the shear line. Our protagonists in Fallout use the old street smart of bending a bobby pin into a hook, even if that wouldn't be nearly as sturdy as a tool from a professional pick kit. In Tamriel, provisions are a little more generous.

Oblivion's picks are consumable items, and each chamber in Oblivion's locks houses only one pin instead of coupled driver and key pins. In the lockpicking minigame, the player may move their pick left and right to select a pin and press "Up" to bump that tumbler up to the shear line. When a pin hits the top of its chamber, the player must quickly hit another button to clamp it in place. On each strike, the pin flies up fast or not so fast; the opportune time to clamp it is on a tap when it moves slowly. If the player attempts to set a pin when it's not lodged into the roof of its groove, they will break a pick, and other pins they have already secured may reset. The possibility of dropping tumblers back into their default positions means that the player can't just store up a sack of lockpicks and randomly hammer the "set" button on each pin, hoping to brute force it. That will undo their previous work.

Oblivion's pins don't emerge into a rotating core; they intersect with a bolt, and once all the pins are set, our character can pull the bolt back to open the chest or door. The sport requires a sensitivity to movement that you'd expect in lockpicking, but it's also a game of reaction times. I've seen a lot of gamers say that, for them, Oblivion was a class on how locks operate. This minigame can be an entrance to that knowledge, and it has us testing pins to see if they can be bumped into place just like a real locksmith. However, it's important to remember that Oblivion's minigame is not intended to stream you realistic, contemporary knowledge of pin tumbler locks.

The Oblivion locks are the inventions of faux-medieval hamlets and are intended to be trivial to operate. As covered, they lack the dual-pin system of the Yale lock. Oblivion's guardians also have no rotational movement, and therefore, no need for a picker to apply torque, and unlike our locks, they don't have a "binding order": a sequence in which the pins must be set.^[16] The player in Elder Scrolls can tackle the parts in any order they wish. As the pins in Cyrodil's locks are all the same length, one key could also open every door, and Tamriel is still waiting for someone to come along and invent security pins.

Much like cybersecurity professionals had to devise defences against trespassers, so did lockmakers. That's where the unique grooves in the key and the security pins come in. Security pins are pin variants meant to protect the lock from sneaky infiltrators. They are mushroom-shaped, spool-shaped, or serrated, among other designs. They confound the picker by making the pins tough to get purchase on or easy to jam halfway into the plug, or by giving the picker false feedback, among other methods.^[17]

The Oblivion locks, with their deadbolts and identically tall pins, are highly similar to an Ancient Egyptian lock design, among the first ever created. As Bethesda progressed into Skyrim and Fallout, they would not only replace the Egyptian-style lock with a cylindrical design, they would think about the experience of picking locks from a new visual perspective.

Fallout/The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda quickly swapped the gilded, almost art-deco locks of Cyrodil for grubby, scratched doormen. While the picking minigames in Oblivion and Elder Scrolls Online are rooted primarily in pin mechanics, the minigames in Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are about the experience of a picker. A locksmith doesn't get to see a cross-section of the parts barring them from entry; they stare dead-on at the poker face of the edifice and navigate mole-like by feel and sound.^[18] When it comes to lock anatomy, this minigame also cares more about the plug's rotation than the pins' heights.

It works like this: The player character inserts a chisel or a screwdriver into the lock with one hand. This is their tension tool: the tool that applies rotational force. In their other hand, they hold a hook or bobby pin. The player turns the hook or bobby pin within an arc, searching for a position that will free the lock. When they want to test if they've found the special position, they push the tension tool to one side to spin the plug. If their pin or hook is in the sweet spot, then the lock will rotate all the way, and the door will swing open. Otherwise, the turning motion will stop short, and the pick will quiver. If the pick is shaking and the player does not let off the screwdriver/chisel quickly, the pick will break, and they will have to start over. The closer the hook/pin is to the destination zone, the further the lock will turn before seizing.

The player solves the lock by trial and error, as well as an educated feel for what counts as "enough" torque. Only then can you throw aside the board in front of a shack or the gates of an industrial plant. All of these are skills that actual-ass locksmiths carry in their brain belt. Although, to my knowledge, this 180-degree probing isn't something one of our pickers would do. We can only surmise from the minigame that these locks are bound by a pin that may be arbitrarily located anywhere around the northern hemisphere of the keyway.

