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Released earlier this month, Starfield is Bethesda’s long-in-development and much-hyped open-world space RPG. And while the hundreds of planets and spaceship building are cool and all, I particularly enjoy Starfield’s fantastic lockpicking minigame. Apparently I’m not alone, because someone out there has taken the time to create a standalone version of the minigame, letting you play it whenever and wherever you want.
Starfield is a very big game. You’ve probably heard that already, but it’s true! A thousand planets, hundreds of quests, starship combat, crafting, base building, and that’s just some of it. Not every aspect is great, but if you can put up with some classic Bethesda RPG jank, you can have a good time exploring the game’s massive galaxy for hundreds of hours. Yet with all the stuff to do and places to visit, it’s wild that maybe one of my favorite things in Starfield is something I usually don’t like much in video games: lockpicking. Against all odds, Bethesda actually developed a fun lockpicking minigame puzzle that is so good I (and apparently others) want to play it outside the game. Lucky, then, someone has gone and built that standalone version to satisfy us digipicking weirdos.
As spotted by Polygon, a Starfield fan and developer who goes by BB-dev has released an open-source digipick simulator for all to enjoy. Click here to play it in your browser. And a recent update made it much more playable on mobile devices, too.
Just like in Starfield, you spin around “key rings” and try to slot them into “lock rings.” The most important point is to make sure you don’t screw yourself and use a key on an outer ring that is needed for a later one. The minigame created by BB-dev supports multiple difficulties, a daily hard puzzle with one attempt, an in-game timer, and a scoreboard that tracks how many puzzles you’ve attempted and solved.
Read More: Starfield: The Kotaku Review
Buy Starfield: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop
According to BB-dev on Reddit, they have more feature ideas they’d like to work on, including a possible endless mode. But they want to be careful and not upset Bethesda, saying they won’t release an offline version of the game without the company’s permission.
“I hope they’ll see this is open source and let it slide. There’s a ton more I’d like to do with it,” wrote BB-dev. Future updates might be slow to come, though, as they announced in the minigame’s latest patch notes that they started a new job that will be taking up a lot of their time.
Still, even if they never get around to updating it again, the fact they made it open-source means that it’s likely other fans will pick up from where they left off to port this thing to other devices and add more modes and features. I just need a really good mobile version with a few power-ups and I’ll be set whenever I need to kill some time.
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