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. A container takes one lock. A door or gate takes two, a padlock and a keypad deadbolt, and it opens only when both let you in.

• Padlock and Hasp: cheap, made at a workbench from steel sheet, a spring, bolts and a key blank. Every padlock is stamped with its own number, like #A41F, and so is every key cut for it: the key's name tells you which lock it fits. A new padlock comes with its key. Take a padlock off and it keeps its stamp, so its keys still open it wherever you hang it next. Cut copies from a Key Blank at a Workshop Bench to hand to people you trust.
• Keypad Deadbolt: made at an Electronics Bench from a salvaged keypad, electronics, wire, steel and a nine-volt battery. You choose a four-digit code. Anyone who types the right code is remembered and let in from then on, without the code.

The keypad's battery

A keypad runs on its own nine-volt battery, never the base grid, so a power cut doesn't open it. A fresh battery lasts about a month standing by, and every door you open takes a little more. When it runs low the pad chirps and blinks red, and your base log says so. Change it from the lock's card with a fresh 9V Battery.

When the battery dies, the bolt stays thrown for everyone, you included: a real deadbolt fails secure. Hold a fresh battery to the contacts under the pad and it wakes long enough to type the code, then change the battery from the inside. A flat battery gives a raider nothing.

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, and it's a skill, not luck. Lean on the tension wrench until one pin binds, lift it until it sets with a click, and feel for the next. Too much tension and the pick snaps and is gone; too little and the pins drop. Each padlock feels the same every time you come back to it. The scrape carries ten feet or so, and a picked padlock comes off the hasp in your hand. 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.