Nearly a year after the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, dedicated players are still discovering rare interactions related to fail-safes and backup fail-safes designed to prevent us from accidentally breaking the game. The latest find comes from 1,400 hours of detective work Proxy Gate Tacticianswho found a lucky merchant, magical fish, spontaneous goblins, and a real softlock connected to some of the most important items in the entire RPG: the Netherstones.
The Netherstones are, uh, borrowed by the RPG’s three main villains and in the fight against the big bad Netherbrain, so they’re pretty important – and since they’re late-game items, you should start the rest of this breakdown with a big old Spoiler warningProxy Gate you may know for publishing a reward of $500 for an extremely rare Karlach cutscenewanted to see what would happen if these objects were lost in completely unthinkable ways, such as being thrown into the sea or into a soon-to-explode factory.
“The only thing I can think of is that it’s an Easter egg that someone intentionally used to try and lose the game,” the investigator tells GamesRadar+. “It’s still hard to find anything new in the game, but the backup NPCs are probably the most unexplored. I’ve found several more backup NPCs that aren’t well known and only appear in the game if the player has killed certain NPCs.” Some are backups of backups even.”
Losing the Netherstones under normal circumstances — well, normal compared to what we’re about to talk about, but still pretty unlikely — usually causes the Emperor himself to either remind you of the stones or transport them straight to your camp. Or you’ll lose the game outright if the stones are absolutely impossible to recover. But what if you dropped the stones into, say, the undersea Iron Throne and then blew it up so the area was locked?
Look further
As it turns out, Larian had planned this. Proxy Gate has figured out that this special case of the Iron Throne causes a change in the encounter with the Sahuagin on the nearby shore of the lower city of Baldur’s Gate. One of the Sahuagin will now carry the stones you lost. How helpful.
But what if you kill the Sahuagin Before throw the stones at the Iron Throne? Well, you’ll find that they’re now owned by Old Troutman, a fisherman who hawks his wares on a dock near the beach. You can buy the stones back for just three gold apiece – a small price to pay for saving the world.
What if you killed the sahuagin? And Old Troutman first? At this point, Lady Luck doesn’t even try to be subtle anymore: her lost Netherstones are swallowed by an unfortunate fish that washes up dead on the same shore, just waiting to be plundered. This is obviously the fish that Old Troutman would You 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, offers a similar solution to lost Netherstones, as Proxy Gate noted and as Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov recently explained in a Deep dive. Larian calls these progress-correcting mini-quests “boosters,” and a Steel Watch booster summons a troop of harmless goblins who have recovered the Netherstones from the factory rubble. Kill them and you get the stones back—or you let them escape and face a rare Game Over.
Okay, smarty-pants. What if we just dump the Netherstones into another former area, like the Chult Jungle, which is connected to the Faire Ghost Lottery Wheel from Baldur’s Gate, and then seal the way back?
As it turns out, Larian didn’t plan on doing this, presumably because no one who gets teleported to an alien jungle thinks first thing: “I’d rather leave these priceless, world-saving gems behind as signposts.” Proxy Gate was able to lock Baldur’s Gate 3 by leaving the Netherstones in the jungle, which can only be visited once. They figure the chance of Larian fixing this is non-zero, as “they’ve fixed many other issues I’ve found in the past and mentioned in my videos.” Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 7 won’t be the end of Larian’s support, so there’s a chance.
“I’ve seen people mention the goblins before, but they weren’t widely known. I’ve never seen the game over from the goblins disappearing mentioned, though,” adds Proxy Gate. “I’ve never seen anyone mention the fish and Old Troutman’s situation. It’s hard to imagine someone dropping the netherstone (ignoring the emperor) when they’ve already killed a random NPC who does nothing and an easily missed encounter on the beach.”
It’s a fascinating example of the lengths Larian had to go to in order to enable this level of player freedom. Here’s another one of my favorite examples: the worst hero in Baldur’s Gate 3 gets an apocalyptically bad secret ending after all safety precautions in the role play have been broken.
“I quickly realized that this was D&D”: Astarion actor Neil Newbon sensed Baldur’s Gate 3 or perhaps Icewind Dale 3 and set 10 of the role-playing game’s 12 races in the middle of Final Fantasy 16.