Skalitz lock-picking targets

Tired of opening a chest in Skalitz (the beginning town) only to find about 6 groschen cash in there? Let me tell you where the GOOD stuff is and how to be able to open it all

Lockpicking 101... how to open that stubborn "very easy" door

Here is a nice YouTube video that shows how to work the lock-picking controls. I did not make this video, but it helped me to figure it out so I thought I should be nice and share it. If you are on mouse/kb controls, then the "D" key is like the left stick and the mouse is like the right stick.

During this guide I will occasionally make reference to some mods you can download from the Nexus site. Many people have made interesting mods for this game and they are posted on there, for free. Anytime you see a hyperlink to a website in here, it leads to the appropriate mod's web page. The mods are, strictly speaking, not necessary to get all the loot in Skalitz before you leave town, but I highly recommend them if you find yourself having trouble and getting frustrated at how stupidly hard it is to open the first few locks before you level-up your lockpicking skill, and how fast your lockpick snaps. So the mods are optional, if you're not interested just don't download/install them. The information here will be good in either case.

Step 0: SAVE YOUR GAME before trying the lock. Maybe use a mod from the Nexus website to allow you to save anywhere[www.nexusmods.com], or have infinite saviour schnapps.

Step 1: use a MOUSE AND KEYBOARD to make it easier, dual-stick control is awkward for this.

Step 2: maybe find a mod on the Nexus website that will help your lockpicks last longer before they break[www.nexusmods.com], so you don't worry so much about losing your ONLY lockpick in this starting town... (warning that particular mod was made by me but is a total "easy mode" overhaul of the game not just for lockpicks) or use a mod that takes some of the shimmy and jitter out of the lock[www.nexusmods.com] at lower skill levels (this one gives easier locks but still vanilla pick durability, and also gives easier archery).

Step 3: move your mouse around until you see the little icon turn GOLD. It gets bigger (but still grey) as you get closer, it gets smaller if you get farther away.

Step 4: SIMULTANEOUSLY hold the "rotate lock" key (I set it as "D") to spin the main lock, AND carefully move your mouse in the same direction that the lock spins so that the gold dot stays on the sweet spot. The sweet spot will move since it is attached to the main lock. This takes practice.

Step 5: PRACTICE step 4. A lot. To unlock Hard locks (trader inventory chests, and the locks on the doors at the tavern and general store), you need to hit skill level 6 I think. For very hard locks (the inventory chests for both the tavern and the general store) you need to hit skill level 12 just to try it. I recommend being a solid 2 levels above the base requirement for the lock you are trying to open, to give you an easier time of it. But in Skalitz you'll get bored before you reach level 14 I think... I left town with lockpick level 11 so I missed two of the very hard chests. Such is life.

Step 6: DO NOT let your pick break, until you learn a certain perk it makes a loud noise and you'll get arrested for your crimes because you are too poor to pay the fine. The two perks in Lockpicking that will be most useful are the one that reduces noise of breaking a pick, and the one that doubles durability of picks. The next useful ones are the Deft Grip perk that reduces the jittering of the lock, and another one that gives you a warning when someone is about to catch you playing with the lock so if you exit the attempt fast enough you won't get charged with a crime.

Step 7: If the lockpick snaps, load your previous save and try again until it works.

Step 8: click... open the door.

More basic info about locks

Locks work the same way for doors or chests, the mini-game will be the same.

Very easy and Easy locks can be attempted immediately. Hard locks I believe you need Lockpick level 4 or 5 or something like that to attempt it. Very hard locks you need lockpick skill level 10 or more. In the lists below, I will indicate where to find each type of lock in Skalitz.

If you are opening a chest that you just unlocked, you will have to hold down the "use" button (I set it to "E" on my keyboard) to rob the chest. Just looking in there is a crime (as is picking the lock) so stay stealthy when you open the chest to rob it. These guards don't mess around, you aren't high enough in any skill level yet to trick them by dialogue options and jail in this town is a game over. Any chest labeled "open" is legal to open and mess around in; any chest labled "Rob" is illegal to open. Pay attention to what the little action icon says!

