The Last of Us Part 1 Shiv Doors and Safes: All Locations

A single campaign of The Last of Us contains 1,620 parts, and 660 of them are behind locks — 460 inside the thirteen shiv doors and another 200 inside the four safes. That is per the wiki's part-by-part census of the campaign, and it means more than 40% of your weapon-upgrade budget never lies on a shelf waiting to be walked past. It sits behind a door that eats a shiv, or a dial that wants a combination, and the game marks none of it on any map.

Our crafting and upgrade guide covers why you open these — the shiv economy, the blade scarcity, what the parts buy. This guide is the half it deliberately left out: where every one of them is, chapter by chapter, and what is actually inside.

Everything here is the first game — The Last of Us, Remastered, and the Part I remake. The doors and safes sit in the same places in all three; where the versions differ (trophies, how safes unlock), it is called out. Part II has its own safe system with different rules, covered in the Part 2 safe codes guide.

Two lock systems, two trophies

The first game locks loot behind two different mechanisms, and Part I attaches a silver trophy to each:

The trophy history is worth a sentence, because it decides what your old saves are worth. Master of Unlocking exists in every version — it is a bronze on the original PS3/PS4 list ("Unlock all shiv doors") and a silver in Part I ("Break into every locked door using shivs"). Sticky Fingers exists only in Part I. The original game has the same four safes but no trophy for opening them, so if you platinumed the 2013 game or Remastered, the safes are the one piece of this checklist you may genuinely never have touched.

Both trophies are all-or-nothing — no partial credit, no difficulty requirement. They sit inside Part I's 29-trophy list, where the platinum requires everything, so a platinum run goes through all seventeen of these locks.

All 13 shiv doors, chapter by chapter

Shiv doors are locked rooms that require a whole shiv to open, and the shiv is expended when you use it — remaining durability and all. Inside is a supply stash: parts, supplements, ammunition, health kits. The parts values below are from the wiki's census of the campaign, and parts do not scale with difficulty, so the numbers hold on everything from Easy to Grounded.

Two patterns in that table are worth noticing.

The doors get richer as the game goes on. The four early doors in Boston and Bill's Town average around 21 parts each; from Pittsburgh onward, seven of the nine remaining doors hold a 50-part tray — the disassembled-gun pickups that are the single largest parts denomination in the game. The other two are the 25-part Escape the City door and the hospital, which holds none. The twelve doors that hold parts sum to exactly the census's 460.

The hospital door is the exception. The Firefly Lab chapter contains no parts at all, per the wiki's chapter-by-chapter accounting — so door 13 is supplies only. By that point there is no workbench left to spend at anyway; you open it for the trophy and the consumables.

The doors that hide behind detours

Most of the thirteen sit a few steps off the critical path, but three are structured so that the level geometry actively points you away from them:

The Lakeside Resort door (11) is the buried one. It requires entering a motel room across from the gas station, going into the bathroom, climbing out the back window, and then turning left to a wooden gate — three moves deep into a building the story gives you no reason to enter, during a stretch of the game where you are not inclined to sightsee. It holds a 50-part hunting rifle tray.

The Bus Depot door (12) sits directly after the final workbench — the last place you can spend anything. Leave the workbench room, look right. If you walk the tunnel junction the other way first, you can put the whole sequence behind you without seeing it.

The Rations Depot door (7) is inside the building stretch rigged with tripwire nail bombs, which trains you to move carefully and touch nothing. The door is in the backroom, before you boost Ellie up to the ladder.

The red-X door in the hero image is the opposite case — Pittsburgh paints a literal X on it at the moment you are watching hunters patrol a river container. It is the closest the game comes to labelling one.

Don't open a door with a half-used shiv

The door wants a whole shiv and expends it, however many uses were left on it — and the wiki flags a sharper edge on that rule: collecting a shiv-durability training manual does not repair a shiv that has already been used, and a partially used shiv cannot open a shiv door at all. If your only shiv has a kill on it, the door will not take it; you need a fresh one.

