Keys & Keycards

Locked rooms are where the loot that's worth a trip lives, and each one has a key. Keys are small: they belong in your secure container, which is exactly what it's for, and your stash has room for keys and keycards that grows as you upgrade it.

A key is used up when it opens its lock, as is a keycard on its door. Not sure which key a chest wants? Check the lock: it names the key. A locked door names the key or card it needs and how long until it opens again.

Where keys come from#

Scavs carry keys: about one in eight has one, for anything from a military base to the police station, the dorms or Reserve, but never a Lab card. Task rewards hand out keys too, often as a random draw from a list; the Quests / Tasks page says which.

How rare a key is follows what it opens. Keys come in three tiers:

• Common: the Solnechny mine, the Berezino sawmill, the three safes (Novy Sobor, Guglovo, Vyshnoye) and the lower Dorms rooms. These drop most often.
• Military: the police station, the military bases, the airfields, the Resort and the other military sites.
• Endgame: both Labs keys, Skalisty, Shturman's stash, Reserve, the three marked rooms, Tisy HQ, Prison Island and the Lexos director's office. These drop about a third as often as they used to, and on the ground only in military and police buildings.

The number of keys in circulation is the same as before; it is which keys you find that changed. A chest can lead to a better key: civilian chests sometimes hold a military key, and military and endgame chests sometimes an endgame one.

Spare keys with a name of their own, such as the two Lexos keys and the Ritual Key, show that name at the traders and on the flea market.

Chest keys#

Find your key below, under the name on the item, to see where it works and how many chests it opens. Most chests need a key; the hidden stashes and caches are the free ones.

Keyed chests suit their place: industrial at a mine, household at a dorm, military at a base, and police stations hold police weapons and a guaranteed vest and helmet. Free chests have a limit on how good a gun can be. Keyed chests don't. Chests are for looting, not storage: they clear shortly after you empty them, loot that doesn't fit on you is placed beside the chest, and a fresh one never appears right next to a player.

Keycard rooms#

A few rooms are behind a locked door rather than a chest. The six coloured cards open rooms inside the Lab, and opening one sounds an alarm that anyone nearby can hear. The three marked rooms out on the map open silently with their own keys, and they are one of the few places the coloured cards come from. Each room resets on its own clock and waits while someone is still inside, and logging in inside a locked room moves you out safely.

The Lab keycards#

The white access card gets you into the Lab and is used up on entry; the coloured cards open its rooms. The Lab covers what each room holds and where the cards come from.

• TerraGroup Labs access keycard
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Black)
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Blue)
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Green)
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Red)
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Violet)
• TerraGroup Labs keycard (Yellow)

Every chest location#

The hidden stashes and caches are plotted, every spot, on the stash map.

Every weapon out of a chest arrives built — magazine, optic, the furniture it actually takes — with at most four spare magazines, and its attachments are mixed, so no two are quite alike.