this is a
repost from Reddit (r/baldursgate3). if you find this post interesting, don't miss out on the interesting comments left on the Reddit thread.
I wanted to try something interesting on my third EA playthrough and decided not to rest until the end of act 1. In this post, which is full of speculation and spoilers, I will detail my methods and findings.
here is how I did it:
- my tav is a paladin, played on patch 9.
- I thought of HP as a limited resource and did my best to maximize it. I avoided combat, farmed, and spammed all types of healing methods, e.g. regularly visited traders and purchased all potions, swapped party members, and magical items.
- I finished all the missions except deal with auntie ethel and reached level 5 without long rest.
here is what I learned:
- the game has an internal clock, when triggered opens up a new dialogue with your party members and other NPCs, replenishes trader inventories, and most importantly, advances the ceremorphosis.
- there are two types of story progression triggers: (1) long rests (2) event-based triggers. latter causes small changes in the world, once at a time, e.g. when you visit the teahouse region, auntie ethel leaves the grove, when you kill minthara, tieflings in the grove get ready to move out and talsin comes back, etc. as far as I understand, long rests trigger many small events in bulk. when you finish the mushroom picker mission, derryth will thank you and state that they will be leaving soon, yet they stay in the Underdark until you rest.
- ceremorphosis-related advancements and tadpole ability refreshes are triggered only when you long rest. if you avoid resting, you don't gain any of the dreams, mind flayer abilities, tadpole related conversation options don't work (they are turned into dud/blank options). only passive abilities such as telepathy between party members and other infected NPCs, initial encounter mind-meld work without rest.
- successful interaction with omeluum triggers a tadpole event which leaves you with repulsor ability.
- here is the fun part: I took the ring from omeluum and put it on my Tav and then rested for the first time. To make sure I rested 20 times
none of the ceremorphosis advancements occurred. so I successfully tamed the tadpole.
not sure if this is a path that devs intended for the users, but I enjoyed this playthrough a lot! It felt quite organic to me: If I had an alien worm in my head that evolved, I would do my best to slow its growth
edit: this run was quite achievable. I avoided combat at the beginning, but after reaching level 3, most combat encounters became manageable. i interacted with all possible traders early on and regularly checked their inventory for replenished resources.
note to devs: as this is my third time installing the game, I'm not sure if I shared my in-game data with larian. if you need it and if i can share it manually please reach out to me, i would love to help out.
