How to lockpick in Oblivion Remastered

Lockpicking is one of the best ways to unlock chests and doors The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered — and to get loot.

You will encounter loads of locked chests and doors while exploring the lands and dungeons of Oblivion Remastered. To bypass these locks as you encounter them, you will need to play a little lockpicking minigame.

Our Oblivion Remastered guide will explain how to lockpick chests and doors and walk you through the tricky mechanics of this minigame.

Where to find lockpicks in Oblivion Remastered

First, you’ll need a lockpick, an item that allows you to attempt to pick a lock. The quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to get lockpicks is by exploring dungeons. You can get lockpicks by searching the corpses of some enemies and by checking chests, barrels, and crates in dungeons.

You can also buy lockpicks from fences (characters who purchase illicit goods) after you join the Thieves Guild. Ongar, the fence located in Bruma, will sell you lockpicks for 6 gold a piece.

What can you unlock with a lockpick in Oblivion Remastered?

Lockpicks can be used to unlock doors and chests. While many doors and chests can be unlocked with a lockpick, some cannot be broken and require special keys. (The game will tell you can’t use a lockpick if this is the case.)

If the door or chest can be unlocked with a lockpick, just walk up to either a chest or door (with a lockpick item in hand) and interact with it to start the lockpicking minigame.

How to use a lockpick in Oblivion Remastered

Lockpicking in Oblivion Remastered can get pretty frustrating pretty quickly. In short, it’s a timing minigame.

When you start the lockpicking minigame, you’ll see a cross-section view of a lock with five different tumblers, each inside a tiny chamber. Tap the inner metal piece upward with the left control stick and then hit A (on Xbox) to “set” the tumbler. To pick a lock, you must set the tumbler just as it taps the top of the lock. If you get the timing right, the tumbler will “set” in place and go dark, as shown in the final image of the slider above.

It is a deceptively tricky timing game. Some tumblers fall faster than others, and the speed at which they fall from tap to tap varies. If you mess up one tumbler, you need to start the entire lock over and set every single one (if you’re still ranked novice for Security). There are three difficulty levels of locks: easy, medium, and hard. An easier lock will have fewer tumblers you need to set, thus less room for error.

Here are some tips to help you pick locks in Oblivion Remastered:

• Our best advice is to fudge the numbers a bit. If you think a lock will give you trouble, make sure you save before. That way, you can try the lock as many times as you need and can load the save file if you run out of lockpicks.
• Some other guides suggest you listen to the lock. This might just be us, but we couldn’t hear a difference. However, it can be hard to focus on the game if there is a lot else going on, so we found it helpful to turn off the game’s background music in the game settings.
• We can’t confirm this for sure, but there appears to be a pattern for each tumbler. Tap it a bunch of times to get a feel for each tumbler, and you can try to predict when the tumbler will stick at the top.
• Just keep at it. Eventually, you’ll level up your Security skill to the point where the minigame is less punitive.

How lockpick auto attempts work in Oblivion Remastered

The auto-attempt feature can let you bypass the minigame and lockpick automatically — in certain circumstances. For example, we used the auto-attempt after setting one tumbler on a medium lock, and it automatically set the final two tumblers, thus unlocking the door. We also used it to bypass an easy lock without doing anything.

However, there are limits to the auto-lock. We tried to use it multiple times on another medium lock, and it broke a ton of lockpicks. At the time of writing, it’s unclear if any of the skills influence this feature.