If you just kill everyone in town, or knock them out, you can steal their keys from their bodies. These allow you to instantly open their doors and chests without the lockpicking mini-game, but then you don't gain any XP from opening the lock. It will also let you try to lockpick it open again even if you have the right key, you just have to hold the button down instead of just clicking it. Or you can just steal all of their equipment but leave their keys on the body. Knocked out people will get up and carry only what they had on them when they woke up from now on (except guards who will spawn new weapons but usually not new armor). Dead bodies will eventually vanish (supposedly found and buried by the town's undertaker) and whatever you left on the corpse will vanish with them, never to be seen again.

Dead people never re-lock their doors, so if you kill them you can't unlock their stuff a second or third time for extra practice and XP on your lockpicking skill! Living people will eventually return home, re-lock their doors (but usually not their chests) so you can come back later and open the doors again for more training XP to level-up your lockpick skill. But it is SLOW GOING because there are only so many locks in this town.

Where are all the locked doors?

Doors - depending on time of day, houses will have 2 or 3 locked doors in most cases (including exterior and interior doors). Remember that if you are seen while trying to pick the lock on a door it is a CRIME so be sneaky and stealthy and silent. If you unlock/open a door, wait a while and the resident will come home and re-lock it as long as you haven't killed them yet. Then you can come back and pick it again for additional skill XP to level-up your lockpicking ability.

Very Easy / Easy locks - available immediately or after skill level 1/2
Hard locks - available after skill level 6 or so
Very Hard locks - available after skill level 12 or 13?
(sorry I don't remember the exact sill requirements for this but it's in that ballpark)

A few doors have HARD locks on them, the rest are very easy or easy level. You'll notice a distinct jump in difficulty when you attempt hard locks, compared to the easy locks. There is a perk "Luck of the Drunk" that makes it easier to do harder locks - but it only works if you drink enough alcohol to get tipsy, so I personally prefer to just train up on easy locks more and come back to these when I'm at a higher level of lockpicking skill, use that perk point on something more useful than drunk-unlocking.

1 & 2. Across the yard from tavern is a two-story house with two outer doors one upstairs and one at ground level, both are hard and the one at ground level is "guarded" because it is within view of the woman who sits there and feeds the chickens as well as the baliff at the table by the tavern. They are the first two locked doors you find if you are following the quest, but they should be among the LAST doors you try to unlock before you finish the tutorial zone by giving Teresa her nails.

3. Deutche's house - (easy doors)

4. Farmer's house - far NE end of the main road (all easy doors)

5. Farmer's house - middle of the row on main road, NE side (easy doors)

6. Zybeck's house - beside trader shop on NE main road (easy doors)

7. Farmer's house - SE side of main road behind the TAVERN (easy doors)

8. Farmer's house downhill from Tavern, behind Deutche's place

9. Farmer's house middle of row on SE side of main road (easy doors)

10. Farmer's house SE side of main road, end of the road (easy doors)

11 & 12. Shopkeeper's house - two outer doors one at ground level and one upstairs (hard doors)

13. Shopkeeper's house - attic door upstairs between the bedroom and the storage attic (hard lock)

14. Shopkeeper's house - indoors, leading to the storage room on ground level (hard lock)

15. Johanka's house near the sheep (easy doors) - only available after finishing the side-quest to get revenge on Deutche by throwing poo at his house and fighting his son Hans, when Johanka runs to tell you the guard is coming. She is invincible until that time, and she always sits staring at her front door before that.

16. House across the yard from the tavern, second floor apartment, interior (hard)

17 - 18. House across the yard from the tavern, ground floor apartment, interior (hard).

Easy chests for quick low-level gains

Easy chests MOSTLY have only a few coins in them. Their only real function is to provide skill XP to get your lockpicking level up high enough to open the harder locks, which have better things inside. THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS TO THIS THOUGH - in the general store ALL of the chests have different items that are sold by the trader as well as some of the gold kept by the store. There are two chests in the main storefront room, and two more in the back room (ground floor past the staircase) that have some good stuff that you can steal from the store's inventory list, all easy locks.

