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About this mod
The more lockpicks you already have, the fewer you will find in most loot. Prevents the player from accumulating a huge stash of lockpicks so that the Lockpicking minigame is still challenging.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Description
Have you ever noticed how, after you've been playing for long enough, you end up walking around with a huge stack of 100+ lockpicks all the time? Has the lockpicking minigame ever felt more like a tedious chore than an actual challenge, because you knew you could just break as many lockpicks as you like, and you would never actually run out?
This mod is specifically intended to address that problem, while changing as little about the game as possible and being maximally compatible with everything else. The "obvious" solution, of course, would be to edit the leveled lists and reduce the number of lockpicks the player gets. This works, but has two issues:
Leveled list edits are also known for compatibility issues, and require patching (manual or automatic) to work properly. To solve those problems, I decided to completely ignore leveled lists. My mod doesn't touch them at all. You can combine it with whatever loot overhauls you like, and everything should just work. Instead, the mod does the following:
The more lockpicks you have, the higher the probability - but it's nonlinear, so that you can accumulate a lot of lockpicks below the soft limit, but as you approach the limit, the drop rate falls dramatically to 50% at the limit, and to approximately 0% once you're far enough above the limit. You can adjust the soft limit, and how abruptly the drop rate changes when close to the limit (the "sharpness"), in the MCM. There's also an option to give yourself a skill-based bonus, so that the soft limit is increased by one for every five levels of Lockpicking. This is on top of the regular limit you set in MCM.
Requirements
PapyrusUtil and SKSE. Install like any other mod. Safe to install mid-playthrough.
Removing this mod mid-playthrough is probably safe but is untested. You're probably better off disabling the mod in MCM if you don't like it.
Not compatible with any mod where you don't actually press the "use" key to open containers yourself (e.g. all versions of Quick Loot, any mod where your followers loot stuff for you, any automatic looting mod, etc.). There are some modded containers which are really just activators that pretend to be containers, and those may not work properly either. However, in my experience, such containers are usually in player homes, and player homes are already excluded anyway.
FAQ
Why do I need PapyrusUtil and SKSE?
You need SKSE because this mod is way less useful without MCM/SkyUI, and also because PapyrusUtil depends on it.
You need PapyrusUtil because it was easier that way - I reused a bunch of existing code I had lying around to make the MCM, and that code depends on PapyrusUtil. It was less work than coding up an MCM from scratch or teaching myself how to use MCM Helper (which is of course the Right Way to make MCMs in 2021 - but I haven't bothered to learn it yet).
All in all, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a non-SKSE, non-SkyUI version of this mod. But I am not going to do that, because that'd be work. My permissions are open specifically so that I don't have to support anything that is too far removed from my own use case.
Sometimes, your script removes zero lockpicks from a container which does not have any in it. Is this harmful?
I have tested it extensively and the answer appears to be "no." But if you can demonstrate that it causes problems for you, let me know and I'll change it (unlike the above question, this is basically a one-line fix).
Wait, you mean you're going around putting invisible objects into every container in Skyrim? Shouldn't that bloat the save or something?
Technically, this will make your saves very slightly larger than they otherwise would have been. But it's not particularly expensive, firstly because non-persistent changeforms in containers are very cheap, secondly because the vast majority of corpses as well as many containers are respawning, and thirdly because the game is already rolling up a ton of random loot for all of those containers anyway, which takes up way more space than one extra item per container. Unless you are meticulously disposing of all loot you encounter (selling it or moving it into respawning containers), this is not going to make your save bloat significantly worse than it already is.
Will this mod remove lockpicks from chests in my player home?
Not if it's keyworded correctly. All of the vanilla homes have the LocTypePlayerHouse keyword, which should also be the case for most modded player homes. This mod completely ignores containers in those locations.
What about chests I loot as part of a quest, such as Diplomatic Immunity?
There is no general way to detect this situation, but it is fortunately rare. If necessary, you can turn the mod off, loot the chest, then turn the mod on again.
What does "sync these settings" do?
If we're going to take a dependency on PapyrusUtil anyway, we might as well get some value out of it. This checkbox will automatically sync your settings between all of your saves, so that you do not have to redo them every time you make a new game. Uncheck if you prefer to have separate settings in each save file.
Sometimes, I briefly see lockpicks in a corpse's inventory before they disappear. Can you fix it?
No. For most containers, this isn't a problem, because the opening animation is slow enough that we have time to remove the lockpicks before the inventory menu opens. But for corpses, there's no delay, so you might see lockpicks before they are removed.
Have you ever noticed how, after you've been playing for long enough, you end up walking around with a huge stack of 100+ lockpicks all the time? Has the lockpicking minigame ever felt more like a tedious chore than an actual challenge, because you knew you could just break as many lockpicks as you like, and you would never actually run out?
