When you talk to Finnigan in the cellar of the Ducal inn in Verdistis, and agree to do a task for him, he says;
Commander Kratus confiscated my favourite pair of lock picks in his office. I got those lock picks from my father, so they are of sentimental value. They are also imbued with very useful magics too. I wish them returned to me as soon as possible.
The "useful magics" are being unbreakable (no more collecting and carrying around stacks of regular lockpicks), and a nice stat bonus: +20 agility.
Before the 1.31
patch, Finnigan's lockpicks would break if you lock picked anything with them in your inventory. Installing the disk version patch will put them back in commander Kratus' desk/table, ready to be re-stolen.
In an unpatched disk version, or the Steam version, The magic lockpicks will disappear if you drop them on the ground. Before the disk version patch fixed this, it meant the inventory file trick could not be used to replace them. However, that is currently the best way to recover the lockpicks; see the reply below (the 1.0061A Steam version lockpicks will disappear if dropped on the ground, but the lockpicks from the updated disk version inventory files will be fine).
Before the 1.33 disk patch there was still a way to get the magic lockpicks back, but it is only useful in the 1.31/1.32 disk versions, and remains here for historical reference.
The following is basically a copy of Nike SXT's post from the old forum, '
stuck in easter egg area'.
Please read this post through before attempting, and make sure you follow the steps below carefully.NOTE: With updated disk versions and the Steam release of DD, the method described in a reply below should be used.
You will need a hex editor. The one Nike recommends,
WHD, is small (151KB zip, 315KB extracted), requires no install, is free and easy to use.
Procedure1 ) Drop everything from your inventory and equipment, or put everything in a chest.
2 ) Pick up a boulder, or other useless object.
3 )
Save the game under a new name, such as 'lockpicks'.
Important: just on general principles, you do not want to try a fix or hack on the only copy of your latest save.
4 ) Open the inv.b0 file from the 'lockpicks' saved game folder (..\Divine Divinity\Run\savegames\lockpicks\inv.b0 ) in the hex editor.
5 ) In WHD, there is a Mode selection at the top left, which defaults to 'Dec' (decimal). Press this button, to switch to 'Hex' mode. The program displays a series of 4 character sets, with 10 sets per row. The first two rows are the first 40 bytes of the file, which currently describes the boulder. For Finnigan's lockpicks, the first two lines should be;
8C00 0000 1000 0000 FD0F 0000 FFFF 0000 0100 E0BB
8021 0725 04AB 0014 1400 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
6 ) Each set of 4 characters contains 2 bytes of data. Double click on the left and / or right two characters of each set, and enter the corresponding values above, then hit Enter or click OK. This is a bit tedious, but not all of the values will need to be changed.
7 ) Double check the values in the first two rows of the hex editor, then exit WHD and re-load the saved game 'lockpicks'.
You should now have Finnigan's magic lockpicks in your inventory, rather than a boulder. Pick up all your stuff / equipment, and go sell your regular lockpicks.
