Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Looting is no fun

After finishing my 5th playthrough I've come to the conclusion that looting is probably my least favorite activity in this game. It certainly takes a lot of time. There are like a billion crates, barrels and other containers, and you have to check ALL of them, if you don't want to miss the few items that are really useful. This issue has many compounding layers.

Crates. Friggin crates. They have been the staple of unimaginative level design for the last 40 years or so. They are geometrically simple and can take up a lot of space, so they are perfect to fill up every game area no matter its nature. Is it living room? Crates! Is it an ancient temple? Crates! Is it a derelict cave? Crates of course. Seeing a wooden crate in real life is the most "Omg! This is just like in games!" moment you can experience. BG3 does have a LOT of crates everywhere along with its siblings the barrels, and unfortunately these are most often not just decorative elements. They MAY contain items, so you will check all of them. It doesn't matter whether it is the first or 5th playthrough, you probably won't remember which of these have the good stuff, so you have to check them again.

To make matters worse, the UI does not consistently highlight every relevant container type. An empty pouch is highlighted while a skeleton that may have an awesome ring is not. This will result in spending a lot of time carefully investigating every area, and probably still missing a few great items. This is made worse by the very linear nature of the game, since you can't go back to earlier areas to get the stuff you have missed the first time.

This is not a uniquely BG3 problem. A lot of other games also bloat their gameplay time values by making players scrounge for questionably useful stuff. "Sure, this mission may be extremely time sensitive and the zombies are on my tail, but first let me check these crates for crafting materials!" This creates a major dissonance between the story and the actual gameplay. The first priority is to secure those potentially OP items you think you will need for the tough fights ahead. To make things funnier, most of these things you have collected will stay in your backpack after the final boss is slain. Especially the best stuff.

At some point RPGs have decided to let players pick up every useless random item there is. Sure, you can just sell most of these for a tiny amounts of gold (or whatever), but at end of the day, these add nothing of actual value to the game. An empty barrel is functionally the same as the barrel with a rotten egg inside, but the second one creates the illusion of loot diversity.

When it comes to the quality of the actually relevant loot in BG3, one question keeps tormenting my mind: Why so many hyper-niche equipment items? "If a drunk gnome wields this sword in offhand and hits a dazed monster of the aberration type, then that monster will receive the condition of constipation, which reduces wisdom saving throws on average by 0.5." There are so many of these in the game. On the plus side, they are kinda funny. I am absolutely sure that many of these can be useful when combined on hyper-specific builds, but usually they are just disappointing junk loot that ends up at the bottom of your camp chest, because "maybe I need this in the future".

In conclusion: way too much gameplay time is spent on browsing through "meh" loot.

Not really. Crates and Bookshelves are the only worthwhile containers to actually bother looting. Since these can contain Thieves Tools/Disarm Kits and Scrolls respectively.

Barrels, bottle racks, vases, pots, don't contain anything particularly useful (Barrels can also contain tools and kits, but at a much lower rate to the point where it's just not worth the time to check)

Even then, by Act 2 you likely have like 70+ Thieves Tools and 50+ Disarm Kits and 20k+ gold to simply buy more from vendors if somehow you use them all.


The very few scenarios where this is actually relevant are all scripted. So after 1-2 playthroughs you should simply know the skeletons that contain actual loot and not just some random dagger or bone.


Umm... You literally can.

Until Act 3 anyway. But if you're entering Act 3 you're going to the area that contains all the stuff that completely invalidates all the junk items you'd find from the prior 2 acts by having a plethora of vendors selling the highest tier stuff.


There's really not that many. There's like 2 items with Drunk synergy, 1 item with small race synergy, 1 item with Drow synergy, 1 item with Dwarf synergy and then a handful of build dependent items.

The bigger problem is there's just so many bad or underwhelming items. Runs often end up all boiling down to the same handful of actually good items every time (Things like Knife of the Undermountain King, Phalar Aluve, the single cloak that gives +1 AC, Melf's First Staff, Caustic Band, Ring of Protection etc).

Which is made worse by the fact that all these items come from scripted sources. Mostly vendors but also static locations.

There's no finding random magic items in containers or on enemies to make looting spicier (Or pickpocketing worthwhile), it's all just "Go to X location and pick up Y item and move on". It's why pushing enemies into chasms doesn't feel bad, since you know you're not missing any loot because you know 100% what every enemy drops.

You can easily play through the game without looting anything but chests and you won’t miss anything you don’t need.

The bookshelves are quite a chore. So many same books and parchmetns, all worth 14 gp. But you can't skip these if you want to know how the absolute was formed and how they became what they are at the time of the game. So yes, purely from a material inventory you can skip them, but will lose a lot of understanding of what is going on and how we got here.

Just because certain container types (like skeletons and barrels) are unlikely to contain decent loot, it does not mean that it is not worth checking them. The awesome Smuggler's Ring is on a random unmarked skeleton you can find very early. Since there is a 0.05% chance a skeleton can "drop" a goodie, you will check all of them, especially on a first run. There is a major difference between a container type never or rarely having good stuff. It is just a nasty trick to bloat gameplay times.

I was using the "drunk gnome" just as a hyperbolic example. There are too many items that share the "tiny buff/debuff on a very specific condition" pattern. Some of these can be good on certain builds, but they make for an underwhelming reward in the average case. You very rarely get exciting items, compared to the time you spend opening containers.

