PSA: Be Careful When You Long Rest in Baldur’s Gate 3

Picture this: Faerûn, 1492 DR. You’re walking down the road with your pals when you suddenly smell smoke. Around the bend, you come across an inn engulfed in flames. Inside, you can hear multiple voices screaming for help. You know you should rush in and save them, but your party is a bit battered from the last battle with the local goblins. So you sit down, make camp, and take a long rest to make sure you’re fit to save everyone. Hours later, your health replenished, you stand up, only to discover the inn has burned to ash and everyone died.

Well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately in the Baldur’s Gate 3 community about the intersection of long rests, missable events, and quest progression. A number of people have reported finding themselves in situations where a quest seemed to progress without their input, a character moved on from the location they were supposed to meet them in, or someone died because the player didn’t help them fast enough. Several theories have been thrown around as to why this is happening, and one prevalent suggestion is that taking too many long rests can push the clock forward and cause certain events to progress.

For instance, one player reported a situation with an early quest involving a druidic ritual they wanted to stop. They claimed they went off to do some other things, but when they came back the ritual had completed and they weren’t given a chance to stop it. Multiple other users replied, suggesting the player may have taken too many long rests.

But is that really what’s going on? Should we all be terrified of long resting? We checked in with Larian Studios to see if long rests do, in fact, progress the clock forward. This was the studio’s reply:

“It’s not about how many long rests you take. but when you choose to take a long rest can have an effect. For instance, if you enter a town and see an inn on fire and you immediately decide to go to bed, that may have consequences.”

But that answer from Larian leaves one unanswered question: what’s happening, then, with all those people reporting quests moving forward without their input? The answer varies based on the situation, but in most cases, it sounds like players are completing other quests elsewhere that are then influencing events elsewhere in the world. For example, most players meet Lae’zel near the wreck of the Nautilid, but my party accidentally missed her. When we came back to find her, she had moved on. We’re not sure what exactly triggered her to disappear, but we’d completed dozens of quests by then, so it’s extremely likely something else we did caused her quest to progress. Given the situation she was in, it would have been silly to expect her to hang around anyway.

Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that moving from Act 1 to Act 2 will automatically complete most possible Act 1 events and make it impossible to backtrack and pick up those dropped threads. So if you beelined your way through the first act and then wondered why you missed stuff back in Emerald Grove, that’s likely the reason.

There you have it, then: If you are in an immediate, urgent situation where someone’s about to be murdered or an inn is burning down, don’t camp out overnight right in front of it; solve the problem first. But if you’re dealing with a more long-term problem, like an infestation of goblins in the next town over, it sounds like you can long rest as much as you like and still have goblins left to boot out.

For more details about how all this stuff works, we’ve got a guide to all the things Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t tell you, and another guide to resting specifically. And for everything else you didn’t know you didn’t know about Baldur’s Gate 3, check out our guides to Races and Subraces, Classes and Subclasses, and How to Build a Character before you get started, and take a peek at our walkthrough whenever you find yourself stuck.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.