With characteristic exactitude from Bethesda, Elder Scrolls contains books that remember the history of lockpicking and the art of Tamrielian lock design. We learn that locks are fabricated from brass and copper and that crafty specialists have come up with the idea of having each pin forged by a different smith. One book, Advances in Lockpicking, attests to locks having pins set at angles, and these tomes acknowledge the existence of multiple pins in locks. As we only search the locks for one pin, we know the minigames must be artistic interpretations of how locks are defeated within the world's canon.

Now, why would Bethesda ditch the Oblivion lock setup for this one? It is not that the developer wants a new lockpicking minigame for every RPG because Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, 76, and Skyrim include almost identical lockpicking mechanics. It's also not that they considered Oblivion's lockpicking aesthetically appropriate for that world, but sought distinct gameplay for Fallout. Skyrim and Fallout include nearly mirrored lockpicking, while the ESO and Skyrim versions are distinct from Oblivion's, despite ESO, Skyrim, and Oblivion all hailing from the same series.

The Oblivion minigame may well have been given the shaft because it's not readily apparent how to play it. If you're not scanning for those moments when a pin rises in slow motion, you probably won't be able to set that pin. Yet, neither the game nor its manual tells you that the speed of the pins is inconsistent. If a player does notice that the velocity of the pin changes, they may not know whether that's down to an action on their part or RNG. The pins actually jump fast or slow in a repeating pattern. If you hit the same one three times, it might rise fast, then fast, then slow. Any subsequent three strikes would also result in a fast, then fast, then slow rise. However, this, too, goes unexplained. In Fallout and Skyrim, you can determine how a lock responds to you and what's being asked of you with just a little stretching of your fingers. Additionally, while you can start picking in Fallout/Skyrim at a measured pace and speed up as you improve, Oblivion requires decent reaction times even at the novice grade. Some players didn't feel like they could get their feet on the peddles.

When you consider the ambitious sprawl of a single Bethesda map, it's also obvious that users will potentially end up interacting with a lot of locks in a single save slot. Therefore, you want experienced players to be able to defeat them quickly so they don't get bored, but there's only so fast you can ever be at Oblivion lockpicking. You need to force multiple individual pins into position, must often press a pin repeatedly to drop into bullet time, and when the difficulty of a lock increases, so does its pin count. In Fallout and Skyrim, however, you only need to find a single weak spot in a lock to open it. As The Lone Wanderer, I felt like a fucking wizard when I got adept enough to clear a door in just a few seconds.

"Unbreakable", an advanced perk from Skyrim, appears to be designed with the need for speed in mind. As the perk prevents lockpicks from snapping, you can rush through break-ins without worrying about wasting valuable inventory. Oblivion and Skyrim's Skeleton Keys similarly allow scoundrels to open doors without pick breakage. In Oblivion, the Skeleton Key is rewarded for completing the quest Nocturnal, while in Skyrim, you can bag it by finishing the quest Blindsighted. However, in Elder Scrolls V, the player must eventually return this tool to the Daedric Prince if they want to complete the quest Darkness Returns. While real skeleton keys exist, contrary to popular myth, they can't open any lock. They are specialised to open a type of lock called a "warded lock" and cannot overcome the defences of a Yale lock.^[19] It's a relief.

The juxtaposition between the Oblivion break-ins and Bethesda's subsequent lockpicking minigames can teach us where boolean inputs and where variable inputs each excel in game design. A keyboard or D-Pad is a great interface for the Oblivion minigame, where we use a single, sharp press to jolt the pins. However, in Fallout/Skyrim, we want to alter the speed at which we move the hook: fast if we think it's far from the sweet spot and slow if we think we're near it. We may also want to change the velocity with which we turn the plug, being cautious with tougher locks or if less practised. The upshot is that the gradated input you get from a control stick is superior to the binary presses of a key or D-Pad. Additionally, not only does the rumble of a gamepad help immerse us in Fallout and Skyrim's activity, but it is valuable output when we can't see inside the lock.

