I’ve never understood this.
No one can touch your stuff.
No one can use your stuff.
No one can break your stuff.
So what’s the point?
And why do so many of you inconsiderate folks lock your portals? Do you not want the free footfall? 
6 Likes
Locking portals? I don’t know. Locking shops? I don’t know. Locking private homes? Because we don’t want strangers wandering in and touching all our things. They can’t interact with it, but they can still track in mud and put their fingers all over your stuff!
31 Likes
I usually just lock stuff when the things within are things they’re not meant to see or access through this way.
For example, the ugly mess that is the back end of an intricate, pretty wall sculpture. Aesthetic doors that mostly function as windows and you don’t want anyone messing up.
I also used a lock on one of the little trapdoors in my village, but it only houses a beacon. It’s a beacon only my alts and my main can access, but it’s mostly just used as waypoint. I can warp to it without worrying I’ll be warped on top of the roof or on top of the beacon. I dont want people opening the thing because it will disrupt the scenery haha
7 Likes
People have a bad habit of leaving doors open when they use them. My home is on a T3 world. I put locks on the doors to my crafting area because otherwise, one day my crafter is going to log in right next to an exotic spitter that he just can’t deal with.
22 Likes
old habit from way back when you needed locks to stop ppl taking your stuff.
3 Likes
Yep, this. Too many people leave the door open on dangerous worlds.
10 Likes
I’d lock a lock a portal that goes to an area I don’t want people frequenting, could mess up my experiments with regeneration and such. I’m too poor for such a portal, but I would do it😉
1 Like
We locked the portal to where we were building in order to get the area we wanted plotted before other players got some of the plots. Missing a little footfall versus having to negotiate for plots was a better solution for us. Now that we have it plotted, we have removed the lock. And other players have built around us so it worked out pretty well.
In the old universe we also locked portals into our guild spaces, to make them more special for the guild. Again, footfall as not really a consideration for that space.
2 Likes
I’ve worked on quite a few huge projects in the past, and whenever possible I’d lock people out of the construction area while in development. There’s a lot to be said for slowly seeing a build progress over time, but sometimes it’s nice to have a grand reveal.
The same goes for portals. Sometimes those portals lead to a construction area that you’re not ready to showcase to the world just yet - handy for people working on the project, but locked to keep the public out.
Nothing wrong with locks - it’s just a preference thing.
3 Likes
In the case of portals, its nice to stop people from using your portal to completely bomb-mine out around your beacon if you use portals to access your mines.
In the case of houses, I personally use it to cordon off the coils area behind my machinery wall so that unsuspecting new players don’t wander in there and kill themselves by walking into the pretty lights.
Edit: At least not as often. The other day someone still managed to sneak by and suicide to my coils when I forgot to close the door. 
3 Likes
I usually lock people out of construction sites, because they can walk over blocks I knock down and nab them. It’s also kinda to keep the suspense of seeing a new addition and to give them reason to come back!
1 Like
Oh, and I lock machine rooms to keep people from walking through the beams and hurting themselves and my machines!
4 Likes
I do that as well, and that’s because my home is completely empty. And I just want to give people that curiosity and suspense.
2 Likes
Because people are rude and don’t shut doors behind them.
2 Likes
I only own one lock at the moment and I am using it to keep my secret tunnel a secret tunnel. Once the tunnel is completed I’ll probably remove the lock.
Sometimes i don’t want my neighbors to know that i’m secretly tunneling under his base.
4 Likes
Same as Chivlet
I have a locked door to avoid killing people (did this after killing myself)
When a part of your build is WIP, things can get a bit dangerous. 
2 Likes
I thought it was rats. 
1 Like
Some do it to keep that portal to a favorite mining place private.
I have trap doors down over my stairs because I kept failing in the them when using stations near them. People kept leaving them open so I final put a lock on them.
Locking doors on hostile planets to keep people from letting spitters and stuff in the base.
1 Like
i do it for immersion.
when ppl see that there are just empty rooms in that big temple thing i build it would not feel like a big temple thing anymore :>
less is more sometimes, and secrets can make places more interesting
5 Likes