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Secure Containers
They make your fingers bleed your blood!

Could we possibly consolidate some of the verbiage for using secure containers?

Basically, I'm asking if we can make them more like lockers in function.

Open BankSafe with 123456

Get item from safe

Close safe

Versus:

Unlock safe with 123456

Open safe

get item from safe

close safe

lock safe

Just a relatively small QOL suggestion. There's a heck of a lot of command IO and keystrokes for managing the inventories of secure containers.

How will your evil lover catch you carelessly forgetting to lock your safe though?
I tend to agree that close/lock functions are pretty inconsistent and that it mostly just means that things that need to be explicitly locked just end up eating a @macro slot.

If you can remember to close something you can remember to lock it, it just ends up being more commands for very little flavor.

In most cases where things are left unlocked, my experience is that it was because the player didn't even know there was an explicit lock verb required because the game teaches players from the beginning that closing and locking are the same thing.

My usual metric is 'is there a benefit to the character for this state?' and I really can't think of a situation where having a container than can lock is closed but not locked really adds anything compared to being closed and locked.

I mostly wish all things that took 'lock' also took 'secure'. Not being able to use credchips and e-notes in cars is a serious QoL inconvenience.
Though -- I have forgotten to lock secure containers many times. So in so far as that creates an opportunity for theft, I think it's maybe a game positive.
I agree that having multiple steps required to secure increases the odds that a container would be left unsecured. To an extreme degree as a thought experiment, you could think of a container that required 100 different commands to secure and imagine it would be left unlocked more often than not.

I would always argue that fewer verbs is always better though, and that it makes the game more learning-friendly. It's why I love grapple so much, since the player only has to learn one verb for their character to do a ton of different things.

If all locking things had to be locked through a verb, I think it would make a lot more sense -- but they don't, which ends up increasing the learning curve for a player's verbal command vocabulary.