Treasure Lock

Some dungeon chests hide a second, better-guarded secret. If your hands are steady enough to work the lock, its cache is yours.

Overview

The Treasure Lock is a lockpicking minigame hidden inside dungeon treasure chests. When you pick a dungeon chest, you sometimes discover that it conceals a secret chamber with its own lock. You keep everything from the chest you just opened - and if you can defeat the secret lock before the music runs out, a hidden cache opens with a second, full load of treasure.

Finding a Secret Chamber

Successfully pick the lock on any dungeon treasure chest.
Sometimes the message appears: "Upon examination, you find a secret chamber with its own lock." - and the Treasure Lock rises onto your screen.
The clock is the music: when the song ends, the chamber seals itself forever. The tune grows more urgent as your time runs short - learn its shape and you'll always know how long you have without ever watching a timer.

Working the Lock

The lock has five pin columns, each a tube of eight chambers. Somewhere in each column hides the set point.

Click PICK and the pressure bar starts rising up the active column. Click PICK again to stop it.
As the bar climbs, listen: a soft click marks the moment the pin reaches its set point. Stop the bar just after the click and the pin sets - the column locks in and glows green, and the lock moves you to the next pin.
Stop too early and nothing is lost - the bar simply holds its place, ready to resume. Let it climb past the click without stopping, and the pin slips: that column resets and you try it again.
The set point hides somewhere different in every column, every attempt - trust your ears, not a pattern.
Previous Pin / Next Pin move you between columns whenever you need to revisit one.

Tension & Picks

The tension bar and remaining picks — Watch the tension gauge - a snapped pick is gone for good.

While the bar is rising, tension builds in the gauge at the bottom. Pause your picking and it slowly drains.
If tension ever hits the top, your pick snaps - the column resets, and one of your three lockpicks is gone.
Lose all three picks and the chamber seals. Work in bursts: climb, pause, breathe, climb again.

Traps

The chambers are not undefended. Each chamber the bar crosses risks springing a trap - a nasty surprise that resets the column you're working and undoes the previous pin you set, green glow and all. Use the Previous Pin button to go back and re-set it.

Skills That Matter

What your training buys you
Skill	Effect
Lockpicking	Widens the window for stopping the bar after the click - a master has noticeably more breathing room than a novice on every single pin.
Remove Trap	Calms the lock's defenses. Each rank of training makes traps rarer, and a true master can silence them entirely.

The Secret Cache

Defeat all five pins before the song ends and the secret cache swings open - a second full chest of loot at the same level as the chest that hid it.
The cache is also the only known source of Treasure Hue exclusives: bolts of treasure-hued cloth, and - exceedingly rarely - treasure-hued hair dye, facial hair dye, backpack dye, or a treasure spell-hue deed.

Tips

Sound matters. Play with sound on - the click is the whole game. Music volume and effects volume are separate sliders, so you can keep the click loud and the song soft.
Pausing is free. The only ways to lose ground are sailing past the click, springing a trap, or snapping a pick.
Watch the tension gauge out of the corner of your eye; it drains while you're paused.
Bring Remove Trap training for the deep-dungeon chests - one sprung trap can cost you two pins.
Higher-level chests hide higher-level caches. The best secret chambers live behind the hardest locks in the game.