Daggerfall Workshop Forums

I guess this remake nerfed lockpicking but now its pointless to have. Impossible to level up, and never opens anything.

Nah, no nerf involved. It was always terrible You can see the small change which was made to lockpicking in DFU on this page. No matter how you look at it, it's an awful skill to rely on!

Dang, well I am sorry I selected it then, almost impossible to level and it never works

Kaelis wrote: ↑Thu Nov 25, 2021 8:44 pm Dang, well I am sorry I selected it then, almost impossible to level and it never works

You can try adding the Skulduggery mod to change the calculation of success. Also the skill books mod will let you read a book to train it.

Leveling it only depends on your attempts, not your success. So if you go out every night and click on a bunch of locked doors, you'll attempt it several times and can level it up.

There are also the trainers in the Thieves Guild, if you decide to join them.

AFAIK both lockpicking formulae match classic. These were added by Allofich in 2017, and that typically means they were sourced properly or reverse engineered by him. There are two lockpicking formulae depending on where lock is found:

Interior Locks (e.g. inside dungeons and buildings) Exterior Locks (e.g. breaking into shops and guilds) You'll find these in FormulaHelper.cs in CalculateInteriorLockpickingChance() and CalculateExteriorLockpickingChance() respectively.

Chance calculation for both formulae are clamped to between 5-95 and player must roll lower than chance value to succeed. So a higher chance is always better.

The UESP only has one of these formula on its lockpicking page. This isn't a difference in DFU at all - there are different formulae for different locks and UESP only lists one of them.

In terms of levelling lockpicking, as Jay says even failed attempts will level lockpicking. Depending on which formula you're trying to beat, levelling up your character is just as important as their Lockpicking skill. Other than grinding, trainers can help level Lockpicking faster (or use skill book mods).

The only thing that's not 100% certain is how shop/building quality translates into lockvalue for that door. I use qualitylevel/2 as locklevel, and it yielded similar distribution of success and failure when I implemented exterior locks. And if there are any mistakes here, they will be on my end. I'm confident the actual formulae added by Allofich will be correct.

Well I can understand not deviating from the original, so this is not a complaint aimed at those who graciously ported this over in unity. But leveling up lockpicking his really really slow. Compared to any other skill its pathetically slow, and seems to barely function even north of level 55.

I trained it to level 51 with trainers and I saw almost negligible improvement over level 24. Even at level 70 with enchantments it fails all the time(feels like the same rate). Really this remains a terrible skill that would in no way be overpowered if it worked, as bashing is 100% effective, and the open lock spell is trivial past level 10 or so. Here we have an entire skill dedicated to just this one thing and it underperforms other means dramatically.

How much would people enjoy a UI interface mod, like Skyrims, to replace default lockpicking mechanisms? What I've learned making the minimap could translate over to a UI lockpicking mod, and with the power of Unity and C#, it could be more interactive and immersive than the Skyrim system of just finding a sweet spot.

I agree, this is one of the least fun skills to have in the game. I think it was meant to be this way, as stealing and reselling things is such an easy way to get uber rich fast in classic Daggerfall.

I think nearly anything would succeed over Daggerfall's method. Giving the player any form of agency is preferable IMO.

Having dabbled in Morrowind and, to a lesser extent, Oblivion, I actually prefer Morrowind's approach to showing lockpicking in action. Lockpicks and probes wobbling about on screen with nice satisfying sound effects. It's simple but conveys with action without having to play a minigame.