[Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

42dustman · 2014-02-06 10:05:00

I hate combination locks, they are a dirty trick that makes the robbery practically impossible for players that don't have the expensive tools needed for brute forcing the way through it. So I had this idea: An test probe. It would be a tool that you could use on exposed wires or electric floors and it would give you an map showing every other electronic component connected to it. I think this addition would make comb locks way less common.

protox13 · 2014-02-06 10:11:50

42dustman wrote:

I hate combination locks, they are a dirty trick that makes the robbery practically impossible for players that don't have the expensive tools needed for brute forcing the way through it. So I had this idea: An test probe. It would be a tool that you could use on exposed wires or electric floors and it would give you an map showing every other electronic component connected to it. I think this addition would make comb locks way less common.

Too powerful and unbalancing. For the price of the probe you could potentially map significant portions of a house.

largestherb · 2014-02-06 10:12:29

oh i can't believe there isn't a page on it in the wiki!

a long time ago the game was changed to prevent combo locks by adding a viewable blueprint for every single house that you could access from the neighbourhood screen. i'll go and see if i can find an old screenshot.. they were beautiful.

but basically, this tool was suggested before blueprints came about. and then blueprints came about. and then the game just became an electronics puzzle solver. .....it was pretty awesome fun, but not the game jason wanted to make.

edit: found one on goooogle

Last edited by largestherb (2014-02-06 10:21:01)

DaVinci · 2014-02-06 10:25:58

Well, even though it MIGHT NOT be what you are looking for, there is a future update that will bring the "voltage-tester" in-game.Possibly.

Source: game files

42dustman · 2014-02-06 10:29:10

If it only showed the tiles that are electrically connected to the ones were the tool was used it would not be so overpowered.

DaVinci wrote:

Well, even though it MIGHT NOT be what you are looking for, there is a future update that will bring the "voltage-tester" in-game.Possibly.
Source: game files

Nice

Last edited by 42dustman (2014-02-06 10:30:17)

largestherb · 2014-02-06 10:30:32

DaVinci wrote:

Well, even though it MIGHT NOT be what you are looking for, there is a future update that will bring the "voltage-tester" in-game.Possibly.
Source: game files

haha, the voltage meter was replaced with the club a while back. i think there was only one ever used.

also i should have mentioned, the voltage meter used to be placed on 'wire' tiles and it'd let you know if the wire was powered or not.

v in reply to cheese: i am going to poke ukuko about having an export to blueprint button. or letting me play with it to make it do that

Last edited by largestherb (2014-02-06 10:35:49)

TheRealCheese · 2014-02-06 10:33:40

largestherb wrote:

oh i can't believe there isn't a page on it in the wiki!
a long time ago the game was changed to prevent combo locks by adding a viewable blueprint for every single house that you could access from the neighbourhood screen. i'll go and see if i can find an old screenshot.. they were beautiful.
but basically, this tool was suggested before blueprints came about. and then blueprints came about. and then the game just became an electronics puzzle solver. .....it was pretty awesome fun, but not the game jason wanted to make.
edit: found one on goooogle
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8276/8882 … 2d26_o.png

That is beautiful. Jason, any chance of a feature that lets you export your own map in this format? Would be great to show off a good dungeon after it's crumbled and you move on to new traps.

Drakol · 2014-02-07 02:11:30

Though all in all, Combination Locks are making this game a lot less fun for me. Half the time, it's really really intriguing to go through a maze. Doors locking behind you, being chased by dogs, needing dogs to get through traps. Then after all that, you come to a lock, which you have to guess? or break? instead of like the entire other half of the Map, that was Ingenuity and Careful planning? Yeah...

arakira · 2014-02-07 04:57:47

Combo locks are boring, but are not to difficult to brute force if you have the cash. So, the best way to deal with them is to ignore them until you have enough cash to crack it. It would be nice to have a note on the front door, left by previous robbers, that would say "beware, 6-bit combo lock inside". So most people would just ignore the house.

DaVinci · 2014-02-07 05:02:00

Drakol wrote:

Though all in all, Combination Locks are making this game a lot less fun for me. Half the time, it's really really intriguing to go through a maze. Doors locking behind you, being chased by dogs, needing dogs to get through traps. Then after all that, you come to a lock, which you have to guess? or break? instead of like the entire other half of the Map, that was Ingenuity and Careful planning? Yeah...

