Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Owlbear Egg] - Should Not Be Consumable Food

Please prevent the Owlbear Egg from acting as consumable food!

It's so annoying having to babysit this easily consumed quest item every playthrough by fighting against the Long Rest mechanic trying to consume it 'till the player finally gets to Lady Esther, only to then realize it 'magically' got consumed anyway ages ago somewhere along the journey. Ultimately leaving the player without a lore-appropriate way to peacefully complete the 'Steal The Githyanki Egg' quest (without murdering Lady Esther or angering Lae'zel and massacring the Society Of Brilliance).

50 hours into a playthrough; Shadowheart was safekeeping the egg in her backpack up until meeting Lady Esther, only to then realize it got consumed 25 hours ago by the Owlbear Cub's feeding dialogue choice, stole it straight from her backpack.

This is impressively awful and cruel
+1 to make it a quest item (or not consumable)

"Babysit"?

Put the thing literally anywhere else besides your active party's inventory and voila, it is never, ever going to be a factor in any Long Rest or other food consumption related check.

Like, slap it into your camp chest and when you reach Lady Esther, pop back to camp and pick it up again.

Incorrect.

• If one puts it into the Camp Chest the Long Rest mechanic will try to consume it.
• If one gives it to non-active party members the Long Rest mechanic will try to consume it.
• If one has active party members carry it the Long Rest mechanic will try to consume it.

Therefore the player has to babysit it 24/7 to ensure it doesn't get consumed 'till they reach Lady Esther, because the Long Rest mechanic globally links all these inventories together in order to access all available food (which the Owlbear dialogue also uses to feed the cub).

And dropping it in the middle of the camp or somewhere out of camp is also not a solution. The point is to solve the problem, not to avoid it - because so many people (both aware and unaware) keep running into this stupid issue with the egg for over a year now. The player shouldn't have to fight against the game's core mechanic in order to successfully finish a quest.

It's a quest item, it should act as such.

Long Rest mechanic ONLY takes from your ACTIVE parties inventory.

How do I know? Because I tried shoving all of my food into the camp chest and onto non-active party members to save weight on my active party members. Only to see that the Long Rest mechanic showed me having 0 food as a result.

In addition, every playthrough I shove the egg into camp chest/onto a non-active party member and lo and behold... It never appears in my Long Rest food usage options.


I dunno. I think it's an interesting mechanic to not simply label the thing as a non-interactive quest item.

It as an object, is worth 100g which is a decent amount early game. It also can provide a large amount of camp resources (Which can be useful early game). It's not necessary to complete the quest (You can give Lady Esther the actual Gith egg for example)

It provides a player ways to interact with the game beyond "Get quest item X for quest X" which is good design.

The only "issue" with it is that it is sometimes consumed by the auto-food usage options (Personally, the times where I don't bother to stash it out of reach of such things it has never been selected, but maybe that's because I loot every Supply Pack I see so I'm often swimming in tons of Camp Resources). But again, such things are easily worked around by the aforementioned, putting it out of your party...

I agree. Tbh, I wish, it would hatch at the end and Owlbert and Scratch would get a little sister or brother. I'm protecting the damn thing my whole playthrough to headcanon, that after the game, there will be another baby owlbear.

Is the thread title correct? Isn't it about the GITYANKI egg?

BTW - a pity the Owlbear Cubs does not eat Scratch.

Yeah.... this is why I don't get the egg until the owlbear is at my camp. Of course this isn't ideal for many people and would 3000000% easier if the egg just wasn't edible!

Again, completely incorrect. The game has evolved since launch, might want to open it up and see what's new since then.

*Owlbear Egg within the Camp Chest accounted for by the Long Rest mechanic*


*Solo character with no party members, 5169 food accounted for from the Camp Chest.*

Oh man. Is it bad to say I never considered this a quest item and just sold it? I thought that option to do the switcheroo was just a fun quirk, didn't know that was the intention for the egg existing.

I think, the notion of camp supplies only being used by active party members comes from EA. Back then, it was like that and people complained about that, so it was changed with full release or one of the patches.

Buba: No, the title is correct, you can give Esther the owlbear egg with a deception check for the reward. The githyanki egg is not marked as camp supply. And for your last sentence have a nun ringing a bell and cry 'Shame' following you

I never had the problem, because so far, I never killed the owlbear mum and come back to loot the cave after I gave secured Owlbert, but at the least, we should be able to select, what he gets.

There is a mod, that changes the egg from food to quest item, but with the modding situation being as complicated as it is, I would wait with installing it maybe.

Yes, it was a thing since Early Access and up until post-launch 30th of November 2023, then Update #5 introduced the universal Camp Chest as we know it today.

• "While at camp, you can now access and manage the inventories of companions who aren't in your active party."

So that's why all food is being universally accounted for and why unfortunately Owlbear Egg falls into its mechanic regardless of where it's stashed. I had 5000 food in the Camp Chest and even some fish on my main character during the Owlbear Cub feeding scene, but it randomly snatched the egg from Shadowheart's backpack instead.

Currently the Owlbear Egg is a versatile item. You can sell it, you can eat it, you can use it for the quest. Just like you can think the broken shards of Mourning Frost are trash and sell them. Turning the egg into a quest item would severely limit its use to only be a quest item - and if you never decided to solve the quest this way, it would just sit uselessly in your camp inventory without even the option to sell it. Like the goblin drawing of the Chosen, the book from the dude who took a tumble down the cliff of Ethel's back door, or all those broken Moon Lanterns which we never use because Gale prefers to cleanse the circle instead of creating the Shadow Lantern.

I don't mind that it can be used for Long Rest. You are shown the items you use for dinner after all - and the new upgrade at least managed to sort things by size, so larger portions are listed first. But I think Beaky should get the same dietary restrictions like Crimson or Tara and only should be able to be fed with raw meat or fish. Does our little fellow really chomp away 40 camp supplies a night btw?

Yes it is a versatile item, however its usefulness drastically varies because its primary purpose is to be a quest item.

• In terms of a quest it offers a unique outcome, experience and 500g.
• In terms of a vendor it offers 250g (without any Charisma on Tactician/Honor).
• In terms of food it is just 40 points, a single supply pack (selling it provides much more).

So it being food is completely useless when its price overshadows its native food value so much. Not to mention that I just got into ACT II and already have over 5000 food exclusively by looting it. That's 125 Long Rests below Tactician difficulty or 62 on Tactician/Honour difficulties. It literally serves no purpose as food, it's an insignificant drop in an ocean of food because of which players get locked out of a quest outcome if it gets randomly consumed.

So it doesn't have to be turned into a quest item with an orange border to uselessly sit in inventory, it just has to stop being consumable food. Then the player can either use it for the quest or simply sell it to buy more food than it natively offers, but at least it would no longer get randomly consumed and lock the player out of a quest outcome.

I wonder if it is posssible to have it as food, but give it lowest priority so it is always used last?

I don't mind it being food, but yeah, I get the frustration when it is used without players meaning to.

The primary purpose for you is for it to be a quest item, in equal parts because you know that it will later become a possible quest item and because you know it is the most efficient use for it. Let people be inefficient. Maybe after eating a spot of dwarf someone wants to supplement their diet with an owlbear egg. It's an egg, eggs can be eaten. You get told that it is valuable when you pick it up, so you should know to be careful with it.

Even our cub eating it isn't too wild, after all his mom ate his big brother, so cannibalism seems to be normal for owlbears. I'd rather not upkeep this tradition and have the egg be taken off the menu for our little friend though.

Kira: The auto-picker currently and frustratingly hates supplies with high camp values. You'll have to chomp through all your bagels, apples and fish-heads before it touches the egg or the supply bags.

@Anska I remember (bearly) my first play of the game and it autopicked stacks of campsupplies, making my Tav run way out of supplies. I have manually picked since then. I don't trust it anymore.

But I was thinking mainly specificly with Crimsomriders situation where it got auto-fed to the owlbear, in that situation it should have had a lower priority as use item. Not because it is horrible (I think it would make sense for owlbear to eat it) but because it is a high value food item.

Am actually being objective here - that is its main purpose by design.

Same story with the broken spear halves for the [Vision Of The Absolute] or the icy staff pieces for the [Mourning Frost]. People can absolutely do whatever they wish with the junk pieces, but the primary purpose of these pieces is to create unique weapons.

The Owlbear Egg is a quest item directly tied to Lae'zel becoming a mommy; its primary purpose to be used so the player can peacefully complete the quest without killing Lady Esther, angering Lae'zel and massacring the Society Of Brilliance in ACT III.

What people do with the egg is entirely up to them, but players hoping to achieve this outcome end up having their choice entirely stolen away from under them, because they don't even notice it's gone until it's too late. An important quest item that keeps getting randomly consumed and therefore locking people out of their outcome necessary for a paragon playthrough.

