You remove some scarab-set professional calipers from in your black stalking cloak.
>
Using your professional calipers, you carefully begin to measure the lock...
Roundtime: 7 sec.
R>
Measuring carefully, it looks to be a fairly complicated lock.
R>
760-795

Using your professional calipers, you carefully begin to measure the lock...
Roundtime: 8 sec.
R>
Measuring carefully, it looks to be a fairly complicated lock.
>
760-795

>pick chest with invar lockpick
You settle into the difficult task of picking the lock.
You make a competent attempt (d100=61).
You are not able to pick the chest, but you get a sense that it has an amazingly well-crafted lock. About a -860 difficulty lock (in thief-lingo).
Roundtime: 5 sec.

lm cal cal
Those calipers could not be more perfectly calibrated. You should leave them alone. You'll just mess them up.

...
and just to check a soul golem box hadn't snuck into Nelemar somehow

>lm rel my chest
You settle into the difficult task of relocking the silver chest.
You make an excellent attempt (d100=94).
You struggle with the tumblers. As you do, you get a sense that the chest has an amazingly well-crafted lock (-860 thief-lingo difficulty ranking). Then...CLICK! It locks!

Roundtime: 10 sec.

...

Thats perfect calibration from a grandmaster giving repeat measurements at least 65 out

I think I worked out what it was. The messaging doesn't tell you which box you measured, and I think it wasn't the one I thought it was.

So this was new to me too - it's possible that it has been brought up before - but if so I had no recollection.

Calipers have a maximum "calibration" amount, which is what you're at when you see the "practically glows" message, but not all calipers have the same maximum calibration value. The absolute best calipers max out at 6/5 the value of the professional calipers at Larton's (according to the comments/code). I don't actually know if there's any way to evaluate your calipers, and I don't know where or when you might have been able to buy better calipers.


Ixix

> If that's near your max lock as well it can add additional error to the measurement.

I definitely have the impression that they are worse dealing with a lower locksize than normal, but haven't noticed anything at the top end. If there's a -250 off a critter that got in the way of an escort mixed in with a bunch of capped critter boxes, my calipers seem to be a lot worse at the -250 lock than they are at the -1250 locks.

Its possible that the way calipers use to decide what maxlock is I never get close to, because I could open boxes that are too tough for calipers to measure and my record lock comes from an invasion critter and is somewhat above the maximum a normal critter can gen.