Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Not a fan of camp supplies...

Based on my observations of watching other people play, mealtimes on long rests seem to fall into a couple common categories.

Catergory 1: Drink your dinner. You can collect an absurd amount of wine and other booze, and you can just select wine as a meal. It's not called an adventuring party for no reason.

Category 2: Cheese. Everyone gets a whole wheel of cheese. What you do with it is up to you.

Category 3: Potatoes. Just potatoes.

Category 4: Sausage party. No that's no a euphemism, or is it....


And then maybe when you are all out of booze and wheels of cheese you might have to create an actually balanced meal, except that it seems like you could have booze for almost every meal and never run out.

Sounds perfect to me!

I agree, but what they have isn't it.

The purpose of Short Rest in 5E is to give players a way to recharge a bit mid-day so they can get through a few small skirmishes before needing a long rest. If you read the PHB, you see Short Rest is all about HP gain. Only those who need health use up their dice and they roll one dice at a time. So if they need a small boost to top-off their health, no big deal. A properly implemented Short Rest system lets people keep their health topped off (more or less) for quite a few skirmishes.

But BG3's system gives you 2 short rests that are simply insta-heals. Thus staying topped off for several fights is now more difficult shy of using spell slots.

When I played BG3 last year, I thought the food was clever. Taking the time to pull food out of packs and have people eat it is basically what a short rest is supposed to be. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but it was at least natural and gave the items some utility. It also allowed the party to focus their pool of cheap-health on those party members who needed it.

But ... I had forgotten about the short-rest button (Still don't use it to this day to avoid missing content). When I remembered it, I realized the system was OP. But unlike some people who think the problem was the food, I actually think the problem is the short rest button itself.

I would rather have the mechanics of short-rest integrated naturally into the game so that it feels less like table-top and more like what the table top rules were trying to simulate. Let me take control of my "short rests" by... pausing to look in my packs and distribute the food myself. Maybe even change the "Short Rest" button to a "Distribute Food" convenience button to do that part for me. (Any name that doesn't use the word "rest" in it would work). And possibly the most important thing: It would mean only needing 1 rest button. If there is only 1 rest button, we don't have to worry about users getting confused by the various rest types, when and when not to use them and the possibility of "abusing" or "ignoring" the other button.

I loved BG2 because BG2 added conveniences and hid the complexities of D&D (But also let you expose them if you cared). In BG2 when users hit REST, it appeared that everyone healed to 100%. But 3.5E rules didn't insta-heal everyone on rest. Behind the scenes, the game would have the healer repeatedly memorize/rest and cast healing spells on the party as many times as necessary to ensure everyone was topped off and their own spells were replenished. That was a convenience that you could disable in the config but was on by default. Those types of time-saving conveniences have been in cRPGs since the gold box games of the 80s.

But when it comes to resting, Larian is doing the opposite of making things convenient. They are actively putting up hurdles and trying to make things as complicated as possible for reasons I can't even explain. Now we have a rest-toll which requires you to gather camp-supplies (What? You didn't want to loot every single container in the game? Tough luck). And maybe the worst part is they invented a new homebrew rest type called "Partial Rest" which is REST, but only gives you 50% benefit and no short rest. But it doesn't cost camp-supplies. So if you want 100% health, you have to partial rest two times in a row. Once to get 50%, then have your healers heal the party with spells and then partial rest again to recover the healers spells back. More hoops to jump through and to what end? Why is Larian wasting time on this when they could focus on bigger balance issues like Fast Travel from anywhere and being able to Long Rest from anywhere. If anything should require some limited and depleted item to use, it should be the fast-travel system, not the Rest button...

I think many aspects of the game are better than they were a year ago, but resting is not one of them.


I push for options because I know BG3 is trying to cater to a number of groups and I know some will want explicit 5E features like a short rest button. I just hope Larian doesn't forget what made BG2 stand out. There is nothing wrong with adding convenience to a computer game. So why not allow users to choose if they want to be able to eat the food in their packs and have 1 rest button. Or no-food in the game and a short rest and a long rest button. Or if they are struggling, let them have both food and short rest. Options like that seem like the best way to make the most people happy. There could even be some crazy option like adding a resting-toll to the game in combination with a new homebrew resting type for a total of 3 types of rest, all with different behaviors and proper usage times.

I admit, I went a bit overboard with the options, but I was thinking multi-player sessions where Hosts may want to set up some homebrew rules. Relying on mods is a possibility, but getting mods to work in multiplayer requires everyone has the same version of the game and the same version of the mod. I am in a house with a mix of Macs and PCs and I have friends that use Stadia. So how does one host a game that requires mods if it is impossible to install a mod on all the platforms? If it is built into the game, that is not an issue.

Agreed. One can use their imagination. I could also imagine food is present in a game that doesn't have any.

My first preference would be that they bring consumable food back. But should camp-supplies remain, one of the issues with what they have now is expectations. If you do any modding on Larian games, they have some guidelines for modders. One of their TENANTS:


This is from their own mod-design guidelines. Yet with the latest patch, 3 of the first 4 bullets no longer behave as expected. So if they don't make food consumable, they should just remove the items all together.

Regardless of what Larian does about food, I am not a fan of paying a toll to rest. But if the camp-supply toll remains (hopefully as an option I can disabled), it would be nice if camp-supply item names and icons didn't imply things I should be able to eat. Replace them with things like : flint, kindle, bedroll, pillow, sticks, logs, rocks, straw, etc...

