Ultima Online Lockpicking - the 56, 72, 84 and 95 ladder, and where uo.com contradicts itself

An attempt, and what failure costs

The action itself is simple: get some lockpicks, use them on the target lock, and you attempt to break it open.

Failure has a price, and it is consumables rather than damage. Depending on how complex the lock is against your current skill, a failed attempt can break the pick outright, so a well-prepared rogue brings plenty of spares. Picks come from a Tinkering character, which is the first reason a picker usually has a tinker on the account.

[!] The chance of breaking a pick is not published. The two inputs are the lock’s complexity against your skill, and no percentage is given for any combination of them.

[!] The success-chance formula is not published either. There is no published table of pick chance at a given skill against a given lock.

[!] And nothing states whether Lockpicking has a speed component at all. This is worth saying because the neighbouring skill does: uo.com explicitly says higher Remove Trap skill reduces disarming time. Nothing equivalent is published for picking, so do not assume higher skill picks faster.

The ladder

These are uo.com’s figures, and they are the reason the skill gets trained to specific numbers rather than simply to Grandmaster.

Skill	What it opens
56	Level 1 treasure chests, if you have Cartography
72	Level 2 dungeon chests, or level 2 treasure chests with Cartography
75	Yew prison cell doors
84	Level 3 dungeon chests, or level 3 treasure chests with Cartography
95+	Level 4 dungeon chests and level 4 treasure chests

Two things to read off it. The treasure-chest entries are stated as conditional on carrying Cartography, so the ladder is really a two-skill ladder. And 95, not 100, is where the top published tier opens — the last five points buy reliability rather than access.

[!] Levels 5, 6 and 7 treasure chests have no published Lockpicking requirement. uo.com’s progression stops at level 4, and uo.com gives no figure for the higher map tiers. Any number for them is unpublished.

The trap comes first

uo.com is direct about this: “Town and dungeon containers are trapped, up to 3 traps per container, do not open them to look inside unless you are able to deal with these traps.” Even after the lock itself is dealt with, there may still be chest traps; Remove Trap can disarm them, but it is a risky business.

The order of operations runs the other way from the order people assume: a successful Remove Trap attempt disarms the trap, and only then do you attempt the lock. Disarm, then pick.

That makes the full container loop a three-skill job: Detecting Hidden to produce the [trapped] label and, in the Classic Client, the colour that names the trap type; Remove Trap to disarm it; Lockpicking to open it. A picker without the first two is opening blind, into as many as three traps.

Magic unlock substitutes, up to a point

uo.com concedes a shortcut and bounds it in the same breath: “although at low levels the spell ‘magic unlock’ can substitute on shards other than Siege and Mugen”.

Here is where it stops working: a Magery character can use the Unlock spell on standard chests, but only skilled pickers can open the more valuable chests dropped by Paragon creatures and found during treasure hunts.

So the honest summary is that Magery covers the boring half of the skill everywhere except Siege Perilous and Mugen, and covers none of the half you actually wanted it for. Those two shards are called out twice on uo.com’s page — you also cannot buy the skill from an NPC there.

Respawn timing, which is what a farming route is built from

uo.com publishes two figures that between them determine how a picking route is planned. Containers respawn in approximately 20–30 minutes. Dungeon static chests are different: they only re-lock at server restarts.

That is a real distinction and not a trivia item. A town or shop circuit can be run on a loop every half hour indefinitely; a dungeon static is a once-per-restart prize, which is why those get contested rather than farmed.

It does not break your cover

Lockpicking is on uo.com’s published list of skills usable while hidden without being revealed, alongside Detecting Hidden, Poisoning, Anatomy, Arms Lore and others; Remove Trap is stated separately as also not revealing.

This is the whole of Lockpicking’s PvP relevance, and it is worth being precise about it. A stealth thief working a Felucca dungeon container is not exposed by picking, or by disarming, or by scanning. The reveal comes from Stealing — which uo.com says reveals you “whether successful or not”, with a 10 second block on re-hiding afterwards. Pick quietly for as long as you like; the moment you take something, the clock starts.

Where the figures disagree

uo.com contradicts itself on the third training-box tier. The overview text on uo.com’s Lockpicking page lists the tinker tiers as sets of “10 boxes made with 30 tinkering skill, 10 boxes made with 50 tinkering skill, 10 boxes made with 75 tinkering skill, and 10 boxes made with GM tinkering skill.” The step-by-step progression lower on the same page says, for the 50–70 band, “use boxes made with 70 tinkering”. 75 against 70, on one page. Both are recorded here; neither is chosen, and uo.com does not resolve it.

