Baldur’s Gate 3 is packed with all manner of dangerous encounters, but as you work your way through the lands of Faerûn, you’ll slowly start to clear out its paths and leave yourself wandering through comparatively empty zones. If you’re someone who likes to backtrack through areas and spend more time exploring, this Baldur’s Gate 3 random encounters mod is exactly what you need to keep things spicy.
Another welcome contender for the best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods, The Hunted by creator ‘Gabe Camomescro’ enables random encounters to occur, well, at random as you explore the vast RPG game. It’s a good way to keep your game busy and make sure you never truly feel safe. As someone who spends a lot of time wandering about each of the Baldur’s Gate 3 acts scouring for every last hidden secret, I have found areas tend to feel a little quiet after a while, so this mod presents a great solution.
Setting up the mod is pretty straightforward – it’s just a case of using a special potion, which can be obtained from a specific early vendor in each of the game’s acts. You can choose if you want the default, full-chaos mode, which allows random enemies to attack whenever, interrupting you even when you’re in conversations, or a ‘protected’ version that prevents spawns from happening when you’re within 100 meters of non-party, non-summoned allies.
“Spawns can, and will, mess up NPCs,” Gabe tells PCGamesN. “This was not planned for, but I find it realistic enough in a Dungeons and Dragons setting to not poke at it too much.” Nevertheless, if you don’t want to worry about disabling the random encounters every time you wander into town then you now have an option to hopefully avoid any awkward conflicts that might mess up a potential Baldur’s Gate 3 romance, for example.
In addition to the monsters that can appear, which are all standard enemies you’d encounter during normal play and come from your chosen act when enabling the “bait” spell, you’ll also come across a new creature – Treasure Goblins. Much like those from games such as Diablo, these critters will simply attempt to run from you. Kill them in time and you’ll score loot such as gold, health potions, and scrolls. Fail to do so and they’ll be transformed into a petrified, burning state “as a monument to the players’ failures.”
After some experimentation, Gabe settled on monsters granting a small amount of experience per kill during these random encounters, so you will get a little benefit from taking on these additional challenges, but don’t need to worry about completely breaking your game’s progression by massively over-leveling unless you’re really grinding them out for a long time.
The mod also includes a handful of pets that can join you in combat. These were actually a holdover from an earlier version that used them as the spawn trigger for the random encounters, but Gabe decided to leave them in “as added fun and as a little extra firepower.” They are “rather weak compared to players,” however, so don’t expect them to carry you through fights – you’ll have to rely on your own Baldur’s Gate 3 builds for that.
If the idea of spicing up your adventure with random encounters sounds up your alley, then you can get the Baldur’s Gate 3 The Hunted mod right here, where you’ll also find installation and customization instructions. Personally, I’m very tempted to experiment with it for my next playthrough – along with some of Gabe’s other mods, linked to on the same page, which include a ring that lets you polymorph into over 30 different creature types, and Instruments of Controlled Chaos, which turns the purely cosmetic instrument interactions into powerful weapons.
Our guide to Baldur’s Gate 3 crafting should help you learn how to use one of the most powerful but underutilized tools in the Larian Studios RPG. If you’re in the mood to watch some other people’s adventures, I’d highly recommend starting with Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler’s Dark Urge run, which she started just this week with hilarious consequences.