I had no choice but to give Lady Esther the Githyanki egg to complete the quest and then immediately steal it back. I am now stuck with my journal saying I gave her the hatchling and Lae'zel got pissed off at me, telling me to take it back despite already having done so. Got no clue if she can even hatch it anymore, which is something I want for her in this paragon playthrough.

This whole mess just because the stupid egg is a quest item posing as useless food. But yes... the irony did not escape me that the Mother ate the cub's brother and now the cub ate its own baby brother.

I don't know if it plays out any differently, if you already have the githyanki egg in your inventory but otherwise, you can tell Esther that you won't get involved and the matter is settled. The quest is not added to your journal and while you can chat with Esther about the experiment, it counts as a decision made and you can simply walk away. The owlbear egg is an option for characters who are a bit greedy or like to lead a cruel experiment astray, but it is not necessary to get out of the situation peacefully. I would even argue that giving her the owlbear egg is not part of a paragon playthrough at all, as it is a con.

Still, I agree that it should not be randomly fed to the cub, a situation during which you don't have control over what is handed out, unlike the long rest menu in which you have control over what you eat.

So it would seem I was wrong and they changed how it worked in that patch.

It, however, still doesn't prevent options for ensuring that the thing cannot be randomly consumed - Such as dropping it on the ground next to a fast travel location (Allowing you to easily teleport back to it to pick it up). Given that loot doesn't despawn in the game and there's no lockout prohibiting you from travelling back to anywhere in the Wilderness until after the Shadow-Cursed Lands. With such an action not being a unique solution (For example, you can meta game Gerringothe Thorm in a similar fashion, by dumping your gold into a random chest so her attack that deals damage based on your held gold doesn't do anything)

The main issue here is not that the item has other (Arguably) less valuable uses, but that it can randomly be consumed without player input.

Simply making it low priority for random selection when it comes to food, so that it is only used if a player has no other alternatives (Which, personally, has been my experience with it. But who knows, maybe patch 6/7 broke it and I simply haven't played enough runs since then to have noticed)

Since options like selling it or eating it can be valuable to some players (Not everyone loots tons of food or makes lots of gold and might find eating/selling the egg useful and/or players might decide to just give Lady Esther the Gith Egg anyway) and completely locking out these possibilities is unnecessary when it can simply be made less likely to be randomly consumed.

There is a mod for exactly this called "Don't Eat the Owlbear Egg." I immediately downloaded that one lol.

I mean this just seems like something that must have been scrambled up along the way. Perhaps if eating the Owlbear Egg did something more significant? I don't know, perhaps with diet and exercise, a balanced breakfast featuring the Owlbear Egg might give the party some lasting boon. There could be extra dialogue options in some sort of "are you sure you want to eat the Owlbear Egg?" sequence.

Perhaps there is some disagreement there among the camp companions. A scene similar to the first use of the tadpole. For example Astarion might object, since presumably he's not eating anything on the menu. Not that the game really ever accounts for that, he seems to benefit from random potato pies or Tiefling gruel same as everyone else hehe. Perhaps all this food is just for Tav/Durge, and we're only managing our own appetites? In any case, there could still be a moment like that to reinforce some character stuff.

Maybe Jaheira balks cause she's a Druid, and Minsc has misgivings cause he's a Ranger. Probably nobody wants to see any of the companion characters being all terribly enthusiastic about eating the owlbear egg. Maybe Minthara is into it, that sorta fits. It would be more interesting though, if the Goblins were like all craven and we could trade the Owlbear Egg that way. Maybe Owlbear Eggs are poisonous to Gortash somehow, exactly like Return to Oz? Or maybe there are other options besides just pawning it off to Ester is what I'm driving at. I had my suspicions there anyway. I thought perhaps if we held onto the Owlbear Egg that eventually it might hatch or lead to a follow up. Initially I thought the Owl Bear cub might be some kind of summon similar to Scratch.

The appearance of the Owlbear cub at camp is a little bit random, and potentially easy to miss. There are a few ways to show up show up at the Goblin camp and only see the regular chicken chase. Or to mess up the sequence, and have the Owlbear still chillin' at the Goblin party, even after the camp celebration. Or worse, where Andric kills the Owlbear cub, or something like that happens. Seeing the Owlbear Cub get got is always dispiriting, but maybe if the egg could hatch a second owlbear it wouldn't be such a bummer lol.