An unpublished ladder uses different bands entirely. uo.com runs 0–30 / 30–50 / 50–70 / 70–95 / 95–GM across four tinker tiers. The unpublished ladder runs 0–30 (NPC thief or tinker) / 30–55 [!] (boxes from a 30-skill tinker) / 55–95 [!] (boxes from a 100-skill tinker) / 95+ (level 4 chests, or the Satyr trick in the Twisted Weald — when your skill drops, jump into the sparkle teleporter and start picking boxes again). Only uo.com’s bands are published.

And one old requirement is out of date. An unpublished rule has Remove Trap needing at least 50 [!] each in Lockpicking and Detecting Hidden before you can start training it. uo.com’s Remove Trap page says “Until publish 105 there were ‘qualifying’ requirements which must be met before the skill could be trained, these have been removed.” The requirement is gone, and the out-of-date claim is the kind of thing that sends people to train 50 Lockpicking they did not need.

In PvP

uo.com describes no Lockpicking mechanic that operates against another player. There is no lock to pick on a person, no counter to it, and nothing defensive in it. What it has is position.

• It works from hiding. A stealth thief can open a contested Felucca container without revealing, so the skill lets you be somewhere dangerous doing something productive rather than doing nothing.
• The exposure is Stealing, not picking. The 10-second re-hide lockout is attached to the theft, so the published play is to pick and scan in advance and spend the exposed window on the one thing you came for.
• Level 4 chests are Felucca content. The chests this skill exists to open are in open-PvP space, and the skill contributes nothing to surviving what arrives. A picking party is a target, and it needs someone whose job is not picking.

In PvM

• It gates treasure hunting with Cartography. Levels 1 to 4 need 56 / 72 / 84 / 95+, and no map level is accessible without the pair.
• It gates the Exodus loop. uo.com’s own opening sentence names “detecting hidden boxes in Exodus dungeon” as one of the three reasons to carry the skill — you still need Detecting Hidden to find them and something to survive their two traps.
• Town and dungeon chests are where semi-rares and refinements come from, at up to 3 traps each — which is why the classic treasure-hunter template is Cartography, Lockpicking and Remove Trap together, with healing supplies.
• Route timing is published. 20–30 minute container respawns for a repeatable circuit; dungeon statics only at server restart.

Caps, stats and training

Primary stat Dex, secondary Int. Lockpicking has no Power Scroll — it is absent from uo.com’s published list — so it caps at 100, against the 720 total skill cap. Scrolls of Transcendence do apply, since uo.com states they cover all skills including non-Powerscroll ones. There is no Lockpicking mastery. [!] No item property that adds Lockpicking skill is published, so the 95 threshold has to be bought with real points.

uo.com’s progression, with its own internal 75-versus-70 discrepancy noted above:

Band	Method
0–30	Buy from an NPC (not on Siege or Mugen); boxes made with 30 tinkering; town crates and chests
30–50	Boxes made with 50 tinkering; crates in NPC shops
50–70	Boxes made with 70 tinkering (the overview says 75); town crates and barrels; level 1 dungeon chests; level 1 treasure chests at 56 with Cartography
70–95	Boxes made with GM tinkering; level 2 chests at 72; Yew prison cell doors at 75; level 3 chests at 84
95–GM	Level 4 dungeon and treasure chests; town crates and barrels; Yew prison doors

The published locations are worth having in one place:

Level	Where
Up to 50	Inns at Jhelom and Skara Brae; provisioners in most towns; the Jhelom Pits and Docks barrels
50–70	Provisioners; Jhelom Pits and Docks barrels; Vesper Bank; the Warrior’s Guild secret room in Britain; Despise Dungeon Trammel level 1
70–GM	Vesper Bank; Warrior’s Guild, Britain; Despise Dungeon Trammel; Destard level 1; Yew Crypt; Yew prison cell doors; Shame level 5 islands

uo.com recommends a Crystal Ball of Knowledge to read a container’s difficulty — it is what produces the “too challenging” message — and notes you can pay an NPC thief or tinker to train you through the early levels. The most convenient setup it names is making the boxes yourself: “create a tinker/carpenter so you can make your own lockboxes”, which ties the skill to Tinkering and Carpentry on a second character.

Underneath, the Guaranteed Gain System awards a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] The success-chance formula for a pick attempt at a given skill against a given lock.
• [!] The chance of breaking a lockpick on failure.
• [!] Lockpicking requirements for level 5, 6 and 7 treasure chests.
• [!] Whether Lockpicking has any time or speed component, as Remove Trap explicitly does.
• [!] Any item property that adds Lockpicking skill.
• [!] A resolution of uo.com’s own 75-versus-70 tinkering discrepancy.

Where these come from

uo.com Lockpicking · uo.com Remove Trap · uo.com Detect Hidden · uo.com Hiding · uo.com Stealing · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Scrolls of Transcendence · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.