Again, remember that picking a lock, or looking inside a chest that belongs to someone else (labeled "Rob" instead of "Open") is a crime so don't let anyone see or hear you while you work.

Very Easy / Easy locks - available immediately or after skill level 1/2
Hard locks - available after skill level 6 or so
Very Hard locks - available after skill level 12 or 13?
(sorry I don't remember the exact sill requirements for this but it's in that ballpark)

These ones all have the easier locks. Chests with harder locks are listed in the next chapter.heading.

1 & 2. Henry's house - main room chest is not locked, pantry chest is easy lock but I don't remember if this was in the vanilla game or if it is brand new from a Nexus mod[www.nexusmods.com] I found.

3. Tavern, first floor in the back room

4 & 5. Tavern, upstairs in attic bedroom there are two chests

6 & 7. Deutche's house, both easy (one in main room and one in pantry) - best to break in DURING the ♥♥♥♥-throwing quest but BEFORE talking to Mrs. Deutche.since you know Hans and Mr Deutsche are busy at the tavern and Mrs. D is still sitting in the back yard so nobody will bother you inside the house.

8. Farmer's house, far NE end of the main road - main room

9. Farmer's house, middle of row in NE main road - main room

10. Zbysheck's house, next to trader on NE main road - main room (beware, Zbysheck is invincible until after the mission where you throw poo at the house and fight him and Hans).

11. Farmer's house BEHIND the TAVERN on SE side of main road - main room

12. Farmer's house downhill from Tavern, behind Deutche's place - main room

13. Farmer's house middle of row on SE side of main road - main room

14. Farmer's house, end of road on SE side - main room

15. Shopkeeper's house, upstairs in bedroom

16. Shopkeeper's house, upstairs in attic

17 & 18. In the general store (junk and other small items from store's inventory)

19 & 20. Shopkeeper's house, first floor, back room (inventory for the store)

19 - 22. House across the lawn from tavern, second floor there are four easy chests spread around the two rooms

23. House across the lawn from tavern, first floor there is one.

24. Johanka's house near the sheep. Only available after the mission to throw poo on the house, until then Johanka is invincible and she always sits staring at her front door so you can't sneak in before that.

25 & 26. The a-hole's house where your dad sends you to collect payment, there are two here. The one in the kitchen has the tools you're supposed to collect if the a-hole refuses to pay, as per your father's request. there are a few ways to get into this chest. You can defeat the man in a fistfight and he gives you the key, thereby satisfying his debt; or you can LOSE the fistfight or choose the dialogue option that doesn't start a fight and then you have another choice. If you go tell your dad you lost the fight but you still want to solve it on your own, then you can go into his house and look at the chest (with NO lockpick in your inventory) to start a "side quest" - go talk to your buddy who threw poo at the house with you, he will give you a lockpick to try opening the chest. Or if you already have a lockpick you can open it yourself. And remember to also take the little axe that is stuck in the wood stump outside the house.

Harder Chests for better loot

These chests all have hard or very hard locks, so only try them after doing a lot of low-level unlocking to get your lockpick skill up to a higher level. If you don't train hard, you miss out on all the free "lightly used" things you can get with your sticky-finger discount coupon. For a truly magnificent start, find a mod on Nexus that gives merchants extra money[www.nexusmods.com] reserves so you can steal ALL their coin from these shop inventory chests. If you use a 20k mod, you will leave Skalitz with somewhere between 80-100k coins, even after paying off the local guards for all your crimes.

Very Easy / Easy locks - available immediately or after skill level 1/2
Hard locks - available after skill level 6 or so
Very Hard locks - available after skill level 12
(sorry I don't remember the exact sill requirements for this but it's in that ballpark)

These chests are all HARD, except two that are VERY HARD. You'll notice a distinct jump in difficulty when you attempt these, compared to the easy locks. There is a perk "Luck of the Drunk" that makes it easier to do harder locks - but it only works if you drink enough alcohol to get tipsy, so I personally prefer to just train up on easy locks more and come back to these when I'm at a higher level of lockpicking skill, use that perk point on something more useful than drunk-unlocking.

