Baldur’s Gate 3 dev tempts fate and taunts players as the RPG’s latest patch fixes yet another easy-gold trade exploit: “Any more of these up your sleeves?”
Baldur’s Gate 3 devs released a hotfix on October 16 that, among other balance adjustments, disposes of another one of the role-playing game’s many trade exploits.
“You can no longer add items to your wares even if they cannot become wares (e.g. pact weapons) by selecting them along with another item that can become a ware,” the patch notes say. “This prevents a trade exploit where you could sell your wares and the bound items would not leave your inventory. Any more of these up your sleeves?”
Uh, probably. Since 2023, when Baldur’s Gate 3 released, developer Larian has been attempting to stomp out players’ many, many attempts to dupe the game’s defenseless NPC traders. But trade exploits keep lighting up like little fires. Just this week, Baldur’s Gate 3 content creator Morgana Evelyn seems to have found a way to fill up the game’s backpacks with infinite greed.
“Right click on a body, and click loot,” Morgana instructs in a video. “Close your inventory, but make sure the [body] is still open. Go talk to a trader, donate a container.” After elaborately swapping a trader’s items to and from the container and body, you’ll be able to drag your desired items from the body to the icon of a second container. Then, you profit and receive all the loot you stole.
“Congrats sweetie,” says Morgana, “you’ve broken Faerun’s economy.”
Oh, well. Larian’s doing the best it can. The developer’s most recent hotfix also improves loading times for players “with many mods installed,” and BG3 should no longer crash while loading a save game.
“Something so small before something so big,” a Larian dev on X said cryptically about the hotfix. Some fans hope he’s referring to crossplay possibly coming to BG3, but I’m sure others are praying he means there will be opportunities for even more trade exploits.
Once I stopped treating Baldur’s Gate 3 like a video game, I finally got good at it.