Bad news, Baldur's Gate 3 fraudsters, the latest hotfix stops you hoodwinking merchants using cheeky container tricks

Hello there, Baldur's Gate 3 people. We're doing this dance again. There's a newly released hotfix, and it does things. What things? Well, for one, it fixes a bunch of exploits involving containers that you'd previously been able to use to defraud the game's merchants.

Yep, after the last hotfix helped out the not quite evil Minthara romancers who'd been getting rejected by her in really quite brutal - although to be fair this is Minty we're talking about - fashion, a new one's arrived to save some NPCs from you instead. Though to be fair, you're no longer in danger of getting permananetly trapped in conversation with Lae'zel like she's an in-law you've been seated next to at a wedding, so both sides are benefitting here.

If you take a peek in the full set of notes for hotfix 23 - which has gone live today - Larian's described all the downright sneaky methods folks have been using to save or score some extra gold. The studio's whacked bugs that allowed you to "generate gold by buying multiple items but only paying for one of them if you dragged the items into a container" and acquire "a stack of items for free when dragging the stack into a container and using the item splitter".

That's not all though. You'll find that "equipped items blocked by shapeshifting" can no longer be traded stopping you from getting "even if the items don't transfer to the trader's inventory" and selling all of you wares won't fail to remove the correct ammount of gold from a merchant's pockets. You should still be able to speedrun the game by sticking Shadowheart in a container though, so not all of BG3's boxes have been nerfed.

Aside from all of that work to eliminate BG3's populace of dodgy dealers, there are a bunch of fixes designed to provent crashes at certain points or that are triggered by certain things, such as "throwing the Black Pudding Platter" and issues that lead to you being unable to play properly due to something, or your character, being stuck. One fun example is "a bug causing you to get stuck in Lae'zel's recruitment dialogue if you saved halfway through the dialogue and then loaded that savegame".

There are also plenty of scripting and gameplay tweaks, designed to eliminate issues like "a bug causing party members to be wrongly ungrouped" that seems like it could break your entire save, and a problem with "Balthazar not finishing his turn when he is too far from the Colony ritual spot to reach it in one turn".

While that's it for this one, Larian's working on further fixes and patches, which hopefully won't have to include any new ones that crop up following this new hotfix, as has happened before on occasion.

While you're waiting for hotfix 23 to apply itself to your game, why not read about how Baldur's Gate 3's developers put measures in place to stop you from messing everything up if you decided to murder everyone you came across or just run headlong towards the finish.