Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Search area circle like DOS2?

Is there a search area circle like in Divinity that lets you search multiple boxes/chests/items on tables etc at once? After playing both Divinity titles multiple times, then coming to BG3.. I really detest having to pick up items one at a time, especially tiny little items. I have looked for this before without success, I figured it would be a much asked about feature. Any info on this? Thanks.

No there isn’t a feature like this, and yes some folk have indeed suggested it.

Personally, I’m in two minds. I certainly don’t enjoy rummaging through every crate, but then I quite like the fact that there’s just lots of stuff in the world that a Very Important Adventurer like me isn’t going to bother with, and once cured of the pack rat tendencies I’d developed in other games I decided that I found it more immersive that there are many containers and much junk that you’re just not meant to look through or pick up, any more than you’d go through every container or pick up every item in the real world. Now I usually just loot fancier looking containers or other stuff that looks more interesting, or if I’m feeling a bit poor or low on potions I’ll be a bit more thorough and enjoy occasionally finding a surprise good item.

It actually felt a bit of an epiphany when I realised I could just ignore stuff, and I feel that would be cheapened by making looting easier. But I’m not so mean as to object to the function being added if that’s what most folk prefer.

Yes there is this function in the game.
But it will only come with official control support.

I played like 2000 hour's in stadia^^ .
And on stadia version we had some controller support.
But was more like toggle on feature .

Sure, if that is your play style I can respect that. It took seconds to search an entire area with the broad search circle in DOS. I like to search and pickup/read all the books, as in divinity titles you could get spells/info/extra quests reading certain books. In this game so far, having all these tiny little items to pick up one by one just seems incredibly tedious, and I find myself not even bothering to pick up many items at this point. The alt function doesn't highlight all searchable items unfortunately. You can easily miss stuff in this game. I hope the search system goes straight to DOS style titles. I don't think we need a controller just for that, just a simple hot key.

It only took less then a minute of my time to sell everything in DOS titles. This game is selling one item at a time so far, right? Can you easily mark items for bulk sales now, or an I missing something? It's great having the $ when needed in those games. In this game, I don't really buy much as the vendors just don't have much worth getting. Hopefully that changes in the future releases. Bummer, I feel the broad area search circle was a huge deal for games like these. Thanks for info guys, I thought maybe it just wasn't listed in the button mapping.

You can mark items as wares, then sell all wares at a vendor but only with the barter toggle on for some reason. I do hope the vendor interface gets some love!


Yes!!! I think this is intended behaviour, at least for the majority of players.

Btw, I’m hoping in the full game that we’ll get the “Detect Magic” spell and will be able to use it to highlight containers, etc that have particularly good stuff in. Having looting circles would also devalue that. But if the option was there in the controller support options then perhaps Larian are intending to add them. Not my preference as I’ve said, but not something I’m going to be overly upset about either.

I'm atill checking every container because apparently this game is just packed with missile stuff and I don't know when I'll find something important. Plus I still find myself needing to scrounge for stuff to sell for money for supplies, so I generally can't afford not to search everything I also can't shake the worry that maybe something worthwhile will be in something, even if it's not valuables then maybe a book or an item that will turn out to be useful for some random puzzle somewhere in the area and it sucks and is tedious and I don't know how you manage not doing it. If they want us not to interact with stuff, don't make the stuff interactive at all. That's what other games do. If a container isn't going to have worthwhile stuff, don't let us open it at all. It can still just be there as background.

Ah … I was once like you, my child, but then I learned to let go of material things and took one step closer to nirvana .

Seriously though, I personally find the game more fun when not looting thoroughly. Partly because clicking on everything is boring but also as it makes resource management more interesting as I don’t end up with quite such an excessive amount of money, potions, arrows, scrolls or food. Not that they’re scarce even so, but it felt impactful when my party had to change its pace and start being more thorough in their looting and pick up even lower value items to sell because they were starting to run low on healing potions or when my paladin accidentally broke their oath and didn’t have 2,000GP to reinstate it (the oathbreaking itself was still annoying but at least restoring it felt a bit more meaningful!). There’s also more variability between different playthroughs depending on what and how much I loot - my curious gnome rogue ended up with tons more stuff than my paladin whose mind was on higher ideals of justice.