I too think Long Rest should be disabled in some locations. It is true that fast travel can be used to defeat such checks, but disabling the button would still present a deterrent. You can fast travel out, but it isn't always easy to get back where you left off. There is also the hope that harder difficulties will disable fast travel all together or the game will eventually introduce a toll to use the fast-travel system so that there is a cost of some sort. (Roughly equivalent to buying potions of healing for everyone).

Agreed. If they do in fact implement some camp-supply requirement madness for rest pacing, why does it have to be in our face? This isn't immersive, it isn't convenient, it is just busy work. I will add... if the party is already topped off, why does the box even appear? Obviously you want to hit the PARTIAL REST button if everyone is topped off, but I'm sure some people won't think about that and waste supplies when they are resting multiple times in a row to catch up on any Camp-TV they missed since their last resting session.

The only way to get camp-supplies is by clicking on containers, whether the container is a box or a dead body. So why not this: every new container opened, increment a variable in the background that awards 1D6 camp-supply points. Maybe boss bodies award 40. And when you go to rest, subtract in the background. No need for player interaction. Add to that some smarts like don't subtract if everyone is already topped off (or alternatively, no XP was gained since last rest). The only time I need to see the supplies or be bothered by the fact that this is going on is when the hidden tracking variable hits 0. If that happens, a message could pop up "You must open more containers or loot more dead bodies before you can short rest again or regain more than 50% of you spell/skill points". Sound like a stupid message? Well, it is a stupid system. If Larian is going to give us any spell points, might as well give us 100% health. Anyway, after user hits OK on the "What the Faerun Just Happened?" titled message box, they get the homebrew partial-rest refresh and they are done. As convoluted as all that sounds, it is basically what Larian is already doing, but they are bothering us with unneeded prompts and tracking details. At least this would be in the background and most users playing the game reasonably would never see the box. (And since most would not see the box, I think "What The Faerun Just Happened!" would be an excellent title for the message )

I actually hadn't thought about this until your post. If 1 sec of real time = 1 hour of game time, then in theory one should long rest every 24 seconds whether they used their short rest or not. I know that sounds ridiculous, but with no day/night cycle, no concept of time or hints of its passage who is to say when that cuttoff occures? If 30 seconds real time = 1 hour game time, then we should long rest every 12 min. If 1 min realtime = 1 hour game time, then every 24 minutes. But no one knows. So who can say when it is/isn't appropriate to use short/long rest?

Excellent point.

To be fair, this poster said
which is technically a metric. In earlier patches, companions' complaints about being tired were (allegedly) actually just a means of notifying the player about dialogue/cutscenes, so they didn't count. But if the MC complains about being tired, and it's *not* just because there's a camp cutscene, then that's better than nothing I suppose...I'd still prefer a more mechanical effect though.

True. To anyone in here complaining about how people play in a single player game (With multiplayer options), I'm sorry you don't like to homebrew your games. Some differences are fine, some are trash. This game cannot translate the possibilities in D&D even in the slightest. If someone came near death and used up their short/long rests, an actual party in D&D wouldn't say, "Screw it push on". You'd request a rest. I get the food thing, I think food should be an out of combat thing. The camp supplies gives us a finite ability to recoup and continue venturing, but in doing so hinders ones aspiration to search every nook and cranny of each area as it may result in:

1. Using up camp supplies that may eventually run out if vendors don't have such items available.
2. Lose a member or TPK.
3. A very limited experience when it comes to taking what the game has to offer in terms of story and side quests.

Number 3 is huge and I can also understand playing another campaign with a new class and travelling to areas you didn't before, that's all good and what not because I plan to play through with just about all classes.

It really isn't a huge deal because I know the modding community will assuredly take care of any annoyances.

I'm liking camp supplies even less now that long rests are required not only for interactions with companions but to clean my characters face and clothing. Never having eaten pork loins in combat or spammed long rests in order to approach every significant combat at full spell strength camp supplies just feel like busy work intended to solve problems I didn't have. And if someone else feels the need to rest more often than I do, that really shouldn't be my concern.

To be fair, there's express timing for at least in combat. A round is X time. So you can probably do the math.

Isn't there an in game clock? I don't remember.

I'll agree specifically with the dirt thing.

Larian, for the love of Innoruuk, make this a damn toggle. I spend a lot of time in character creation to make my character look how I want it to, and being bloodied and filthy in every cutscene is just a downer.

Searches for like button . . .

Today's dinner consists of....

*rummages through her stash of over 300lb of various alcoholic drinks for something different*

Ah-ha! Three whole pig's heads. No actual pig meat, or anything like that, just the heads. One of them is cooked, the other two are raw. Enjoy, team!

to be fair, I have no idea if it's a metric or just story based, first time is usually when I arrive at the druid grove but since I never rest, I can't say... (no goblin, just off topic... well, It might describe a camp event so, maybe goblins ?)
since I usually play at the same pace, I also arrive at the grove roughly after the same amount of time passed so I can't say for sure... on the other hand, since party banter and autosaves are location based, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was the same thing...

Personally I don’t collect food at all. I just buy the camp supplies as needed in addition to the ones you start with and can find. Think they should just get rid of the food all together since they have ditched it as a way to recover health. It’s just clutter now.