Baldur’s Gate 3 speedruns chart to see who can have sex the fastest because of course they do, but a beary interesting new run breaks the mold. As you can probably guess from that atrocious pun, it’s a Halsin speedrun, or Bear%, as the record-setting weedmoder calls it.
Bear%’s goal is seeing how quickly you can get to the Baldur’s Gate 3 romance scene with Halsin, which is a pretty impressive goal to begin with. You can grow closer with every other romanceable companion during Acts 1 and 2, maybe less quickly now than at launch, since Larian patched out some of their, er, eagerness. But you have more free time and opportunities to work on the relationship.
Not so with Halsin. You have to rescue him in Act 1, go through mandatory scenes with the happy refugees, save the Shadow-Cursed Lands in Act 2, complete a difficult battle and a boss fight, and then deal with yet another challenging battle at the start of Act 3.
Weedmoder managed to do all this in just under one hour, and they posted a condensed version of the run and a full breakdown explaining how they managed to pull it off. It involves a combination of glitches and smart planning, including the Shadowboxing method, enhanced leaps, feather fall, and some well-timed assassinations. Poor Minthara. She never saw it coming.
It’s yet another impressive feat from the BG3 community, especially Weedmoder’s method of dealing with the Ketheric battle in Act 2 – they jump while invisible and trick the game into considering it impact damage on Ketheric – and the Astral Plane, where they use a “kidnap” glitch to pick up Gith foes and drop them into the abyss.
Weedmoder admits there’s still room for improvement, and they even encountered some unexpected glitches near the end of the run. Expect Bear% runs to start clocking in even faster as more players figure out its intricacies.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF