Almost a year after the full release of Baldur’s Gate 3, dedicated players are discovering the rare interactions associated with security and backup security features that prevent us from unknowingly breaking the game. The latest find comes from the 1400 hour detective Proxy Gateway Tacticianwho found a lucky merchant, magical fish, spontaneous kobolds, and an actual soft castle linked to some of the most important items in all of RPGs: the Netherstones.
The Netherstones are, uh, borrowed from the three main RPG 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 analysis with a grain of salt. spoiler alert. Proxy Gate, which you may know puts out $500 reward for an extremely rare Karlach cutscenehe wanted to see what happens when you lose these items in a frankly unthinkable way, like being thrown into the ocean or a factory that’s about to explode.
“I can only think of an easter egg for someone trying to lose the game on purpose,” an investigator told GamesRadar+. “It’s still hard to find anything new in the game, but backup NPCs are probably the most unexplored. There are a few other backup NPCs I’ve found that aren’t well known and only appear in your game if the player has killed a specific NPC . Some are even backups of backups.”
Losing the Netherstones under normal circumstances – common 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 deliver them directly to your camp. That, or you’re instantly game over if the stones are completely impregnable. But what if, say, you dropped rocks into the undersea Iron Throne and then blew it up, making the area off-limits?
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Larian had planned it, as it turned out. Proxy Gate discovered that this corner case of the Iron Throne was causing a change in the Sahuagin meeting on the nearby shore of the lower city of Baldur’s Gate. One of the Sahuagin will now carry the stones you lost. How useful.
But what if you kill a Sahuagin before throwing rocks at the Iron Throne? Well, you find out they’re now being held by old Troutman, a fisherman who’s hawking his wares on a dock near a coastal skirmish. You can buy the stones back for just three gold a piece – a small price to pay for saving the world.
What if you were to kill a Sahuagin? and Old Troutman first? At that point, Lady Luck doesn’t even try to be subtle anymore: your lost Netherstones are swallowed by a hapless fish, which washes up dead on the same shore, waiting to be looted. This is evidently the fish that Old Troutman I would you caught him if you didn’t kill him you monster.
The Steel Watch Foundry, which was also blown up later in the Act, has a similar solution to the lost Netherstones, as noted by Proxy Gate and as discussed in a recent article by Larian game writer Mihail Kostov. deep dive. Larian calls these progress-fixing mini-quests “boosters,” and one Steel Watch booster summons a squad of harmless Kobolds to clear the Netherstones from the factory ruins. Kill them and you’ll get the stones back – or you can let them escape and face rare game.
Okay, smarty pants. What if we just dump the Netherstones into another disposable area like the Chult jungle tied to the Baldur’s Gate carnival genie lottery wheel and then seal the way back?
This, it turns out, was not Larian’s plan, probably because no one first teleported into the strange jungle thought, “I’d rather leave these precious world-saving gems as waymarks.” Proxy Gate was able to block Baldur’s Gate 3 by leaving the Netherstones in a jungle that can only be visited once. They reckon there’s a non-zero chance that Larian will fix it because they “fixed many 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’s support, so there’s a chance.
“I’ve definitely seen Kobolds mentioned before, but it wasn’t very well known. The game after the Kobolds disappeared was something I never saw mentioned,” adds Proxy Gate. “I’ve never seen anyone mention Old Troutman’s fish and situation in the past. It’s hard to imagine someone dropping a Netherstone (ignores the Emperor) while already killing random NPCs doing nothing and easily missing the beach encounter. .”
It’s a fascinating example of the lengths Larian has had to go to support this degree of player freedom. Here’s another one of my favorites: the baddest hero in Baldur’s Gate 3 gets an apocalyptically bad secret ending after breaking every failsafe in the RPG.
“I realized very quickly it was D&D”: Astarion actor Neil Newbon sniffed out Baldur’s Gate 3, or maybe Icewind Dale 3, and entered 10 of 12 RPG races amid Final Fantasy 16.