I personally would prefer Larian didn’t just make it impossible to interact with uninteresting stuff as I’d find this less immersive, there’d be less opportunity for the sort of change in pace and approach I mentioned above, I wouldn’t want to deny folk who do seem to enjoy looting everything their fun, it would restrict options to find other stuff to do with random containers and so on, and I’m not entirely joking when I say that I also wouldn’t want other players to be denied the epiphany I had .

But I would be all for some additional 5e-friendly ways to identify magical or unique stuff, such as the Detect Magic spell or the ability to actively roll perception to find unique puzzles, quest items, etc, and/or have this highlighted as the result of passive perception rolls. I’d also like the behaviour of the alt key to highlight stuff to be more consistent, or at least I don’t understand how it decides what does and doesn’t get highlighted at the moment. It might be nice to somehow tie this to your party’s perception, too, but perhaps that’s overcomplicating things.

I see where you're coming from. My perspective on the matter though I'd that if I don't have resourced I need because collecting those resources is tedious, thats not fun or interesting, it's frustrating, because to me it feels like I should have them. They were available for me to get but I left them behind. So either I was dumb for leaving important resourced, or the game is dumb for making getting those resources tedious. It's not an interesting choice for me, it's a question of "have everything I need" or "avoid the tedious task I have to do to get what I need." And as for immersion, the result for me is that I'm not immersed because I'm too busy being annoyed and wishing I could get to the fun part.

As for the difference you mention between your paladin and your rogue, this is probably just a me thing, but I just tend not to think things like that really "count" as role-playing if they're not connected to dialogue somehow. In my head my character isn't actually going through everything, they're just going to their destination and maybe occasionally doing necessary foraging. Unless the characters or story directly reference me doing that as part of the section I'm in.

All totally valid of course, and we should all play the game however feels right to us.

But if you’re worried that if you don’t loot everything you’ll run short of resources and end up regretting it, I can reassure you that’s not been my experience. Yes I need to keep an eye on things like how many potions and (if relevant for my characters) arrows and so on that I have, and if I’m starting to run low perhaps start looting more as I move forward, or even go buy some stuff before venturing off on the next instalment of my journey (I’m actually kind of disappointed I’ve never actually had to buy a healing potion), but I’ve never needed to retrace my steps and loot stuff I’d previously ignored. Totally up to you, of course, but if you think you can manage it and do multiple EA runs, I’d recommend at least giving being more lackadaisical about looting a go for at least one playthrough. You might find it liberating! Or you might absolutely hate it and go back to what suits you .

Totally agree with this. It is very liberating to just walk away from the 75 barrels with 200 lbs of meat that you just don't need but can't help but take because I mean...you went to the trouble of opening the barrel so might as well take it!

I love the idea of the Detect Magic spell being used like you mentioned above.

I too got extremely annoyed trying to see everything and loot every container, trying to figure out which bottles are potions and which are empty on shelves with dozens of bottles, ugh. Not a good experience.

What I really do think would help make looting more enjoyable is well, the Detect Magic idea above, and simply not putting ridiculous useless crap in chests that are obviously meant to hold valuables / and NOT putting rare magical items in a random bucket sitting in a corner somewhere.

It would be nice to be able to play without any worry of missing something really great because you didn't spend countless time searching every single container in the world, but also have the option to spend time searching all those containers because you're a poor ass scavenger and need to make some money early on or you're running from a battle you couldn't win, are down to 10% HP and can't rest, and need some healing potions NOW!

I may try that someday. But I must have bad luck with items or just am bad at the game, because I have at several points run out of healing potions and had to scrape together more gold to restock. Same has happened for invisibility potions as well. Buying magical weapons? Always really tough.

Ah, perhaps we just have different preferences when it comes to this, which is fine. Or would be if you didn’t find looting in the game frustrating, which isn’t ideal!