1. Tavern, first floor in the back room VERY HARD (warning: windows face directly at the table where the baliff and friends sit) (This one probably contains the tavern's inventory for sale and Bianca's groschen from the tavern shop, but I still can't open it because I need higher Lockpick level)

2. Farmer's house, far NE end of the main road - in the pantry (blacksmith's inventory)

3. Farmer's house, next to trader on NE main road - in the pantry (veggie shop's inventory)

4. Farmer's house, behind the TAVERN - pantry (tailor's inventory)

5. Shopkeeper's house, upstairs in the bedroom - hard lock (tiny bit of groschen)

6. Shopkeeper's house, upstairs in the bedroom - VERY HARD (I still can't open this one, need higher Lockpick level!) it probably contains the general store's cash stash

7. Shopkeeper's house, attic at top of stairs - HARD - tons of groschen (surrounded by UN-locked inventory stored in various baskets)

8. House across the lawn from the tavern, first floor apartment - hard lock, (small amount of groschen coins)

Closing thoughts

Well, I got frustrated after about ten minutes and got a few mods to make my experience as "henry the useless" a bit of a smoother ride in the beginning. I also got one that put a METRIC TON of groschen coins into the traders' chests in Skalitz so I walked away a very rich man right from the start. But again, those mods are optional and more power to you if you prefer to play on vanilla, or even hardcore.

I hope this little list helps you remember which shops store their supplies in which chests, and gave you some tips on how to pick locks and gain skill XP. When you leave Skalitz, if you take the time to open all the doors and loot all the chests and really grind some lockpicking XP you should be able to open very hard locks from now on, and you'll have tons of free food, armor, weapons, and repair kits to bring with you into the main story.

One tip I didn't mention though is that if you steal EVERYTHING in the village you'll become "overencumbered" very quickly. That means you're carrying TOO MUCH WEIGHT. You can't ride a horse like that, and you can't run, and basically it makes everything cost more stamina and the game is just harder with that debuff active. If this happens to you, you can drop EVERYTHING into the chest in the main kitchen at Henry's house, or else just dump it all in the grass over where the two cows are. Then after you flee the village and find yourself on the other side of the map, you can come back and pick everything up a little at a time and either sell it off to various merchants or else move it into a more convenient storage location - preferably one that isn't in the middle of a ghost town that's still being ravaged by scavenger bandits on a daily basis.

For continuing to develop your lockpicking skills after leaving (ahem, FLEEING) Skalitz, you'll need to buy more lockpicks and only three merchants sell them. Here is another YouTube video showing you more about lockpicking and where to buy picks. If you're planning to continue unlocking things that don't belong to you, it's a good video to watch.

What to do with all that loot?

Save it. you can use the chest in your house in Skalitz to hold anything you find inside the village. Once you're outside of town and running from the soldiers, anything you find there can be safely dropped on the road - you'll be back for it in just a few minutes after you reach the next town and spend a night guarding the town's walls.

Little bit of spoilers from here on... but if you want to be richer than the Pope right after you leave Skalitz, this is how to KEEP your things and profit off of them before you start the rest of your adventure...

On your way back to Skalitz after the guard lets you leave the next town, pick up everything you dropped on the road. There is a chest beside a bridge just before the town where you can drop your stuff off TEMPORARILY. This will make you light enough to move effectively in combat without doing the fat-man waddle. Kill the six guards in the little area just outside of the main town. Then come back and grab everything out of that chest BEFORE you enter the main village.

In the village, you're basically locked in here until the "boss fight" is over. DO NOT go near your parents' grave yet. First, go to your house again and leave everything in the chest there except the armor and weapon you have equipped. You'll be back for it later. Then you can run around and loot everything from the corpses around town. Put that stuff into your house, too. Now SAVE YOUR GAME.

Take most of the stuff out of the chest. There seems to be a limit on how much stuff you can carry over to the next "chapter" of the game after the upcoming boss fight... you're going to lose some of your stuff from your inventory. If there is anything you ABSOLUTELY don't want to risk losing, leave it in the chest in your house. Take everything else with you, since you are about to get FREE FAST TRAVEL to a new city where you can sell it all. Anything you leave here, you can come back for later but you will have to walk halfway across the map with it in your pocket to find someplace to sell it!! So if you leave too much stuff here, you'll have to make multiple trips to carry it all.

