Dungeons

Every locked place in Baldur’s Gate 3 has an opener, and the useful question is not what it is but where it is. Some doors are solved where you stand: a lever behind a statue, a chess board, a row of plaques. Some want an item from a corpse a few steps outside. Some cannot be opened until you have been to a different region, killed a particular boss, or saved a particular person. And a few are opened with nothing you can carry, only gold, a memory or a light. This guide sorts all 50 of our dungeon and puzzle pages by that distance, because it tells you whether to keep pushing or to leave and come back.

The key is in the room

More than half the pages are puzzles solved on the spot, and the game’s first dungeon sets the pattern. The Overgrown Ruins north of the beach have four ways in, an Ancient Door that needs a steep lockpick, a chapel door, an east hatch behind Thieves’ Tools and a DC 10 Dexterity check, and a hole in the chapel floor that drops you into all six bandits at once. Under them, the Dank Crypt hides a skull-shaped lever behind a wizard statue, an Engraved Key for the Jergal room, and a button by the statue’s stairs that wakes every corpse in the hall; behind all of it is Withers. The Defiled Temple under the Goblin Camp asks you to turn four discs until the light on the ceiling shows a full moon, or to have taken Priestess Gut’s key from her body, and the Selunite Outpost beyond it is closed by two statues that only stop when you break the Moonstone in Selune’s hands, with the Selunite Key waiting on a skeleton up a ladder. Crouch, and the statues never see you at all.

Act 2 is almost entirely this kind. The Thorm Mausoleum wants a stained book read and three murals, Moonrise Towers, General and Grief, pressed in its order. The Sharran Sanctuary north of Moonrise opens when its plaques are touched north, west, east, and then tests three attributes for buffs. The Gauntlet of Shar is a whole dungeon of them: the three trials each start with a drop of blood in a bowl and pay out an Umbral Gem, the Soft-Step for sneaking one character past a guard to a lever, a button and a DC 10 lock, the Faith Leap for crossing an invisible path with three falls allowed or a single Fly spell, the Self-Same for beating copies of your own party, which drop Killer’s Sweetheart and can be cheesed by sending Shadowheart in alone through a DC 20 lock. The fourth gem is Yurgir’s. The Silent Library off the same corridor has a real button among fakes and a shelf holding the Teachings of Loss, and gives Shadowheart the Spear of Night she refuses to descend without.

Inside Moonrise, Balthazar’s Room opens its library when a heart cut from a body goes into a device, and the Necrotic Laboratory below it opens the Flesh-Wrought door once four colour-coded brains are linked, for the Blade of Oppressed Souls and the Braindrain Gloves. The House of Healing wants Speak with Dead for its patients and Malus Thorm dead or talked down for the Battered Lute. In Act 3 the pattern continues in smaller rooms: the Chamber of Strategy is a chess problem, checkmate the Black King in two with Gale to help; the Sluice Gate Vault is two valves brought to their green lights together, with the party ungrouped so rising water hurts only one; Ramazith’s Tower is the white portal on the second floor of Sorcerous Sundries and a room of levels that ends in the Robe of the Weave and the legendary staff Markoheshkir; the Sorcerous Sundries Vault under the same shop is a hidden portal and two doors, Elminster’s and Karsus’s, each opened by a lever reached through a different sequence of doors, with the Tharchiate Codex behind the first. The Emperor’s Old Hideout is a Perception check by a statue after Roveer’s rats, and Roveer’s Storehouse itself is thirty rats and an area spell.

The key is a short walk away

A second group sends you outside, but not far. The Toll House Basement on the Risen Road has a vault door whose key is on a dead collector down by the river bank, or yields to a good lockpick, and a last room where an upturned table and two thrones are the puzzle. The Zhentarim Hideout behind Waukeen’s Rest never appears on your map unless Rugan and Ollie survive the road and hand over the password, and its elevator to the Underdark needs a key pickpocketed from the guard Karad and his wolf, used out of sight or the whole hideout turns. The Arcane Tower is ringed with turrets that a Sussur Bloom from the tree to the north switches off, then powered from a generator at its base, and its roof guard Bernard is answered with four books from its own shelves. The Grymforge Rubble that traps True Soul Nere clears with any explosive you own or one vial of Runepowder from Philomeen in the northeast of the same complex, and the Adamantine Forge behind it needs a mould and a piece of Mithral Ore gathered from around Grymforge before the lever wakes Grym.

Act 3 has its own short walks. The Counting House Vault is opened by a code extracted from Head Clerk Meadhoney upstairs and four party members standing on plates in order, with Minsc and a room of Bhaalists behind Vault 9. Jaheira’s Hideout wants a harp-shaped pin that a boy named Tate has been using to sneak in, and pays in Khalid’s Gift. Sarin’s Skeleton in the sewers is missing a skull that lies deeper in, by the Undercity Ruins waypoint, past the sorcerer Aelis Siryasius and an exploding statue. The doppelganger in your camp is unmasked in the same sewers, where Orin reveals herself. And Cazador’s Palace is entered by intimidating the guard Merony on the ramparts, while its ballroom seal takes the Szarr Family Ring from the skeleton Godey in the kennels below and the Kozakuran Dictionary from a wardrobe, both inside the building.

