Ten years later, Fallout 4 players noticed they'd been picking safes without keyholes with bobby pins the whole time

There's a special kind of discovery that happens on the thousandth hour in a familiar game. Not a secret location or a hidden dialogue option, but the sudden realization that a mechanic you've been using this whole time is physically impossible.

That's exactly the situation that played out around safes in Fallout 4. The standard safe model has a large rotating dial with numbers and no keyhole whatsoever, yet the survivor from Vault 111 calmly shoves a bobby pin and screwdriver somewhere, twists them, and gets access to the contents. One player finally couldn't take it anymore and asked outright where exactly the lock is that they've been picking all these years.

The answer lies in how the game itself is built. The lockpicking minigame carried over to Fallout 4 from Fallout 3 and Skyrim in nearly untouched form, and it uses a single universal lock model no matter what's in front of you – a padlock on a gate, an apartment door, a chest, or a heavy safe. Difficulty isn't tied to the type of container at all, but to the rank of the Locksmith perk, which unlocks advanced, expert, and master locks, and at rank four also makes bobby pins unbreakable.

Funny enough, the fan explanation turned out to be closer to reality than to absurdity. In the comments, someone came up with the idea that the center of the dial is a removable cap hiding an emergency keyhole, with a serial number that lets you call out a specialist from the manufacturer. Real safes actually work this way: the Master Lock 1670 padlock has its keyhole right in the dial head, and budget gun safes with keypads almost always come with a mechanical backup key tucked under a decorative cover, in case the electronics die along with the batteries.

The combination dial on the safe hasn't gone anywhere, and the bobby pin still turns just fine.