I’m actually kind of reassured to hear that it’s not so uncommon to run out of healing potions. I’ve generally had plenty, but did often skate quite close to the line with my moon druid playthrough without Shadowheart, and can see that if she’d not been able to heal herself in animal form with magic it would have tipped the scales. I’m sure on reflection there are plenty of party configurations that would in fact run out of potions if they didn’t buy them or loot reasonably thoroughly. Good .

Regarding invisibility potions and magic weapons, yes these get much harder to obtain and I often can’t afford them so need to save up and ration both what I buy and what I use. For me, this feels right and proper, and adds to my enjoyment and immersion, but I completely understand that other players’ mileage will vary.

Anyway, apologies for drifting somewhat off topic. I think I’ve got a bit of the passion of a convert when it comes to light-touch looting, but will now zip it with my evangelism.

Nah, I definitely don't want a loot radius button.

I like the immersion of picking and poking things. Something you learn by mid-late Act 1 is that there's a stupendous abundance of treasures. Yes, I've collected it all through multiple play throughs and to me the game is more fun collecting hard when poor, then looting selectively when rich.

Seems to me Act 1 has about 200% loot so that casual playthrough sees you well-enough set up for Act 2.

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I did one play through where I optimized Astarion to steal from traders after each rest. I had them all lined up in order with an MO. Gold quickly ballooned to 20k+ and everyone was laden with nothing but the best. At that point I got selective about what was worthwhile stealing to reduce effort-of-clicking. Fantastic experience - once.

Yes! I don’t mind common potions, arrows, scrolls and so on being in unassuming crates, or even the odd cool but not too cool rare magical item to reward characters who do spend time looting, as long as there’s some alternative means of finding truly good or unique items or at least some clues to be found somewhere to warn me to pay particular attention in specific places.

But please don’t give me a bunch of gold-filigreed ornate chests each with a couple of rusty plates!

Yes, the simple area loot circle thankfully killed the extensive pin pointing/clicking tiny items one by one. Without it, searching stuff is just a huge hassle and you can easily miss stuff in my opinion. Using the circle was very quick, and great for people that don't want to waste 5 minutes trying to grab a tiny coin on a table. It let people search all those boxes/cupboards/etc at once. How great is that? You can literally do everything you want in less then a minute, even for mass loot/gold hoarders. That made the DOS games more immersive for me. You can search just about everything, quickly and efficiently. It was cool.

I get that in the end you can end up with tens of thousands of gold, but hey why not? Some people like to do that, and if they don't want to use the loot circle, don't. I don't see why anyone would actually be against it though. I'm glad they will implement this with controller support. I'm just not sure why it has to go solely with controller support. Hopefully it won't be at launch.

If people want to play the style of barely getting by to make it harder and more challenging, or going back for certain items they didn't pick up, that's cool with me. They can also put the difficulty up as well. I just like to search stuff quickly and take what I need. I don't want to be worried about going back for health potions and the such. I really enjoy the story and the D&D universe they have created, especially the dice rolls. That's fun. The new engine looks great and runs very well.

I guess my main issue being at the end of the EA playthrough now, is that all the vendor stuff was pretty crappy compared to stuff I found. I haven't really bought anything, so I hope that's fixed. In DOS you could buy bad@$$ stuff, but you needed money to do it.

Why put so much searchable stuff in the game like DOS if it's more immersive for people to just blow through all the areas without exploring, and just doing the main quests? Let's see what happens. Cheers

To create the illusion of depth, and that this is a fully realised world independent of the adventurer, rather than one that is created specifically for the player to interact with. This may not totally work, but I assume is what Larian are going for by putting so much stuff in that a player isn’t necessarily going to be interested in, and I personally appreciate their effort.

As a result, I’d prefer to try to preserve that illusion as far as possible, and enjoy that as and when I want to dig deeper or explore more thoroughly there is more to be found before I hit bedrock. So if there is a feature that makes it obvious what exactly is present in an area quickly and easily, I would definitely like to be able to toggle it off.

But as I mentioned before, it’s not a huge thing for me so, as you say, we’ll see, and whatever Larian end up doing I’ll live with.