Laughless Saint Lockpicking Guide

Locks are a level check

If you are searching for this, you have probably hit a door that simply will not open. That is by design: locks are gated by your lockpicking skill level. There is no dexterity minigame to out-play — if your skill is too low, the door stays shut.

Confirmed thresholds observed in the shipped build:

Lockpicking 60 is far beyond what a new character has. When a guide author hit that door, their assessment was blunt: that’s too much. Which is the point — the game expects you to find another way in.

When you cannot pick it: three real options

1. Find the physical route. The game’s level design usually provides one. For the level-60 door, the answer is a chimney: go through a nearby ruined home, up the hill, and jump down the chimney. Be quick on the way out — there is a fire in the hearth.

This is the most reliable general lesson. A door you cannot open is often a puzzle about the building’s exterior, not about your skill sheet.

2. Craft the Unlock spell. Hotfix 5 on 19 August made the Unlock spell craftable. That converts a locked door from a lockpicking problem into a magic problem, and magic is taught early — see how to cast spells and spell crafting.

3. Find the key. Sometimes the key exists and the NPC is simply wrong about where it is. In Locked Out, Hyrum insists he left his key on the bed. It is on the table.

Levelling lockpicking

Lockpicking rises through use like every skill here. Two things make this easier than it was at launch:

• Update 7 increased pickpocket and lockpicking XP, so both climb noticeably faster now.
• Picking every low-level lock you pass is genuinely worth the time, because the skill gates content rather than just granting bonuses.

Community sentiment on the system has not been universally warm — “lockpicking sucks” is a real search phrase for this game. The honest summary is that it is a stat gate wearing the costume of a skill challenge, and whether that lands depends on how much you enjoyed the same design in Morrowind.

Related skills

Lockpicking sits next to pickpocketing on the character sheet, and the two share the Update 7 XP buff. Pickpocketing has its own major payoff — a perk granting +100 carry capacity, covered on perks — and drives the Right Where I Found It questline.

Sources

• NerveLabs official announcements, Hotfix 5 (19 Aug 2026) and Update 7 (21 Aug 2026).
• “How to Break the Moonface Curse (Moon In The Man & Locked Out)” walkthrough for the level-60 door, the chimney route and the key location.
• “First Look” gameplay playthrough for the lockpicking 20 room.