Patch 6 of Baldur's Gate 3 opens a Pandora's box of glitches for some players, while a hotfix leaves modders scratching their heads: 'the .exe got completely reorganised again'

Patch 6 of Baldur's Gate 3 released last week. While it's brought a host of intended improvements to smooching, shop interfaces, and character animations, everything seems to be a smidge on fire—with players reporting bugs, crashes, and glitches like mimics coming out of the woodwork.

Larian's been quick to start hotfixing these issues—including a duo of crashes that would kill the game when interacting with vendors—but community-gathered lists of bugs on the game's subreddit, official forums, and a Google document all seem extensive.

These warts include companions becoming un-interactable, hard locks at the raid on the druid grove, and the warlock's repelling blast invocation—which received a fix this update—potentially crashing the game. Vendors are a particular culprit, with Larian's new system for trading and bartering causing all sorts of problems.

I hopped into the patch to do some of my own testing, and I was able to replicate a couple of issues. For starters—while vendors never crashed my game, they did all take a long time to load their stock, which is annoying to say the least. As reported in that document, Shift/CTRL clicking multiple items in the vendor window is busted, too.

Other reported glitches were absent—toggling repelling blast didn't make anything explode, neither did speaking with town criers. Of course, this doesn't mean it's all a mirage. Bugs don't impact everyone equally, and while some players have only hit mild speedbumps, others are enduring game-scuppering issues like Minthara accidentally spoiling major plot points and an invisible bridge at Wyrm's Rock Fortress. For some, even their long-awaited kissing animations aren't playing right.

What's more, the creator of Baldur's Gate 3's script extender (despite adjusting it for Patch 6) says that hotfix 18 has put the .exe through the wringer all over again: "Despite claiming to be a 'hotfix', the .exe got completely reorganised again for seemingly no reason, like in patch 4," writes the mod's author on its GitHub.

This has been further corroborated on Twitter by software engineer Frans Bouma, who writes: "Please check your build system, this fix isn't small at all, it breaks a lot of mods and your executable is seriously smaller, but inlining of functions seems to be ... off?"

Obviously, you should never expect mods to work smoothly with any kind of update—though I can only imagine the frustration of toiling to repair your script extender and finally pulling it off, only for a hotfix with two measly bullet points to tear the whole thing down again. Larian says it has more fixes to come in the following days, but it might be worth pressing pause on that Honour Mode playthrough. After all, a bug's fine if you've got a quicksave loaded up—not so much if it bricks your whole one-save-only attempt.