While players rummage through countless chests in Baldur’s Gate 3 to finally find some loot, one of them wanted to know for sure. And this resulted in a significant and measurable outcome.
What did the player discover? The player and YouTuber “Newbie Indie Game Dev” took on the task of not only counting all chests in Baldur’s Gate 3, but also examining their distribution and probability for loot. From his results, it can be weighed whether it is worthwhile for “loot goblins” to thoroughly search all possible chests or if it’s simply a waste of playtime.
After his investigations, the player was able to determine that there are a total of 17,421 chests in Baldur’s Gate 3, of which only 39% are suitable/reachable for interactions – and much more discouraging – only 29% of these interactive boxes are supposed to contain loot.
He defines “chests” as follows: “A container for items, usually rectangular, possibly with a lid, typically made of materials such as wood, cardboard, or metal.” He excludes bags, vases, and mimics.
In a video on his YouTube channel, Newbie Indie Game Dev visually and beautifully shows how he arrived at these numbers and what other interesting findings he was able to uncover during this deep dive.
Here you can see the animated short film for Patch 8 of Baldur’s Gate 3:
Digging through chests isn’t worth it – at least not for all of them
How did the player go about this action? Counting all chests in Baldur’s Gate 3 by running through the entire game with all maps is not only extremely time-consuming but also not accurate enough. For this reason, he had to take a look at the game files.
Using a script, he searched the game’s item files for certain keywords that were relevant to him, such as Crate, Chest, and Barrel.
This led him to the following results:
The game contains a total of:
- 1145 chests (7%)
- 3699 barrels (21%)
- 12568 crates (72%)
The probabilities that chests contain loot are:
- 1001 barrels (29% chance)
- 6000 crates (29% chance)
- 603 chests (64% chance)
Barrels mostly contain food and alcohol, crates tend to contain tools for lockpicking and trap disarming, and chests mostly hold valuable items like potions, arrows, spell scrolls, gear, or gold.
How exactly he went about these investigations, Newbie Indie Game Dev shows clearly in his video:
What conclusion can be drawn from these results? After the player uploaded his video, he also shared this with the BG3 community on Reddit to share this acquired information with other players.
Since there are many players who are not shy to invest a lot of time in searching chests for loot, the results hit particularly hard. Less than a third of all chests contain any form of loot, which makes it less worthwhile to search all chests in the game. However, chests tend to be more worthwhile since here not only is the chance of finding something higher, but also the value and usefulness of the contents.
“The calls have finally been heard,” writes Baekurly on Reddit, and PhilippTheProgrammer also feels liberated from the burden of ignorance: “… And only after each one of them has been taken into hand will the curse be lifted” (via Reddit).
Chests in Baldur’s Gate 3, however, are useful for more purposes than just storing items. 39% of the 17,412 chests are still enough to stack them to make even the hardest to reach places accessible. A well-known voice actor, DM, and now a player of the most famous Dungeons & Dragons group, was able to use a lot of chests at release to impress even the game’s developers: Legendary genius impresses the head of Baldur’s Gate 3, plays very differently than planned – Shows how creative one can be
