Nearly a year after Baldur’s Gate 3‘s full release, dedicated players are still unearthing rare interactions tied to fail-safes and backup fail-safes designed to prevent us from unwittingly breaking the game. The latest find comes from 1,400-hour sleuth Proxy Gate Tactician, who found a lucky merchant, magic fish, spontaneous kobolds, and a true soft lock tied to some of the most important items in the whole RPG: the Netherstones.
The Netherstones are, uh, borrowed from the RPG’s three main villains and used in the fight against the big bad Netherbrain, so they’re pretty important – and since they’re late-game items, you should take the rest of this breakdown with a big ol’ spoiler warning. Proxy Gate, who you may know for putting out a $500 bounty for an extremely rare Karlach cutscene, wanted to see what happens if you lose these items in frankly unthinkable ways, like chucking them into the sea or a soon-to-explode factory.
“I can only think of it being an Easter egg for someone intentionally trying to lose the game,” the investigator tells GamesRadar+. “It’s tough to find anything new in the game still, but backup NPCs are likely the most unexplored. There are several more backup NPCs I’ve found that aren’t well known about, and only appear in your game if the player killed specific NPCs. Some are backups of backups even.”
Losing the Netherstones under ordinary circumstances – well, ordinary compared to what we’re about to talk about, but still pretty unlikely – will usually prompt the Emperor himself to either remind you of the stones or transport them directly to your camp. That, or you’ll instantly get a game over if the stones are outright unrecoverable. But what if you were to, say, drop the stones in the undersea Iron Throne and then blow it up, making the area off-limits?
Larian planned for this, it turns out. Proxy Gate found 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 be carrying the stones you lost. How helpful.
But what if you kill the Sahuagin before throwing 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 seaside scuffle. You can buy the stones back for just three gold apiece – a small price to pay for saving the world.
Now, what if you were to kill the Sahuagin and Old Troutman first? At that point, Lady Luck doesn’t even try to be subtle anymore: your lost Netherstones will be swallowed by an unlucky fish, which washes up dead on the same shore just waiting to be looted. This is evidently the fish that Old Troutman would have caught if you hadn’t killed him, you monster.
The Steel Watch Foundry, which also gets blown up later in the Act, has a similar solution to lost Netherstones, as Proxy Gate noted and as Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov discussed in a recent deep dive. Larian calls these progress-correcting mini-quests “boosters,” and one Steel Watch booster summons a squad of harmless Kobolds who’ve scavenged the Netherstones from the factory wreckage. Kill them and you’ll get the stones back – or you can let them escape and face a rare game over.
Okay, smarty-pants. What if we just chuck the Netherstones into a different one-time area, like the Chult jungle tied to the Baldur’s Gate carnival genie’s lottery wheel, and then seal the path back?
This, it turns out, Larian did not plan for, presumably because nobody’s first thought when teleported to a strange jungle is, “I’d better 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 reckon there’s a non-zero chance Larian will fix this given that “they’ve patched many other problems I’ve found and mentioned in my videos in the past.” Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 7 won’t be the end of Larian’s support, so there’s a chance.
“The Kobolds for sure I’ve seen mentioned by people before, but it wasn’t widely known. The game over from the kobolds disappearing was something I’ve never seen mentioned though,” Proxy Gate adds. “The fish, and Old Troutman’s situations, I’ve never seen anyone mention in the past. It’s hard to imagine anyone dropping the Netherstone (ignoring the Emperor) while having already killed a random NPC who does nothing, and an easily missed beachside encounter.”
It’s a fascinating example of the lengths Larian had to go to in order to support this degree of player freedom. Here’s another of my favorites: the worst hero in Baldur’s Gate 3 gets an apocalyptically bad secret ending after breaking every failsafe in the RPG.