Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems NPCs from the Zhentarim hideout have disappeared.

Hello everyone. I had this bug: when entering the lower part of the haven in Act 1, where the trader and the artist Oscar are, one of our guys touched the oil spilled on the ground with a torch. There was a small explosion (only the oil exploded), which caused the merchant to fall off the stairs and fall into the ground, and the rest of the NPCs simply disappeared. I tried doing a long rest, changing locations (from the Wilderness to the Mountain Pass and back) - none of them returned back. Has anyone encountered this bug, and is there a way to fix it?

"Honour" difficulty, so there is nowhere to load from.

They didn't retreat anywhere - they just disappeared. They all disappeared from the hideout in a second, only Oscar remained.

P.S. In another playthrough we fought them, blew up barrels and gunpowder - no one evaporated into thin air, all the zhentarims fought and died in battle. But here all the bots disappeared from the location (except Oscar, who just sat in one place) in a second - there are not even any corpses, because they did not die, but fell under the texture.

Thanks for elaborating further, was helpful to test a few things.

I managed to reproduce them falling through the terrain before ultimately disappearing completely, but bad news is unfortunately once they're gone they're gone for good. The moment anything out of the ordinary happens in the hideout they're flagged to despawn upon the next long rest, so am afraid there's nothing that can be done to fix it during a single-save Honour Mode run.

Damn. Such a random absurdity simply cut off a piece of content (trader with his useful goods at this stage and the reward for saving Rugan and Olly). Of course, I sent my save file to tech support, but I am afraid that you will be right, and nothing can be done here.

Usually I periodically made a backup copy of the save (in "Divinity" on max difficulty, for example, so that I could recover from critical bugs), but here I hoped - to my misfortune - for the game to be a full finished with a perfect technical condition. Alas.

Thank you for your answers, anyway, and have a nice day

nothing about the game is finished... always make a backup save!

p.s, dropping into the ground is how people are removed from the game i.e, they take a few steps and go = the world opened up and ate them

You were right
It took too long, but I finally figured out the reason (even though I'm writing this only now, I couldn't do it before): my friend, the second player, had a torch equipped in his melee weapon slot. I didn't know about it, and I couldn't figure out why the explosion happened anyway, since he had a CROSSBOW in his hands when he entered the cave. So, the torch, even if simply inserted into the weapon slot, still sets fire to flammable surfaces. It was too unobvious at the time, but I figured it out when I "recreated" the situation in a new campaign to figure out the reason.

Thanks for the answers, all the best).