This mod is specifically intended to address that problem, while changing as little about the game as possible and being maximally compatible with everything else. The "obvious" solution, of course, would be to edit the leveled lists and reduce the number of lockpicks the player gets. This works, but has two issues:
- In the early game, the player would not have enough lockpicks, and would have to pass up perfectly good loot. For some players, this would be a desirable change, as it would make the early game harder, but I consider it out of scope. All I want to do is make lockpicking relevant, not completely change the balance and pacing of the early game.
- Different players break lockpicks at different rates, because some players are better at the lockpicking minigame than others. A lockpick distribution which is perfect for player A might be too generous, or too stingy, for player B. Worse, most players don't actually know how good they are at the lockpicking minigame. Do you keep track of your own score, with spreadsheets and everything? I certainly don't, but you'd need that data to make a good leveled list adjustment.
Leveled list edits are also known for compatibility issues, and require patching (manual or automatic) to work properly. To solve those problems, I decided to completely ignore leveled lists. My mod doesn't touch them at all. You can combine it with whatever loot overhauls you like, and everything should just work. Instead, the mod does the following:
- The first time you open a container or loot a corpse, we check how many lockpicks you have, do some math with that number, and come up with a probability value.
- We roll this probability, and either remove or do not remove all lockpicks from the container, based on the roll.
- Finally, we place an invisible marker object in the container, to make sure we don't re-roll the probability for the same container (which would be un-immersive).
The more lockpicks you have, the higher the probability - but it's nonlinear, so that you can accumulate a lot of lockpicks below the soft limit, but as you approach the limit, the drop rate falls dramatically to 50% at the limit, and to approximately 0% once you're far enough above the limit. You can adjust the soft limit, and how abruptly the drop rate changes when close to the limit (the "sharpness"), in the MCM. There's also an option to give yourself a skill-based bonus, so that the soft limit is increased by one for every five levels of Lockpicking. This is on top of the regular limit you set in MCM.
Requirements
PapyrusUtil and SKSE. Install like any other mod. Safe to install mid-playthrough.
Removing this mod mid-playthrough is probably safe but is untested. You're probably better off disabling the mod in MCM if you don't like it.
Not compatible with any mod where you don't actually press the "use" key to open containers yourself (e.g. all versions of Quick Loot, any mod where your followers loot stuff for you, any automatic looting mod, etc.). There are some modded containers which are really just activators that pretend to be containers, and those may not work properly either. However, in my experience, such containers are usually in player homes, and player homes are already excluded anyway.
FAQ
Why do I need PapyrusUtil and SKSE?
You need SKSE because this mod is way less useful without MCM/SkyUI, and also because PapyrusUtil depends on it.
You need PapyrusUtil because it was easier that way - I reused a bunch of existing code I had lying around to make the MCM, and that code depends on PapyrusUtil. It was less work than coding up an MCM from scratch or teaching myself how to use MCM Helper (which is of course the Right Way to make MCMs in 2021 - but I haven't bothered to learn it yet).
All in all, it shouldn't be too difficult to make a non-SKSE, non-SkyUI version of this mod. But I am not going to do that, because that'd be work. My permissions are open specifically so that I don't have to support anything that is too far removed from my own use case.
Sometimes, your script removes zero lockpicks from a container which does not have any in it. Is this harmful?
I have tested it extensively and the answer appears to be "no." But if you can demonstrate that it causes problems for you, let me know and I'll change it (unlike the above question, this is basically a one-line fix).
Wait, you mean you're going around putting invisible objects into every container in Skyrim? Shouldn't that bloat the save or something?
Technically, this will make your saves very slightly larger than they otherwise would have been. But it's not particularly expensive, firstly because non-persistent changeforms in containers are very cheap, secondly because the vast majority of corpses as well as many containers are respawning, and thirdly because the game is already rolling up a ton of random loot for all of those containers anyway, which takes up way more space than one extra item per container. Unless you are meticulously disposing of all loot you encounter (selling it or moving it into respawning containers), this is not going to make your save bloat significantly worse than it already is.
Will this mod remove lockpicks from chests in my player home?
Not if it's keyworded correctly. All of the vanilla homes have the LocTypePlayerHouse keyword, which should also be the case for most modded player homes. This mod completely ignores containers in those locations.
What about chests I loot as part of a quest, such as Diplomatic Immunity?
There is no general way to detect this situation, but it is fortunately rare. If necessary, you can turn the mod off, loot the chest, then turn the mod on again.
What does "sync these settings" do?
If we're going to take a dependency on PapyrusUtil anyway, we might as well get some value out of it. This checkbox will automatically sync your settings between all of your saves, so that you do not have to redo them every time you make a new game. Uncheck if you prefer to have separate settings in each save file.
Sometimes, I briefly see lockpicks in a corpse's inventory before they disappear. Can you fix it?
No. For most containers, this isn't a problem, because the opening animation is slow enough that we have time to remove the lockpicks before the inventory menu opens. But for corpses, there's no delay, so you might see lockpicks before they are removed.