The Elder Scrolls Online

The Elder Scrolls Online is the kooky cousin of this lock-tampering family. Every other Bethesda game from 2007-2018 used the play described in the previous section, but not 2014's ESO. Nor would a Bethesda game after this MMO reuse ESO's lockpicking mechanics. This minigame is, however, further evidence to me that the Oblivion minigame was retired because it wasn't fast or readable enough. The ESO door cracking is inspired by Elder Scrolls IV's, but uses more expressive animations and speeds you along like a drill sergeant. Its pin tumblers are everything Oblivion's weren't. This is also the one Bethesda lockpicking minigame which includes a 3D model of its security technology, letting you see the chambers and keyhole in relation to each other.

For each pin in an ESO lock, you must hold down the "depress" button. This will cause your character to gradually plunge the tumbler into its chamber. When the pin comes close to its "set" position, it will begin shaking, and will vibrate more vigorously the further it lowers. The player must press the button to set the pin a little after it starts shaking, but not force the pin so far that their pick breaks and the pin returns to its default placement. There's no time to waste in hacking each cylinder of the lock, as you must complete the whole rank within a claustrophobic time limit.

The minigame's design has been shaped by the exclusive object access and real-time progression of its massively-multiplayer environment. Other Bethesda RPGs have the world freeze while you pinch the edges of a lock, but an ESO server has many players, and the developer isn't going to paralyse the whole world for you to finish lifting the latch on a chest. Even sitting on most locks for too long cannot be an option, as you'd block other players from operating on them. The time wall whips a towel at your ass, allowing another player to shoot their shot if you can't best the mechanism before the clock runs out. As the minigame is played under temporal pressure, the designers had to make it quick and simple to set each pin.

NPCs are still alert and active while a player tries to plunder their life savings, meaning that if a lock protects something dear to an NPC, the player better be well-hidden or have killed everyone in a twenty-foot radius around them. Roving witnesses also provide a potential bonus for opening a lock lickety-split: that's less time in which you have to worry about an enraged guard catching you. Safeboxes in Elder Scrolls Online disappear after their contents have been emptied, so players are persuaded to walk, not run, to a fastened lock. Else, another adventurer might beat them to their prize.

Starfield

Sci-fi carries a stigma of futurism and advanced technology, but the nostalgic and impoverished Fallout shows that these concepts aren't joined to the genre at the hip. We got seventeen years of lockpicking gameplay from Bethesda, but it took until 2023's Starfield for us to bust the lock of tomorrow. In Bethesda's Fallouts (and New Vegas), lockpicking and hacking each had their own rules, but in this space opera, the two exploits of cunning are finally made one. This fusion prevents the player becoming overstuffed with minigames during a single playthrough, and if you'd enjoyed all the Bethesda RPGs up to this point, you'd have wolfed down more than a few side activities. The downside to Starfield's approach is that it makes for less variation in the minigames overall, an outgrowth of the larger disappointment that the game's Milky Way does not have the depth of Fallout's USA or Elder Scrolls' Tamriel.

With Starfield's "digipicks", we fill the gaps in series of concentric circles. We do that by selecting a circular array of pins from the table, rotating it, and, if the pins line up with the voids in the ring, slotting them into place. Placing a set of pins into a halo consumes that pin set. When a ring has no more holes left, we move down to the next one. We can also hit "undo" at any time and as many times as we like to revoke our previous placements without any penalties. The gameplay suggests that in the future, pins are injected into the lock from the outside rather than being an inherent component of these objects.

In the conversion from the manual picking of Elder Scrolls/Fallout to the reprogramming in Starfield, Bethesda observes that computers are tools that allow us to avoid manipulating hardware directly and instead have us interact with parts through the intermediary of software. Early mechanical computers like the difference engine or the stepped reckoner had to have their data and instructions input manually, and their efficiency was bottlenecked by that need. However, later electronic computers could support program code, allowing for fast automation of hardware operations and more efficient oversight of what the metal underneath did. In Starfield, we don't ever touch a hook or keyway, but on convex scopes, we twist glowing constellations that look like they could represent picks. The computer does the rest.

Because software operators are distanced from physical parts, they don't employ physical skills like reaction time or sleight of hand. What they need instead is reasoning. Likewise, where Elder Scrolls' and Fallout's supervisors asked for a steady hand and fast digits, Starfields' lockpicking minigame may be the first that we can call a puzzle. Under some classifications, it's exactly the need to use intellectual abilities rather than any others that defines a puzzle.