The practical routine, then: carry one full-durability shiv as door money and treat it as unspendable in combat. Blades are the most contested crafting ingredient in the game — shivs, melee upgrades and nail bombs all want them — and the crafting guide makes the full argument for why the doors win that contest. The short version sits in the table above: a shiv door pays out up to 50 parts, and no nail bomb ever printed money.

On Grounded, where consumables crater but parts spawns stay fixed, the doors are proportionally the best value in the run — the Grounded guide treats opening all thirteen as core routing rather than completionism.

The four safes and their combinations

Four safes, one per chapter across the first half of the game, each holding a 50-part tray per the wiki's census. Every combination is written on an artifact nearby:

The Pittsburgh hotel safe carries one extra prize, and it does so in every version: alongside its parts, it holds Shiv: Reinforcement, the third of the game's twelve training manuals — the upgrade line that raises shiv durability, which loops straight back into how many doors you can afford to open.

Contents beyond the parts vary: safes can hold ammunition, supplements, crafting supplies and training manuals, and difficulty changes the quantities — crafting supplies and gun ammunition can vanish from them entirely on the hardest settings, while the parts stay put.

How safes open: original versus Part I

The same four safes unlock differently depending on which release you are holding, and the difference decides whether this guide alone can open them for you:

• The original and Remastered: you never enter the combination. Having the artifact is the key — walk up with the right note in your backpack and the safe opens; without it, the game shows NEED COMBINATION and refuses. Reading the code in a guide does nothing, because there is no way to input it.
• Part I: the remake adds manual code entry. You dial the combination yourself, and once you know the code you do not need to find the physical note at all. The four codes in the table above will open all four safes on a fresh Part I save.

That makes Sticky Fingers one of the fastest silvers in Part I if you are doing a cleanup run — four known codes, four dials, no collectible hunt required. In the original, the same sweep requires actually picking up the four artifacts first.

Part II went a third direction — manual entry like Part I, but with codes hidden in environmental clues rather than always written plainly, and three times as many safes. The Part 2 safe codes guide has all fourteen.

What 660 locked parts do to your guns

Put the two tables together and the economy argument makes itself. Fully upgrading every weapon and holster costs 2,510 parts against 1,620 available per campaign — you finish maybe two-thirds of the arsenal per run no matter what. Skip the locks and your ceiling drops from 1,620 to 960, and the upgrade priorities stop being choices and start being casualties: the 150 parts for both holsters, the 115-part hunting rifle package, the shotgun's clip tiers — the locked 660 covers all of it with room to spare.

Since parts do not scale with difficulty, this math is identical on every setting. What changes is only how much the rest of the world gives you around it — which is why the harder the run, the more of your effective income is sitting behind these seventeen locks.

Quick Action Checklist

• Budget for 17 locks: 13 shiv doors (460 parts) and 4 safes (200 parts), out of 1,620 parts per campaign.
• Carry one fresh shiv as door money. A partially used shiv cannot open a shiv door, and durability manuals do not repair used shivs.
• Playing Part I? Dial the safes directly: 03-43-78 (Outskirts), 05-17-21 (Bill's Town), 22-10-56 (Pittsburgh hotel), 08-21-36 (Suburbs).
• Playing the original or Remastered? Grab the note artifacts first — safes there open only if you hold them, and there is no manual entry.
• Check the motel bathroom window at Lakeside Resort and the right-hand turn after the Bus Depot workbench — the two doors the level layout steers you past.
• Open the Pittsburgh hotel safe even if you skip the rest: in every version it holds the Shiv: Reinforcement training manual on top of its 50 parts.
• Do not stress the hospital door for loot — the Firefly Lab chapter holds no parts, so door 13 is trophy and consumables only.
• Expect no partial credit: Master of Unlocking wants all 13 doors, Sticky Fingers all 4 safes, in one save.