The working, maintenance and care of locks across a city or guildhouse is an important and arduous task. It falls to the State Ministry to look after the doors and locks of a city - these being, after all, the main and often only defence safeguarding a citizen's home and all its contents; not to mention commodity sheds filled with the produce of decades' harvest etc. The State Ministry has access to the LOCKSMITH civic service (see CITY HELP SERVICES) to help in the job of keeping locks/doors well-maintained and those with the rank should look at the info in SERVICE LOCKSMITH to find "how-to-use" details for this key area of the ministry.
Most cities have locksmith shops constructed in or near the central thoroughfares and, providing the city government has not suspended locksmith services (occasionally an austerity measure imposed to save treasurey funds), you will be able to make use of the city locksmith as follows:
Syntax: LOCKSMITH <master key> <secondary key>.
Demands the trained city locksmith work on the master key to such a point, it will be able to unlock all the locks covered by the secondary key as well as its own. Be warned: key complexity can cover at most ten distinct lock mechanisms on a single key. The charge for this service will vary from city to city and may be higher if the locksmith must add multiple new locks to the master key's range.
NOTE: civic locksmiths are generally not able to make copies or adjust master key uses if the lock mechanisms involved are too foreign, e..g. a Mercinae locksmith will be able to work with keys to locks in Mercinae, on Mercinaen doors, but may struggle if you bring a secondary key from the depths of the goblin city.
Syntax: COPY <key to be copied>.
For a modest fee, the civic locksmith can make direct copies of a key so you have spare keys or may give copies to friends, allies or guild/city brethren. All you need do is type COPY followed by the key to use, while standing in the city's locksmith shop and - providing you have the gold in your hands to pay for the copying - you will quickly receive the duplicate as well as your original. Both will be able to unlock the same lock or range of locks.
See HELP DOORS and HELP LOCKS for further info about the whole area of doors and lock mechanisms, lockable objects and commands you will need to use to deal with this important facet of the land.