You can also see that this is the first of these minigames that exposes all information about the game state to the player. In Oblivion, you didn't know when you'd get the slow press. In ESO, you didn't know where in a pin's descent it would shake. In Skyrim and Fallout, the sweet spot is hidden. Yet, in Starfield, every piece of information you need to solve the puzzle is spread out on your desk in front of you. The catch is you don't know how to assemble the parts, meaning that even total transparency doesn't strip it of challenge.

It's unfortunate that Starfield likes to drop digipicks right next to locks; you no longer get a reward for coming prepared. And sometimes, the fastest method for burning through one of these firewalls is to aimlessly throw a bunch of solutions at it rather than think about which keys you can afford to spend now and which you'll have to save for later. You could say that at least you need to line up the key with the holes every time. There's always some working out. The Level 2 Security perk, which discloses whether any one set of pins can be applied to the current ring or not, is incredibly useful. That's because most of this minigame is reasoning over what you require and what's surplus to requirements. This also makes the Level 4 perk, which shows which pins you can safely disregard, ferociously pragmatic.

Forcing Locks and Unbreakable Picks

That would be a good album title, actually. Unlike other Bethesda RPGs since Morrowind, Starfield and Skyrim don't give you a license to "force" locks. Forcing is a gameplay action that lets players bypass the lockpicking minigame and roll a die to decide whether they can hear the sweet clunk of a surrendering bolt. It uses the TTRPG logic that drove the lock-befuddling of Elder Scrolls I-III. The player character's security/lockpicking skill and the lock's difficulty are coefficients in calculating the chance that a force is successful. During the late game, the force is just what the doctor ordered. After stomping all over Oblivion or the big wide wasteland, you might well be sick of lockpicking, but you probably have so many lockpicks in your inventory it looks like a steel porcupine. The player who is over lockpicking could, like Luke, use the force and expend their excess lockpicks to skip the minigame.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas fumbled the forcing feature, giving a small chance for a lock to break on a failed force. A broken lock can never be opened unless it has a key associated with it, and you collect that key, or you possess the Infiltrator perk. The possibility of a room or container being closed to you forever was such a strict punishment that it was never worth brutalising a lock and risking its wrath. Bethesda learned its lesson on this one because in Elder Scrolls, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, all locks are indestructible.

Conclusion

While I've diaried the aesthetics of these minigames and the mechanics of real locks, I can't help but feel that these descriptions don't fully capture the rogueishness of lockpicking in Bethesda's RPGs. I think the one last thing missing is the context in which we perform the activity. It matters not just what the mechanics and inspirations of the minigames are. It matters what state our character has to be in to enter the subgame.

Lockpicking is something we do out of sight, crouched before a wooden plank or battered lockbox like a frog ready to leap. We check our 9 and 3 to make sure we're not in sight of witnesses, we don our Gray Cowl or double-check that the meter says we're hidden. Lockpicking is fun because it lets us outsmart crafty mechanisms, but it's also fun because it's forbidden, criminal, not what you're meant to be doing. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Phillips, B. (2005). The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing, Sixth Edition. McGraw-Hill (p. 10).
2. Ibid. (p. 112).
3. Ibid. (p. 103).
4. Ibid. (p. 106).
5. Deviant's Lock Diagrams and Animations by Deviant Ollam (Date Unknown, Accessed July 27, 2025), TOOOL: The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers. Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. These images were scaled down for the purposes of this article. The "pin setting" GIF was also sped up.
6. The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing (p. 69).
7. Ibid. (p. 87).
8. Ibid. (p. 107).
9. Ibid. (p. 66).
10. Ibid. (p. 298-300).
11. Ollam, D. (2012). Practical Lock Picking: A Physical Penetration Tester's Training Guide, Second Edition. Syngress. (p. 49).
12. The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing (p. 50).
13. Ibid. (p. 67).
14. Ibid. (p. 178).
15. Ibid. (p. 53).
16. Weyers, J., Burrough, M., et al. (2024). Locksport: A Hacker's Guide to Lockpicking, Impressioning, and Safe Cracking. No Starch Press, Inc. (p. 84).
17. Practical Lock Picking (p. 137-142).
18. Hampton, S. (1987). Secrets of Lockpicking. Paladin Press (p. 18-19).
19. Ollam, D. (2012). Keys to the Kingdom: Impressioning, Privilege Escalation, Bumping, and Other Key-Based Attacks Against Physical Locks. Syngress (p. 191-195).

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.