While playing the new Gothic Remake game and encountering the lockpicking mini-game puzzle, I understood that I'm not smart/patient enough to solve most of them. At the same time, I thought "huh, this actually should be algorithmically solvable". And I decided to build this web-app to do it.
It provides you an interface to map out and display dependencies between the tumblers in the lock, as well as auto-solve it with some BFS graph-traversal.
In the latter case, you just need to follow the steps/move it gives you verbatim.
Work in progress and looks like ass, but it's operational and verified on a half-a-dozen of locks in the game.
Be warned, even with all of the automation and automatic solving, it's still a somewhat finicky process, which requires attention and time spent.
- Open the app;
- Start lockpicking in the game;
- Set the amount of tumblers in the corresponding input in the app;
- Move tumblers left and right in the app, until their offset matches the one in the game; more
- In the game, move each tumbler, to see which tumbler moves along with it, and mark them in "Dependencies" table in the app. more
- Click
Save Lockin the app; - Click
auto-solveto see the list of movements required to solve the lock. - Follow the list of movements in the game to the T.
Any lock in the game has multiple tumblers, with 7 pins each. Each tumbler is positioned with some offset from the center line. Your goal is to put the central 4-th pin (between 3 pins to the left and 3 pins to the right) in the middle.
The complexity comes from the interconnected dependencies between the tumblers. Moving a tumbler can move some other connected tumblers either in the same or the opposite direction.
Each lock has a predetermined outline of pin offsets and their dependencies, these definitely survive save and load games, so you can come back to them later, close and then resume the process, etc.
I'm not sure if locks are consistent between different game attempts, different players, etc.
The first step is to create a representation of a lock.
This app assigns an uppercase latin character to a tumbler, the farthest away
from a lockpick (or in the top-right corner of your screen in game) is A, the
next one is B, the closest one to you is usually E or F depending on the
lock complexity.
You can create the schematic either in the app directly, I usually prefer ye olde pen-and-paper first, before moving it to the app, if I'm stuck.
Pen and paper example:
Either way while drawing the outline, you should start with tumbler positions. Just count the amount of pins left or right from the center line and replicate the offset in the app, so it matches what you see in the game.
| This in game: | Matches this in the app: |
|---|---|
 |
 |
After that, you need to map out dependencies between tumblers. For that, you need to move each pin in the lock in the game, and see what other tumblers, if any, moves with it.
In the dependency table, each currently selected tumbler is displayed as a row,
and tumblers it affects while moving are represented in the columns. Click on
the column cell, blue + denotes a tumbler that moves into the same direction,
"a positive", red - denotes a tumbler that moves in the opposite direction,
"a negative".
At any point you can click "save lock", to save your progress -- this saves your lock to your browser local storage, and the lock will survive a page reload.
For a more permanent solution, you can export a lock you created as a file to your computer and import it later at any time. Don't forget to name your lock accordingly, by clicking on the header and writing the name there.
You can grab a lock file from the locks folder of this repo and import them, to see how a finished lock looks like.
While you're solving the lock in the app, it stores a list of moves you take. It's also your undo-redo functionality and is smart enough to not count repeated back-and-forth movements as separate actions, if you're just playing around. You can click on any movement in the solution list, to go back in time, if you messed up, or see how the lock looked like back then.
If you click "auto-solve", it will automatically populate the list from any given point to the completion in the fewest-movement path.
Regardless of how you achieved the final state, you can then use this list to replicate it in the game. I suggest you select the movement in the app, replicate it in the game, and then advance the selected movement (with either your mouse or keyboard). In this way you would be able to see the visual outline in the app of how the lock should look like after the movement, as well as the pointer to the current movement performed.
Written in svelte, requires node.js for development.
Once you've created a project and installed dependencies with npm install (or pnpm install or yarn), start a development server:
npm run dev
# or start the server and open the app in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --opengothic-lockpick-emulator is MIT licensed.