Head to your parents' graves. Fight the boss... YOU CANNOT DEFEAT HIM, this is a scripted battle you MUST lose. But you can defeat his friends and loot their stuff DURING the fight. Eventually he beats you senseless and you are rescued by a friend of your father... only to wake up 'naked' in a new city. There will be a chest nearby that contains (almost) everything you had in your inventory before the boss fight.

There is a chance that a bunch of your stuff will be "mysteriously lost" during the rescue after that boss fight in Skalitz... if you notice too much stuff is missing from that chest, then you need to load that previous save, pickup your things from the chest in your house again but LESS OF IT this time, and redo the boss fight. Hopefully this time because you have less stuff on you, it will let you keep more of it.

Grab your things after you wake up, and find some merchants around the city to buy it from you. Then head back to Skalitz, retrieve whatever you left in the house there. I recommend bringing a horse, since there's probably a LOT of stuff and it's pretty heavy. You don't want to do the fat-man waddle all the way back across the map from Skalitz!!

OPTIONAL: Once you reach the new city you can do some quests there to build up your reputation. Higher reputation will give you better prices at the shops, both for buying AND selling. If you want to save most of your stuff until you have a higher reputation, you'll make a bit more money from the sales... but really you should have around $80,000 even if you sell everything with a low reputation, and that's probably enough to get you through the entire game.

[Mr. Moyer]

Also, SPOILER ALERT, everyone in that town will die two minutes after you leave town at the end of the tutorial section of the game.

[Mr. Moyer]

Well, you're not missing much by leaving them alone. If you work on all the other chests in town, plus knock out every citizen and steal all their clothes, weapons, and whatever is in their pockets... plus as you run away from the army that attacks the town soon you steal all the armor and weapons from the invaders... you'll come out of there as the wealthiest person in the world. This entire process is optional, and there is no 'special' loot anywhere in town that you won't find somewhere else later in the game. The point of this whole thing is just to levelup your lockpicking skill, and then steal a bunch of random stuff that you can sell later.

[FurudoErika]

Thanks for your reply!
Yeah, I would rather not kill anyone, I was hoping to open all chests peacefully. The problem with that store is that there's always two persons there, and regardless of which you choose to knock out, the other immediately calls a guard...

[Mr. Moyer]

Also, remember you can CLOSE DOORS that are open, and people can't see through a solid door. They can still HEAR a little bit through a door though, and if the angle is right they can see you through a window.

[Mr. Moyer]

If you can't distract them... sneakily knock them out or murder them.
Key word there: SNEAKILY. Because fighting in front of someone is a crime. And murdering someone is a crime, too, but only if you're caught.
However... if you kill the shopkeeper then you can't shop here anymore... So make this your last stop before you deliver those nails to Teresa.

It all comes down to: do you want to be a peaceful cat-burglar, or are you okay with the occasional murder during a home invasion?

[FurudoErika]

Hey, thanks for the guide. One question: how do you loot the 2 chests inside the general store first floor room? The shopkeeper and a guard are constantly watching them and I couldn't distract them in any way...

[Mr. Moyer]

I watch too much Youtube, that's all. LOL

[Real]

lol alright man thanks alot you know more than i do im kinda jealous haha

[Mr. Moyer]

Ultimately... leave some of it in the chest in your house. After you move to Rattai you come back and collect it, to sell in Rattai. It may require more than one trip to bring it all there, just like moving to a new town in real life... except there are no U-Haul trucks to rent in this game LOL. It seems like there is a limit on the number of items (not weight) you can bring with you when you bury your parents and "teleport" to Rattai the first time.

[Mr. Moyer]

Just BE CAREFUL... when he says go west on your way out of Skalitz to fight more Cumens, the last update SHRUNK that green region he talks about, and even the east side of town has infinitely spawning soldiers... he makes it look easy but it's not that easy unless you are a MASTER at the combat in this game.