Storage and locks

Everything you store at a base is in something you built and placed: a crate, a shelf, an ammo chest, a fridge, a cupboard. There's no hidden stash. With nothing fitted to it, anyone standing at it can open it and take what's inside or leave something. The same goes for doors and gates.

Locks

Look at one of your containers, doors or gates and choose Fit a lock. You can fit one to anything of yours, your squad's, or anything in a claim whose cupboard lists you. One lock to a piece.

• Padlock and Hasp: cheap, made at a workbench from steel sheet, a spring, bolts and a key blank. Fitting it puts its key in your pocket. Whoever carries a key cut for it can open it, so a lost key is a lost lock. Cut copies from a Key Blank at a Workshop Bench to hand to people you trust.
• Keypad Deadbolt: made at an Electronics Bench (Crafting 40) from a salvaged keypad, electronics, wire, steel and a battery. You choose a four-digit code. Anyone who types the right code is remembered and let in from then on, without the code.

Running a keypad

Choose Look at the lock to see who it opens for. Whoever fitted it can let their squad or clan in, change the code (which empties the list, so everyone else needs the new code) or take it off. Anyone else on the list can take themselves off it. Nobody ever sees a code; share it by word of mouth.

Three wrong codes and the keypad shuts itself for a minute, and longer each time after that. The owner hears that someone is trying codes.

Getting past a lock

• A padlock can be picked with a lockpick set: quiet but slow, and the pick can snap. Bolt cutters take it off in seconds, but loudly.
• A keypad deadbolt can't be picked. It takes a metal cutter and most of a minute, and the noise draws the dead.
• Explosives blow a lock off, and can blow the whole container apart. When raiders break a container, part of what was inside is ruined and the rest spills out in a wreckage bag.
• The raid rules decide when any of this works, just like damage to your walls. See Camp and bases.

A crate's lock is only as good as the walls round it. Put your best stores behind a steel door with a keypad, inside a claim.