Nearly a year after the full release of Baldur’s Gate 3, dedicated players are still discovering rare interactions tied to fail-safes and backup fail-safes designed to prevent us from unknowingly breaking the game. The latest find comes after 1,400 hours of sleuthing Proxy Gate Tacticianwhich found a happy merchant, magical fish, spontaneous goblins, and a truly soft lock tied to some of the most important items in the entire RPG: the Netherstones.
The Netherstones are, uh, borrowed of the RPG’s three main villains and are used in the fight against the big bad Netherbrain, so they’re pretty important – and since they’re items you’ll come across in the late game, you should take the rest of this analysis with a big ol’ spoiler warning. Proxy Gate, which you may know from the release of a $500 reward for an extremely rare Karlach cutscenewanted to see what happens when you lose these things in downright unthinkable ways, like throwing them into the sea or into a factory that’s about to explode.
“I can only think that it’s an easter egg for someone who is deliberately trying to lose the game,” the researcher tells GamesRadar+. “It’s still hard to find anything new in the game, but reserve NPCs are probably the least explored. I’ve found a few more reserve NPCs that aren’t as well known and only appear in your game if the player has killed specific NPCs. Some are even backups of backups.”
If you lose the Netherstones under normal circumstances – well, normal compared to what we’re talking about, but still pretty unlikely – the Emperor himself will usually prompt you to either recall the stones or transport them back to your camp immediately. That, or you’ll get an instant game over when the stones are completely beyond saving. But what if, say, you throw the stones into the submarine Iron Throne and then blow it up, making the area off-limits?
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Larian had this planned, it turns out. Proxy Gate discovered that this Iron Throne corner case causes a change in the Sahuagin encounter on the nearby shore of Lower Baldur’s Gate city. One of the Sahuagin will now carry the stones you lost. How helpful.
But what if you kill the Sahuagin? for throw the stones into the Iron Throne? Well, you’ll find that they’re now being held by Old Troutman, a fisherman hawking his wares on a dock near the battle on the shore. You can buy the stones back for just three gold each – a small price to pay for saving the world.
And what if you killed the Sahuagin? And First Old Troutman? At this point Lady Luck doesn’t even try to be subtle: your lost Netherstones are swallowed by an unlucky fish, who washes up dead on the same shore, waiting to be plundered. This is clearly the fish that Old Troutman would would have caught him if you hadn’t killed him, you monster.
The Steel Watch Foundry, which is also blown up later in the Act, has a similar solution for lost Netherstones, as Proxy Gate noted and as Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov discussed in a recent article. deep diveLarian calls these progression-correcting mini-quests “boosters,” and a Steel Watch booster summons a team of harmless kobolds who’ve scavenged the Netherstones from the wreckage of the factory. Kill them and you’ll reclaim the stones—or let them escape and face a rare game over.
Okay, smart guys. What if we just throw the Netherstones into another one-off area, like the Chult jungle attached to the Baldur’s Gate carnival spirit’s lottery wheel, and then block off the path back?
This, it turns out, isn’t something Larian had planned, presumably because no one’s first thought upon being teleported to a strange jungle was, “I might as well leave these priceless world-saving gems behind as path markers.” Proxy Gate was able to soft-lock Baldur’s Gate 3 by leaving the Netherstones in the jungle, which can only be visited once. They estimate that there’s a non-zero chance that Larian will fix this, as “they’ve patched a lot of other issues that I’ve found and mentioned in my videos in the past.” Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 7 won’t be the end of Larian support, so there’s a chance.
“The kobolds are definitely something I’ve heard people mention before, but it wasn’t common knowledge. The game over due to the disappearing kobolds is something I’ve never seen mentioned,” Proxy Gate added. “The fish and the Old Troutman situations are something I’ve never heard anyone mention. It’s hard to imagine anyone dropping the Netherstone (leaving aside the Emperor) when they’ve already killed a random NPC that doesn’t do anything, and a beach encounter they can easily miss.”
It’s a fascinating example of the lengths Larian had to go to support this level of player freedom. Here’s another one of my favorites: The worst hero in Baldur’s Gate 3 gets an apocalyptic evil secret ending after bypassing all security features in the RPG.
“I quickly realized this was D&D”: Astarion actor Neil Newbon discovered Baldur’s Gate 3, or maybe Icewind Dale 3, and filled out 10 of the RPG’s 12 races halfway through Final Fantasy 16.