How to Unlock All the Safes in The Last of Us 2 Without Finding Clues

For fans of The Last of Us 2, Naughty Dog’s follow-up to the 2013 Game of the Year winner The Last of Us, part of the fun is the depth of its world. Such a feeling is often limited to open world games, those allowing you to explore freely and interact with virtually anything; but where The Last of Us 2 is predominately linear, it makes up through narratives and collectibles that live beneath the surface and off the beaten path.

But collecting ammunition to survive can be challenging enough for easy-level gamers, or maybe you simply aren’t interested in the work it takes to search every corner, collect every state coin, or read every letter. If you want the goodies hidden inside each of the safes, however, it’s still possible to crack each one without any clues at all.

Just listen for the click. That’s right: Kudos to the sound engineering team for allowing the ability to crack combination safes — all but the digital ones — like a spy. A necessary caveat: The time it takes for this hack is initially slower than the time it’d take to scour the area for clues (each combination safe has three slots of 100 numbers each, making for 3,000 possible combinations), but it’s fast to learn. If you’re sick of looking, or you just want to feel like a badass jewel thief, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to try.

Cracking a safe is best done with headphones — think of them as your stethoscope — but rest assured you can do it with regular TV audio, as I did. When you stumble across a safe, slowly click through each number. Listen closely to the sound of the clicks until you hear a differently pitched sound as the tumbler falls into place. Select that number, move onto the next, and repeat. It goes faster than you think once you get the hang of it, and you can crack a safe in just a few minutes if you’re in need of supplies but not looking to land a Platinum trophy for reading ever letter in the game.

I highly recommend first trying to crack a safe with a combination you do know, just to familiarise yourself with the sound (that is, if you want to do it quickly; if you’re in it for the challenge, try doing it on the first safe you find). Then try shuffling the numbers, closing your eyes, and doing it again. Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it.

So go forth, safecracker, and add another skill to your stealth repertoire! Collect everything you need to survive, and feel like a badass doing it.