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Keys in Tarkov: 74 are required by tasks, the rest are a lottery

Keys take up space, cost money and break. Carrying all of them is impossible and choosing between them is hard, because it is unclear which ones will ever be useful. We counted using our own database. How many keys you actually need Out of the whole key catalogue, 74 are tied to at least one task .

Keys take up space, cost money and break. Carrying all of them is impossible and choosing between them is hard, because it is unclear which ones will ever be useful. We counted using our own database.

How many keys you actually need

Out of the whole key catalogue, 74 are tied to at least one task. Everything else opens loot rooms: those may pay for themselves and may not, but they are never mandatory.

That distinction matters. A key a task needs you will buy sooner or later — the only question is when and at what price. A loot key is a bet.

Keys that several tasks ask for

The pattern: most of the multi-task keys are on Customs — the dorms and the office. That is one more argument for a new player starting there.

How not to go broke

Checking usefulness in one second

Every key page on this site has a "Needed for quests" block. If it is empty, no task requires that key and the decision to buy is purely economic.

> The reverse holds too: if the block is not empty, you will need the key eventually, and the only question is the price.

A caveat

Our list is built from task objectives. If a key is needed not for an objective itself but simply to reach the room where a quest item lies, the link may not show up — the game does not spell that out in the objective text. We add such cases by hand as we verify them.