In a game as dense and sometimes overwhelming as Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s helpful to have a few go-to tricks up your sleeve. As I’m nearing the end of the massive CRPG’s first act, I’ve found mine: the crate stacking trick.
The many wooden boxes of Faerûn are jam-packed with potions, weapons, camping supplies, and thieving tools, making it well worth your time to rummage through them in each new area. But crates are also useful building blocks: By stacking them on top of one another, you can gain access to previously out-of-reach areas. In an early-game cavern, one such makeshift tower put me at the same elevation as a high ledge. By right-clicking on each successive crate, selecting “Climb On” from the dropdown menu, and then using my Jump action from the uppermost box, I reached the ledge, deactivated a booby-trapped statue, and secured a magical item for my party. (No, I did not feed the item to Gale.)
The best part? You can make these impromptu stairways basically anywhere. By right-clicking a crate and selecting “Pick Up,” you can shove dozens of enormous boxes into your characters’ clown-car-esque pockets. (I rely on Lae’Zel to carry my larger items: Her high strength stat gives her a larger carrying capacity.) From there, simply open the character’s inventory and drag the crates into the game world. I solved Act 1’s “Rescue the Gnome” quest by doing just that:
The crate trick is also helpful in combat situations, since holding the high ground will result in more favorable ranged attacks for your wizards, rangers, sorcerers, and rogues. In especially tough fights (read: after I’ve save-scummed and restarted an encounter that had just kicked my ass) I’ve spent upward of 10 minutes sneaking around groups of enemies to set up sniper towers, all but ensuring advantageous early attacks once the fight begins.
In a stream last week with Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke, Matthew Mercer, the Dungeon Master of Critical Role fame and voice actor for the ranger Minsc in Baldur’s Gate 3, stacked dozens of crates outside of the Baldur’s Gate city walls, allowing him to shoot an Arrow of Transportation onto the roof of a building on the other side, bypassing the moat and ramparts in the process:
Like the “long bridge” trick in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it helps to have a simple, if not all that elegant, solution to Baldur’s Gate 3’s tougher puzzles and emergent scenarios. Larian’s world is a deceptively deep possibility space, so having an ace up your sleeve might keep you from feeling overwhelmed. If, like me, you’d prefer to focus on the role-playing side of things, the crate trick is a great tool to keep in mind.
