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WikiSkillsSnooping

Snooping

Snooping lets you open other players' and NPCs' backpacks and look inside. It is the scouting half of the thief toolkit: snoop first, then steal the item you actually want. Snooping caps at 100; there are no Skill Scrolls for it.

How it works

Stand next to your target and open their backpack like any container. A skill check decides whether the pack opens; on failure you simply "fail to peek into the container" and can try again.

  • Success chance scales directly with skill — at 100 Snooping you open any pack every time.
  • Snooping is not a criminal act by itself: you never turn grey for looking. You do lose a little karma with every attempt, so a career snoop drifts toward infamy.
  • Below 100 skill, each attempt risks bystanders noticing: everyone within 8 tiles may see "You notice [name] attempting to peek into [victim]'s belongings." At 100 skill, nobody ever notices.
  • Failing while hidden can reveal you — a high Hiding skill halves the chance of slipping out of the shadows.
  • Some travellers carry trapped pouches: snooping into a trapped container sets the trap off in your face.

Who you can snoop

  • Players: anywhere you would be allowed to act against them — the same rules as any hostile action apply (see PvP).
  • NPCs: freely outside town. Inside guarded towns, human townsfolk are off-limits, but hostile creatures can still be snooped.
  • Snooping is disabled in protected areas where stealing is blocked too.

Training 0 → 100

The check runs across the full 0–100 range, so it gains from ordinary use at every level. The classic route:

  1. 0–30: buy points from an NPC thief trainer.
  2. 30–100: snoop NPC packs on cooldown — wandering townsfolk outside guard protection, or hirelings and hostile humanoids. A second account/friend standing still makes an ideal practice target.

Failures gain too, so just keep peeking. See Skills Overview for gain modifiers.

  • Stealing — taking what you found
  • Hiding — staying unseen when a snoop fails
  • Player Killers — criminality (stealing flags, snooping does not)