I legit thought the Egg would have it's own thing going on, since it's a pretty big moment in the early game, but it almost feels like they were going to do something like that but then just never got around to it. Like an Unfinished Business sort of thing.

I think we can feed to the Dinosaur at the Circus by accident as well, which would probably be frustrating if something interesting were to happen with it in Act III. Just seems like there could have been more moments where the Owlbear Egg came up. It's really just that one exchange, anything else we can do with it is a bit of a waste. Like there's not even an achievement for eating the Owlbear Egg, which would be something. A special Evil ending where we are haunted by this choice? I don't know, that I have the Mod downloaded, I barely remember it's there. Like all the potions I forget to drink, or scrolls I forget to write, just sorta sits there collecting dust till we get to the Monastery. And even then I usually just end up knocking Ester out the second Lae'zel suggests it. She's like the easiest Merchant to Hold, and never seems to notice when we show up the next morning wearing her clothes, like brilliant here we go again.

I mean did no one seriously consider how cool it would be to have Owlbears with different colored feathers. Maybe a great horned owlbear, or a spotted Owlbear, or Black Owlbear, or a tiny Elf Owlbear that's like more mini? Similar to the smaller wolves mod, which I also enjoyed. More options would have been cool

Could eating the Owlbear egg in EA result in a paladin’s oath being broken? I have this vague and probably inaccurate memory that it was treated as an evil act.

Which is a bit of an aside, but it does seem that we’re intentionally being given the RP option to dine on Owlbear egg which I agree would be fine if it weren’t so easy to do by accident. I’d be for making that not possible.

Here's the thieving scoundrel caught right in the act!




The thing is the egg is necessary because the point of the thread is laid out clearly - if the player wants to peacefully complete the quest.

That's the whole point. Anything outside of this singular outcome is just personal roleplay working around a problem after it occurs, when the actual point is to solve the problem so it never occurs again. To ensure other people aiming for this outcome don't end up with their egg randomly consumed too. Because although there are numerous ways to work around this problem, workarounds are not the point otherwise I could've just used CheatEngine or the ScriptExtender to spawn myself another egg and completed the quest the way I originally intended.

The point is to solve the issue of the egg getting lost due to bad game mechanics and by doing so locking the player out of a quest outcome, which is laid out in the opening post too; "ultimately leaving the player without a lore-appropriate way to peacefully complete the 'Steal The Githyanki Egg' quest (without everyone dying in ACT III)."

The only other option to complete the quest is to either kill her or give her the Githyanki egg, both of which are terrible choices so I had to choose the lesser evil by stealing it back. I also couldn't have just walked away either because I already accepted the quest hours ago at that point, believing the Owlbear Egg to be in Shadowheart's backpack as I proceeded to complete the entire Mountain Pass. Not to mention that my character roleplay got tainted the moment the egg got consumed anyway, because I'm roleplaying Eilistraee's Sword Dancer (Cleric/Bard/Paladin) who is under the sacred oath (of the Ancients) to preserve the sanctity of all life... which the game defecated upon by making her feed an unhatched baby to its big brother.


I could go check, but I'm pretty sure it's just the Oath Of The Ancients itself which unlike the other oaths is very strict when it comes to fighting against neutral NPCs and one of its direct acts against the oath is killing the Owlbear Cub during the battle against its mother. During EA the oath was incredibly clunky regarding NPC attitude behavior and the cub sometimes would remain permanently hostile, so it often led to an oath being broken right next to the egg.

Luckily it stopped being an issue since full release as the oaths got massive improvements, however it can still be an issue within Honour Mode; am playing through the game now as an Oath Of The Ancients Paladin and if the mother is killed before the father, the cub will remain permanently hostile and break the oath of the Paladin if they're unable to flee because its cutscene cannot trigger.

Again, I have no problem with the egg being protected from being fed to his big brother, because it's simply a waste.

But I think in the case of Esther's quest it's good enough that you can peacefully settle it by just saying no and being done with the situation. Same as you can tell Mol that you won't steal the idol for her if you are not generally comfortable with the concept of stealing a holy idol, it will lock you out of the quest reward but that's that. Sometimes the good solution is just to say no and not to accept a very dubious offer with the plan to deceive your employer. And seriously ... giving Esther the owlbear egg does not sound like preserving the sanctity of life to me either, because you can be sure nothing good will happen to that egg. But I think this conversation is going nowhere, so I agree with the request to not make the egg accidental owlbear food but not with the reasoning.