But all other traps all also requiring you to guess what door to open, which hallway to go.

The whole game is a simple gamble.

PS: most used comb lock codes I went through

1 - 3 - 7

2 - 4 - 6

-- Try those above with 2 spaces on each doesn't really matter. People like those.

2 - 3 - 8 -- This might change a little but its the same pattern.

Last edited by DaVinci (2014-02-07 05:06:35)

42dustman · 2014-02-07 08:58:38

DaVinci wrote:

But all other traps all also requiring you to guess what door to open, which hallway to go.

There's just no comparing of a maze to a comb lock, mazes are far more expensive and consume far more space and have far less possible solutions and can be far more easily broken with tools like saws and blowtorches and sometimes you can check your way through with bricks and sometimes if you go the wrong way you can easily turn back with cheap tools like water or bats; whereas in a comb lock you're totally blind and a single wrong move bricks the entire thing. I saw a tutorial on Youtube showing how you can make a 16 buttons comb lock with just a little over a $1000 and comb lock like that can have over 3000 permutations, to make a maze where the odds where equivalently tipped against the burglar you would need literally a hundred trifurcations.

Last edited by 42dustman (2014-02-07 09:02:36)

baughb · 2014-02-08 19:47:29

42dustman wrote:

DaVinci wrote:
But all other traps all also requiring you to guess what door to open, which hallway to go.
There's just no comparing of a maze to a comb lock, mazes are far more expensive and consume far more space and have far less possible solutions and can be far more easily broken with tools like saws and blowtorches and sometimes you can check your way through with bricks and sometimes if you go the wrong way you can easily turn back with cheap tools like water or bats; whereas in a comb lock you're totally blind and a single wrong move bricks the entire thing. I saw a tutorial on Youtube showing how you can make a 16 buttons comb lock with just a little over a $1000 and comb lock like that can have over 3000 permutations, to make a maze where the odds where equivalently tipped against the burglar you would need literally a hundred trifurcations.

Except combo locks all have major weaknesses against tools. Essentially, a contiguous chain of wired wooden walls leading directly to a place the owner doesn't want you to go.
Sure, it's practically impossible for a new player with no tools or maybe even a $2000 tool bag player to break a sufficiently designed combo lock, but a decent scout and enough saws breaks them every time (+maybe a ladder and/or crowbar, depending on how it's set up).

What I'm saying is; the design might be great for new houses with <$5k but you won't ever really get anywhere far with a combo lock house. I've made quite a bit of money by scouting combo locks, then coming back with x saws + 1 ladder.

TyrannosaurusHax · 2014-02-20 07:20:54

Pro tip:
You can break a combo lock in one visit by guessing one digit of it correctly as needing to be off and cutting into it to see the voltage triggered switches, unless something extra is being done so that you can't reach line of sight to them.

Here's why this tool wouldn't work:
Suppose you have a tool that lets you detect whether a bit of wired wall, or a wire, or a switch is linked to a voltage triggered switch or an inverted voltage triggered switch...

It would cost more space but one could link the output from THAT voltage triggered switch to another voltage triggered switch...or not, or do it randomly across half of the digits of the combo lock.
In other words, unless you can see that the combo lock is compact you'd have no way of knowing whether the tool is giving you good information.
So at best this tool would be merely inconvenient for people who want to build combo locks and know what they're doing.

This is why combo locks aren't literally hitler:
A combo lock simply has the lowest probability per space of being guessed correctly and allowing a robber to pass an obstacle without using tools.
Every possible defense in this game is based on the robber being unable to know what to do to get by without tools and the most efficient defenses can only maximize the cost and rarity of the tools required to brute force them while minimizing the probability of a robber guessing their way past it, preferably while costing the robber as many tools as possible to not die from an incorrect guess.
These hard defenses combined with commitment gates may make up almost the entirety of the defenses one can build. Off the top of my head the only other kind is anything designed to confuse a robber, such as a maze or a number of hallways intended to make you forget how many you've passed before you see dogs.

tl;dr of final paragraph: why the rage against combo locks but not "guess the correct commitment gate!" houses? Because the chance of getting it right (ignoring whether you've got instant feedback if it is right) is 1 in 2^[number of digits] as opposed to 1 in [number of commitment hallways]?

You're not really supposed to be able to get through a competent house without tools, unless that is/is part of the house owner's intent.