Except for the Caustic Band, all the others on your list are lost if you fail to pick them up before Act 3.

Maybe this is just the current patch, but if you hold the highlight key, it doesn't show *everything* that is a container. I'm no perfectionist, so I never bother looting everything anyway, but I assume the highlight key is there so you only loot the things with stuff in them.

It does. Since it's simply not worth the time to check when you have so many resources easily available. There's literally an overabundance of stuff where you can be swimming in gold and resources with nothing to use them on. So checking a barrel for the 0.1% chance it contains your 169th Thieves Tool you'll literally never use is pointless.


It's not a "Random unmarked skeleton" it's that specific unmarked skeleton.

Which is the thing. Yes, on your first run, you'll run around looting everything. But after that you should know which unmarked skeletons have the actual items on them and can ignore the other 99.99% of them that contain nothing.

Every worthwhile item is in a static location. The only thing you can find in randomized containers are resources (Camp supplies, Thieves Tools, Disarm Kits, Scrolls and low tier Poisons/Oils)


And literally none of them come from a container.

You talk about time spent opening containers and not finding good loot... Which is because there isn't good loot in random containers. Heck, even the static containers there's pretty much just the Smuggler's Ring as the sole worthwhile item and maybe the Lover's Rings (Other than that the items I can recall off-hand from skeletons are just bad. Like the ring that gives Momentum if you're at less than 50% health, the hat that gives +1 Wis Saves or the ring that gives +1 Deception)

..Having said that, I kind of prefer Icewind Dale's approach, where loot is [semi] random. The places where you find the good stuff remains the same, but the actual thing you get comes from a list. As it stands, you kind of know that you're swinging either a mace or a greatsword. You know which staffs will benefit your wizard in advance etc. I much prefer my adventures to be something like a box of chocolates.

I'm only on my first playthrough, but I'm 400+ hours deep and I loot everything. The world looting is definitely painful, even for people who just want to do a cursory search of all the items and containers littered through BG3. Game needs an optional "loot all" function attached to the "highlight" function, imo. Your character just walks around the highlight area, picks up loose items, opens any containers and auto-loots the contents. Idc that I'm losing agency by watching my character investigate a pool of junk, and pick up the vendor trash. I'm happy to watch it happen in real time, and to deal with any npc's or traps that pop up in the process. I just can't imagine what part of the user experience the sheer volume of searchable containers is meant to improve. Maybe if every single container and item didn't require your character to be in a specific position, facing a specific direction in order to interact/take, it would be more tolerable. If I have to watch my character auto-walk around every container to find the correct open angle anyway, might as well just let me string the process together in to a single, more tolerable chain.

I kind of enjoy the exploration.

Containers don’t have to be searched to contribute to gameplay. They can be seen (as part of set dressing), thrown, stacked, climbed upon, stolen wholesale, burned or otherwise destroyed.

I’m not saying looting that much stuff is fun for everyone, but there is more to these containers than just griefing players.

I do a daily thieving run on select merchants. It's quite achievable even on Honour mode without save-scumming. In particular, I prefer to sell stacks of gems which can be split and easily stolen back - economizing the effort.

Anyway, the loot from thieving far exceeds the usual amount of loot you pick up on a regular day between short rests. Of course you still want to check obvious enemies and chests for special loot. But you don't need to pick up everything.

I enjoy looting in general. It’s relaxing. But, serious question, has anyone ever found anything in a vase?

Same. I'm a loot goblin and take everything that's not nailed down. Always. Yes! Yes I did and I have proof!

Yes, in the Shar temple there is stuff in the big vases.

Since critical fails are still a thing, I don't see how you can do it on a regular basis. With more stacks you get more chances to roll a 1.

Advantage means there's only 1:400 chance of double 1's. But yes, it does happen. It happened on some silly DC4 item after I had cleared everything else of worth.

I then opt for violence, draw OA the _opposite_ direction I want to flee, hide and flee. Latest time I was still exposed, so Lae'zel shot a Darkness arrow. I've stolen plenty of these.

Eventually the reputation lost from times caught will close the trader, but I'm fine to move on then. If I wanted to fix reputation, I'd have to get my thief to donate money, and then steal it all back. However, I'm not stealing from reputable traders, so don't care.

If I really wanted to get efficient, I could recruit a halfling thief hireling. Their lucky trait rerolls 1's... Not a bad idea actually.

In the beginning of ACT 1 I found some things in vases, but after that it almost stops completely. Maybe a ruse to aggravate players who fear to miss the important clue in a vase even more.

That's a fair point, I use containers for absolutely all of those things, but didn't think about how much their massive presence in the game enables me to do all that. I suppose my particular gripe isn't about the volume of junk containers or trash loot, but is instead about the amount of effort even light looting can take with how apparently difficult it is for your character to stand in one place and pick up grouped items. The whole walking from one side of the stack/grouping to the other, then back again - even though the items and containers are so physically close that it shouldn't be necessary. Like walking all around a small desk to pick up three wine cups that might as well be physically touching, even though you could reach all of them perfectly well from where you started. It doesn't just add a painful slowness to mass looting for me, it can even make light looting annoying, and it constantly screws with my stealth looting (aka stealing lol).

Back in my day, we had to walk uphill both ways just to loot two containers.