Baldur's Gate 3 Custom Mode has arrived with Patch 5, providing plenty of difficulty and game customization options from enemy aggression to turning off multiclassing. Baldur's Gate 3 already has a few difficulty options, but these customization settings will let you tailor the experience to your preferred style even more. You can make the game even more forgiving than Explorer, even tougher than Tactician, or even more like real D&D by choosing to hide things like NPC health bars and Difficulty Classes for checks. Whatever you're after, I've laid out all the details on the new Custom Mode in Baldur's Gate 3, including all the options you can change.
How to choose Custom Mode in Baldur's Gate 3
Like all the other Baldur's Gate 3 difficulty options, you can pick Custom Mode as soon as you choose to start a new game. Make sure you navigate all the way to the right of your screen to reach it as it'll be off the screen at first, along with the new Honour Mode – a brutal permadeath mode also added with Patch 5.
Next, select the 'Customize' button and you'll be presented with a long list of options you can toggle or modify. Once you're happy, select 'Start Game' and you'll get right into your adventure with character creation.
Unlike the three main difficulty options, you cannot switch to Custom Mode during a game that you have already started. Custom Mode is for new games only. However, you can adjust your Custom Mode settings by opening the game's menu and selecting the 'Difficulty' option if you find you don't like an option or need to rebalance something.
All Baldur's Gate 3 Custom Mode options
Here is every single option you can adjust for a Custom Mode game:
- Single Save: Toggle this on to lock your ability to reload saves. Your game takes up a single save slot, which means every save overwrites the last, and you can't go back to an old save to alter your choices. Importantly, this cannot be turned off once you begin your campaign.
- Enemy Aggression: Determines how dangerous and aggressive enemies are in combat. Enemies are least aggressive on Explorer and most aggressive on Tactician.
- Character Power: Determines how powerful enemies, allies, and player characters are by modifying their roll bonuses and how hard they are to kill. On Explorer, allies and players are stronger and harder to kill but on Tactician, enemies are stronger and harder to kill.
- Enemy Loadouts: Determines the weapons, spells, and items enemies can use in combat. Enemies use basic spells and items on Explorer but advanced ones on Tactician.
- Additional Combat Mechanics: Determines the quantities of enemies and new mechanics in certain combat encounters. Explorer encounters will be mechanically simple and may have fewer enemies, while Tactician encounters will be mechanically complex, more dangerous, and may feature more enemies.
- Proficiency Bonus: Increase the Proficiency Bonus stat for all characters. This stacks on top of the default +2 bonus you get at the start, increasing to +4 by the time you reach Level 9. This option allows you to adjust the bonus by up to a further +4 or even by -1.
- Enemy Critical Hits: Toggle off to prevent enemies from being able to score high-damage Critical Hits when attacking.
- No Death Saving Throws: Toggle on to stop characters rolling Death Saving Throws when reduced to 0 hit points. Instead, characters are knocked down and immediately stabilized.
- Disable Free First Strikes: When you attack an enemy outside of combat, you will be drawn into combat and will lose one of your attacks, or your action, on your first turn. Toggle this option off to remove this feature, letting you keep your action on your first turn and essentially get a free attack.
- Camp Cost Multiplier: Determines how many camp supplies you need for a Long Rest. With a multiplier of 1, you need 40 camp supplies per Long Rest, but you can set the multiplier to as high as 3 (120 supplies/Long Rest) or as low as 0.5 (20 supplies/Long Rest).
- Short Rest Full Heal: Toggle on to allow Short Rests to fully heal your party instead of healing half of everyone's maximum health.
- Trade Price Modifier: This number multiplies the prices that vendors sell items for and divides the amount of gold you receive for selling items (at the default 2.5x, vendors sell items for 2.5x their normal value, while you sell items for 0.4x their normal value). Change this multiplier to 1x to make buying and selling equal, or even increase it to as high as 4x.
- Multiclassing: Toggle this off to disable multiclassing.
- Always Prompt Reactions: Toggle this on to allow all reactions that pause the game to do so by default, rather than you having to manually turn on pausing for each reaction ability you have.
- Hide NPC Health: Toggle this on to hide the health bars of non-player characters.
- Hide Failed Perception Rolls: Toggle on to hide the notification you get for failing a Perception check to spot a hidden object, like a trap. You will still be alerted to successful Perception checks.
- Hide Passive Rolls in Dialogues: As above, toggle on to hide the notification you get for failing a passive check to learn more information about a subject during a conversation. You will still be alerted to successful checks.
- Preview Dialogue Check Difficulty Before Rolling: Toggle on to allow you to see the Difficulty Class for an ability or skill check linked to a conversation option before you select it.
- Hide Difficulty Class During Rolls: Toggle on to hide the Difficulty Class you need when rolling for ability or skill checks during conversations, lockpicking, or trap disarming.
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