Addendum:

...showing every other electronic component connected to it. ...

Oh...hmm...so reading that more carefully...if I understand this correctly...you'd want to see the entire circuit by plonking this thing on a button or something...

Wouldn't that make any circuit a robber can reach a liability?
Not to mention there'd still be ways to make that far more costly for a robber... cats can press buttons quite far away after all...

Last edited by TyrannosaurusHax (2014-02-20 07:45:44)

jasonrohrer · 2014-02-20 08:45:47

Blueprints demonstrated this simple fact:

Even if you can see the WHOLE map, NP-Hard puzzles are still possible (as in: can likely not be solved in a non-exponential amount of work by a computer or a human).

But we didn't need blueprints to demonstrate it, because it was already theoretically provable: the systems in the game are suitably powerful that they can represent boolean logic statement [(A or B or C) and (D or not B or F) and (not A or not F or E)]. As soon as you can do that, you can encode boolean satisfiability problems in the game maps themselves, where reaching the vault without tools requires finding a set of true/false assignments for A, B, C, D, etc, that make the whole statement true. There is no known algorithm for finding a valid truth assignment for these kinds of problems in a non-exponential number of steps. Effectively, solving methods boil down to trying all possible assignments. For N variables, there are 2^N possible assignments.

This means that even with the map in hand, you'd be staring at 16 buttons and couldn't figure out which ones to press without running through close to 65,000 possibilities on paper.

And even if we eliminate all electronics, I suspect that there are "dog and maze and pit" constructions for where having the full map doesn't help much either. There can be an exponential number of paths through a branching dog/pit maze, and no clear algorithm for picking the right path without going through all possible paths on paper.

This is a hard computer science fact that we will never get around. Any sufficiently powerful system can be used to build puzzles for which there is no known way to solve them in a non-exponential number of steps.

The only solution is to give people tools to bypass these things when necessary. By making these tools precious, tactical, opportunistic tool use is still possible, and the game becomes one of looking for weaknesses to exploit with the fewest and cheapest tools. That's still kind of puzzle-like, but not in the hard Rubik's sense of the word. More like Dishonored: tactical puzzles.

42dustman · 2014-02-21 03:19:09

Every single house in the middle class range has comb locks now... Sigh... They effectively render successful starting robberies impossible.

redxaxder · 2014-02-21 06:29:47

My house doesn't have a combo lock and it's in the middle class range. Rob me

Also, the math on combo locks isn't as oppressive as you may first suspect. Because you generally get one try from each "level".

For example, with a 5 button combo lock, there are 2^5 = 32 states the buttons could be in, but there are two of them that you know -cannot- be the solution: all pressed and all unpressed.

There are 5 possible 1-pressed combinations. You get one guess at this level. If the combo is one of these, your success chance in 1 in 5.

There are 10 possible 2-pressed combinations. You get one guess at this level.

There are 10 possible 3-pressed. 5 possible 4-pressed.

So your odds of guessing a 5 button combo lock with no tools are either 1 in 10 or 1 in 5, depending on how they wired it. That's already way higher than the 1 in 32 the combo lock salesman promised.

But if we bring in tools, then we can do even better! Let's assume the combo is either on level 2 or level 3 (since those are the hardest to guess anyway).

Using one saw, we can make the following guesses:
1, 12, 123, 13, 134, 1345

Our odds of guessing through the combo lock are now 1 in 5, regardless of what level the combination is on.

Using two saws, we can guess like this:
1, 12, 123, 13, 134, 34, 345

So we assume the combo isn't on level 4, and we make 3 guessed each on levels 2 and 3. Our odds of guessing a combo on that level with this approach are 3 in 10. Unfortunately by sawing 2 buttons this way we give up our chance to make a guess on level 4.

4 button combo locks are even easier to guess through. The odds for each level are 1 in 4, 1 in 6, and 1 in 4. With one saw you can take two tries each on level 2 and level 3, making your odds 1 in 4, 1 in 3, and 1 in 2 (depending on what level the combo is on). This is on par with your odds of guessing through branching paths.

Of course, this is assuming that players choose their combos at random, by rolling dice or something. But they really don't. Players will choose combos that "feel random" thinking that it makes the combination harder to guess. This bias will make some combinations appear more frequently than others. If you take notes on what combos you find you can raise your odds even higher.