The key is in another region

These are the ones to leave and return to. The Enclave Library in the Emerald Grove has a socket missing one rune, and the Wolf Rune is Rath’s thank-you for saving Halsin from the Goblin Camp, a whole region west; only then can the runes be lit anticlockwise for the Mace of Sorrow. The Melting Furnace in the Blighted Village blacksmith’s basement will not make a masterwork weapon without Sussur Tree Bark from the Underdark and Highcliff’s blueprint from the chest outside its door. Wyrm’s Rock Fortress cannot be fought into at all; its four doors are a DC 30 Deception check on Blaze Elin about an assassin, an invitation stolen upstairs at Sharess’ Caress, a Lower City pass, or the prison, and the Wyrmway beneath it is not even on the map until Duke Ravengard, saved from the Iron Throne, or Wyll tells you where to jump from the broken fence. The House of Grief opens through a Sharran Lookout who threatens Shadowheart and a woman named Mirie across the city, and the Temple of Bhaal wants the Amulet of Bhaal from Sarevok’s tribunal in a different building, a manhole behind the Basilisk Gate, a wall knocked down, and the Farslayer Ghislev with his Unstoppable condition, before a waypoint by a bridge that is a point of no return.

The key is a price, a plane, or nothing at all

The Helsik Ritual is bought, not found: 20,000 gold, or a promise to bring back an artefact from Raphael’s collection, gets you a Ritual Pouch and a Grimoire, and the pentagram on the floor of the Devil’s Fee takes its items with the desk as north and a Coin of Mammon beside the skull. The portal it opens leads to the House of Hope, where the keys keep coming from other people: Hope’s Debtor’s Attire is the disguise, Harleep gives up the safe key in bed if you keep your mind, the Orphic Hammer needs a password from the safe, and the gauntlets on their pedestal need weight left in their place. The page wants every party member at level 12 before the portal. The Mirror of Loss, met first in Act 2 and again in the House of Grief, is paid in a memory and two points of one ability, with a +2 to another if you pray correctly and a very high Deception check to give it a false memory and lose nothing.

Three more have no key because they have no lock. The Harper Stash deep in Grymforge is opened by torchlight and guarded by mimics that shrug off physical damage and ignore acid. The Oubliette is the hole Ketheric flees through and a maze that fools every camera angle, with the Mind Flayer colony on the far side. The prison page covers six jails, from the roofless one in the Grove to Heapside, and the ways out of each: Minor Illusion on the guard, Command to make him approach, Mage Hand for his key, acid on the door, a frog’s shape, or letting the guards kill you and having Withers bring you back at camp. The Whispering Depths under the Blighted Village are entered by the well or by breaking a cracked wall in the blacksmith’s forge room, and the Overgrown Tunnel behind Auntie Ethel’s fireplace is a series of hazards rather than doors, with the Noxious Fumes, 2 to 24 poison damage to the whole party, disarmed by finding the vent and the Peculiar Flowers with your best Perception. Rosymorn Monastery is entered through a broken window and opened properly from inside with a lever, and its Ceremonial Weapons puzzle produces the Dawnmaster’s Crest that keeps the Blood of Lathander from destroying the Creche below. The Hhune Mausoleum in the Lower City graveyard is the strangest lock of all: kneel with 400 pounds of your party’s belongings on a pressure plate, after two DC 15 traps, and a wall opens. The Society of Brilliance vault has no lock either, only a hiding place in the Underdark that the page marks for you.

What the distance tells you

Every dungeon whose key sits in another region is also a dungeon with a story attached, and the quests guide shows how many ways each of those stories can end. The bosses who wait at the end of the longer ones, Grym at the Forge, Yurgir and Balthazar in the Gauntlet, Raphael in the House of Hope, Ansur under the Wyrmway, Orin in the Temple, are sorted in the bosses guide by what they stand in front of, and the loot behind the locked doors, from Markoheshkir to the Adamantine items, is in the items guide. Where a dungeon sits inside a larger area, the regions guide covers how many roads lead to it.

Dungeon questions

Which dungeons are missable?

The Zhentarim Hideout, which needs Rugan alive on the road to appear on the map at all; the Society of Brilliance vault, which is only ever found by looking; and the Wyrmway, which needs Duke Ravengard or Wyll to tell you it exists. Everything in Act 1 closes when you enter the Shadow-Cursed Lands, and everything in Act 2 when you reach Rivington.

Which dungeon has the best loot?

Our pages call the House of Hope the home of the game’s best loot, and it is also the one that asks for a level 12 party and 20,000 gold or a promise to enter. In Act 1 the Adamantine Forge and the Whispering Depths are the two singled out, one for a full set of gear and the other for its early treasure.

Which puzzles can be skipped?

The Defiled Temple moon puzzle, with Priestess Gut’s key. The Faith Leap trial, with Fly. The Self-Same trial, with a lone Shadowheart and a lockpick. Bernard’s riddle, with his maker’s four books. The Selunite statues, by crouching past them. The Toll House vault, with a good enough lockpick.