Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Hot bars a hot mess

Your friendly neighborhood anal retentive person here.

I need help the hotbars are driving me crazy is there anyway to remove everything from them, and then put stuff back in order you want. I've not found a button or anything to build my own hotbar. It's driving me crazy, like literally. My brain is going must fix, must fix, must fix, must fix. Okay it's not that bad.... no it really is.... just over 30 minutes tryiing to get all my precious spells together, and all my ducks in a row, and kittens in the basket... .and why please help my preciouses are getting all scramble.

to those that answer thank you in advance.

I feel the same pain.

After some fiddling I found that the 1280 1020?? size to be the major issue with this. After switching the screen to 1280 700 or whatever it fixes this. Though as a half blind person it makes it harder to read everything, and the small boxes that are in many of the screens to be even harder to see.

The first screen size forcibly clumps everything together leads to many things being 'off screen'. Again this is changed by the small screen size.

Prepared spells and abilities should show up in pup-up bars corresponding to "powers" "cantrips" "1-st level spells" "2-nd evel spells" "3-rd level spells" etc. I find myself clicking on the little 1-st level spell flap expecting in to extend upwards and showing me my prepared 1 level spells.

Also, the "lock" icon keeps getting unlocked. Ugghh.

I have as well now that I switched my res, sadly this problem is avoidable if you look on the spell your clicking. 2nd level ones have II on them, to show their second level, or can just hover over it to see it pop up and read the level for the spell. Though if your like me, yeaaaah I forget at times, gotta kill em all fast as possible. lol

Bravo on the title.

I've had some issues with the Hotbars, and figured out some stuff.
Changing any of the "Don't screw with my hotbars" won't help. The game will repeatedly put EVERY spell you could cast onto your hotbar. Remove them, and they reappear when you Load (And the Lock will be removed).

You can remove all the spells / abilities (you will sometimes have to right click to "regain control" after removing something, depending what screen you are on when you do it).
When you rebuild the Hotbars to the way you want them, two important things to notice.
First you have multiple Hotbars, on the bottom right there is Up and Down Triangles, these will roll into new bars. There is also a + - that will widen your bars.
So, Bar #1 is your "Main" bar. Fill this one up with the stuff that you want to use.
Second, If you have other Spells that you don't want to use (Like the 2 per level "Domain" spells that you have as a cleric) put them on another bar. If they are on another hotbar, it won't autofill them onto your "Main" bar.

In my playthrough I was using the Trickster to do Charm / Disguise / Minor Illusion, so the Cleric had duplicates of these (Charm I and Charm II) that I would never use. Trying to clean up her bar kept refilling and ruining my nicely organized bar. This was the only way I have managed to get it to stop.

I agree with this entirely.

The spells and whatnot should have an interface to the first game in that there's a single icon with it's own dedicated menu.

The hotbar otherwise still needs a serious overhaul. That's the one painful part of the game.

Go into options / gameplay /" bottom bar options" and uncheck everything there so it doesn't auto add anything to the hotbar. Then go to the hotbar and simply grab the items in there, drag them out and let go to get them out. Now that everything is cleared out, open up up your character tab which shows you all your abilities, spells and inventory and drag whatever you want down to your hotbar in whatever order you want.

I do definitely agree that the hotbar needs a lot of work. Pop ups with tabs like Pathfinder Kingmaker uses are a really nice design and almost negate the need for a quick bar.

That's great advice and I'll make sure to do that first thing I launch the game next time. Thanks!

I didn't find that removing the bottom bar options helped, I called them the "Don't screw with my hotbars" settings. I turned off everything, and the game kept replacing "missing" spells upon loading.
Only fix I figured out, was moving things to unused bars, instead of just "Removing" them.

I had the exact same problem. Yet another frustrating bug in a AAA title that was released at full price. But don't worry, it's "Early Access," so the 10,000 inexcusable and embarrassing problems with the game are completely justified and normal. Because that's how the future of quality gaming works now.

Nobody held a gun to your head and said "YOU MUST BUY THIS GAME RIGHT NOW". It warned you on the store page that the game is unfinished and buggy. No reason why you couldn't have waited a month, 6 months, a year - that's the reason why it's full price, so there's no incentive to pay in unless you really, really want to.

Well, the plus side of "Today" is that it takes much less time to build a game, we're not building EVERY thing from scratch.
Should also mean that it takes less money, and Digital releases should also lower the price (We're not buying a box, CDs, paying to have it shipped to the local game store), but the price is about the same as 20 years ago (inflation?) or higher. But, you arguably get "More" now than you did in the past, for example, all the Voice Acting.

X Dollars are needed to build a game, Studios get a big chunk in advance from somewhere, and if the choices are
a) Micro transactions in game
b) Proprietary (Xbox / Playstation releases) Distribution
c) Some people paying for it in advance (including Kickstarter backing which might not get you anything, or Presales)

Getting a playable (buggy?) version with option C) doesn't really seem like the worst thing, if you are confident that the Developer will do a good job on fixing things.
Especially with Larian being a "trusted" developer, that doesn't turn around and release a bunch of extra content for additional $ down the line.

If I wasn't confident in the fact that Larian will deliver on many of it's promises (not I didn't state all), or that the bugs would be to much for me to handle, I'd not of bought the game. Indeed I expected there to be bugs, the game not to be finished, for it to be rough all around. I still bought it ranting and raving about buying a game where the dev's state that it is Early Access, it's incomplete, they are continueing to work on it, there will be crashes, and odd things happening, etc. means I expected these things to be as they are now.

Feedback is letting the Dev's know there is a problem with this and this in the game. If you can replicate it, if you found a work around.

It is not throwing a hissy fit because your ass was to stupid realize the game wouldn't be perfect when the Dev's clearly stated it wouldn't be, and expl...(sorry I'll use small words) said if it's not for you don't buy it.

This right here is the rid (sorry probly to big of a words.) Take off your daiper, and put on your big boy pants. or go take a nap, have someone fetch your bottle. As another stated noone forced you to buy this game, noone said it would be perfect, they said the opposite. you bought it, your choice, crying about it online is just stupid. If you feel the need to cry grab a blanket and curl up in a corner and cry over a CHOICE YOU MADE without outside influence. If you have helpful feedback, or true problems with some bug/glitch or whatever that isn't A CHOICE YOU MADE, then plz post it. If not go crawl in your crib.

Sorry all for that, just so tired of babes making choices then crying about them. I will prolly get reported don't much care, it needs to be said, and hopeful it will sink in. I doubt it though.

I posted about the issues/bugs in the technical thread and did not get any response besides check your settings. Toolbar does not work at all and is almost more trouble then it is worth.

Yeah I don't believe they are really replying at the moment instead focusing on fixing the issue. I myself found changing the resolution to fix some of the problems. the one where you load a saved game and it reverts back to it's orignal annoying form I've not yet found a way to fix that. It's really bad since I have 1 of every class saved, and switch them when I'm trying new things, and builds. Think 20% of my hair is gone, but this is simply my anal retentiveness, and ocd popping up.

Is there a particular thing about the toolbar not working? Or is the toolbar just inoperative??

Toolbar unlocks at the start of combat it looks like to me. I often click on things in it with the mouse so it removes the spell from the bar. I have to hit N because C doesn't get your character page and drag the spell back and put it into the bar because right click doesn't do anything in combat. Can't just right click and add to hotbar during combat. I find combat pretty tedious and I have run through the start so many times it is painful. Long ago you didn't have to buy a game to be in the Alpha/Beta and playtest in a Galaxy far,far away.