Baldur's Gate 3 wizard accidentally breaks the game by learning too many spells

Baldur’s Gate 3 wizard accidentally breaks the game by learning too many spells

Time Stamp: August 9, 2023 7:13 PM

D&D wizards live and die by one rule: you can never know too many spells. The same is generally true in Baldur’s Gate 3, except for in the case of one player who has been apparently been wizarding so hard that they broke the game.

Reddit user Yourigath shared their encounter with a strange bug while trying to level up their half-elf wizard to level 10. Part of the level-up process requires picking a few new spells to add to your spellbook, but when presented with the spell selection screen, Yourigath says nothing appeared—their wizard had already learned all the fifth level spells they could, so they were stuck in level-up limbo.

“You will get stuck here. With no way to level up or fix the character anymore,” Yourigath warned on Reddit.

The culprit here is a system in Baldur’s Gate 3 that makes it easy to unlock spells without leveling up: scrolls. Any spell can also come in the form of a scroll that allows any character to cast it once. Alternatively, wizards are allowed to spend a chunk of gold to add that spell to their permanent arsenal. That’s what Yourigath was up to, and explains how they were eventually confronted with a bugged level-up screen.

Try not to learn “too many” spells using scrolls as a Wizard from r/BaldursGate3

On the off chance you run into this scenario, Yourigath was able to get around the bug by installing/uninstalling a mod that let them ritual-cast spells, tricking the game into letting them repick spells and get out of the level-up process. You could also respec into a different class until Larian fixes this, but apparently respeccing back into wizard doesn’t do the trick.

Maybe this is blasphemy to my spellcasting aficionados, but I’d generally avoid memorizing spell scrolls too often anyway. They’re a neat shortcut to some pretty powerful magic, but I’ve enjoyed using them as one-offs. Scrolls are effectively extra spell slots, which makes them great to hoard for desperate times. A few nights ago I got ambushed by a gang of crossbowmen that would’ve surely wiped my party, but managed to bail myself out with two fireball scrolls.

Yourigath says they’ve reported the bug to Larian already, and with the steady pace of hotfixes that have already squashed hundreds of bugs, I’m sure it’ll get fixed soon.

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