Last edited by redxaxder (2014-02-21 06:53:31)

Kimenzar · 2014-02-21 06:39:44

Magic dance is a combo lock too like 4 steps forward 1 step back 7 1 4 2. You just need to exploit the weakness of this lock, like get to the dancing dog and figure the combo out or left this house behind. And most houses are built to be 2k safe.

Last edited by Kimenzar (2014-02-21 06:39:55)

colorfusion · 2014-02-21 06:47:29

I'm half way up the front page, and have been the very top house with the same design, and have a house that is incredibly easy to figure out with a single scouting trip and no tools.

I don't think combo locks are overpowered at all at the moment, although magic dances are pretty annoying.

Last edited by colorfusion (2014-02-21 06:52:35)

redxaxder · 2014-02-21 06:50:59

colorfusion wrote:

I'm half way up the front page, and have been the very top house with the same design, and have a house that is incredibly easy to figure out with a single scouting trip and no tools.

It's always easy when you built it yourself

*
Also, I fibbed slightly when I said I don't have a combo lock. But I'm sure you'll agree this kind of thing hardly counts.

http://castledraft.com/editor/c8C9wM

I call it "Despair".

Last edited by redxaxder (2014-02-21 07:19:21)

ukuko · 2014-02-21 07:24:07

The bottom left of the map seems to be the favourite spot for fake combo locks.

redxaxder · 2014-02-21 07:27:39

ukuko wrote:

The bottom left of the map seems to be the favourite spot for fake combo locks.

Only the fake ones?

Immhotep · 2014-02-21 14:29:37

Perhaps a new tool which is less OP such as a power generator might help in breaking these combination locks? Since all combi-locks makes you unable to pass by cutting the power, a power generator will surely help much...

TyrannosaurusHax · 2014-02-21 16:49:35

Perhaps a new tool which is less OP such as a power generator might help in breaking these combination locks?

That would have to cost an obscene amount of money to be reasonable, not to mention greatly undermine the biggest strength - the unique strength - of a powered pit.
http://castledraft.com/editor/G53fUB The most extreme case I can think of quickly would currently cost one at least $13400 to brute force if I'm not mistaken.

...and it still wouldn't do you any good against an island combo lock.

redxaxder · 2014-02-21 17:19:59

TyrannosaurusHax wrote:

$13400

For common items like saws you're better off considering the opportunity cost of not selling the saw (instead of the buy cost). A more realistic cost of tearing through that map would be 29 * 200 + 1800 = 7600.

42dustman · 2014-02-21 17:52:35

redxaxder wrote:

My house doesn't have a combo lock and it's in the middle class range. Rob me

Your's that one with the arrow made of indicator lights ain't it? Only one I remember that didn't have a comb lock (at least up until the part I reached).

Kimenzar wrote:

Magic dance is a combo lock too like 4 steps forward 1 step back 7 1 4 2. You just need to exploit the weakness of this lock, like get to the dancing dog and figure the combo out or left this house behind. And most houses are built to be 2k safe.

I have, in two different occasions, successfully guessed magic dances that extended all the way from the entrance to the top corner of the house. I have never successfully guessed a comb lock even though I'm faced with them 10x more often.

Still, I suppose this won't be changed so I'll just stop whining now.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-02-06 10:05:00

[Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#2 2014-02-06 10:11:50

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#3 2014-02-06 10:12:29

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#4 2014-02-06 10:25:58

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#5 2014-02-06 10:29:10

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#6 2014-02-06 10:30:32

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#7 2014-02-06 10:33:40

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#8 2014-02-07 02:11:30

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#9 2014-02-07 04:57:47

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#10 2014-02-07 05:02:00

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#11 2014-02-07 08:58:38

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#12 2014-02-08 19:47:29

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#13 2014-02-20 07:20:54

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#14 2014-02-20 08:45:47

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#15 2014-02-21 03:19:09

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#16 2014-02-21 06:29:47

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#17 2014-02-21 06:39:44

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#18 2014-02-21 06:47:29

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#19 2014-02-21 06:50:59

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#20 2014-02-21 07:24:07

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#21 2014-02-21 07:27:39

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#22 2014-02-21 14:29:37

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#23 2014-02-21 16:49:35

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

#24 2014-02-21 17:19:59

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#25 2014-02-21 17:52:35

Re: [Idea] A tool for breaking combination locks.

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