In a game packed with interesting items that can be used for all kinds of productive and/or sinister purposes, one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s more flavorful bits of enchanted ephemera is the Iron Flask, an item you can find early in the game that, as its tooltip says, “can hold friends and foes.” The only way to learn what it contains, however, is to throw it—at which point you’ll discover the spectator that was imprisoned within is very much a foe to you and everything else in the vicinity. And then presumably you’d be hit with one of its many beam attacks.
Unfortunately, the Iron Flask’s potential for Poké Ball shenanigans is limited by the fact that it’s single use, dashing our collective hopes of collecting our least-favorite NPCs and forcing them to fight the game’s most horrible creatures—until this week. Modder ForKiramay has released the Binding Arcane Lattice Lock, or “BALL,” a throwable item allowing you to “capture non-player characters inside a ball and free them later (or don’t).”
If you’re wondering what kind of person would want to trap a Baldur’s Gate 3 NPC in an orb just to carry them around indefinitely, just spend an hour or two on the BG3 subreddit. You’ll learn plenty.
To collect a character in a BALL, you’ve got two options: You can do the straightforward thing and chuck it at your desired entity, but ForKiramay notes that, understandably, “neutral NPCs sometimes take offense to being hit in the head.” To avoid aggravating your new captive comrade, you can instead use the Gotta Catch ‘Em All spell provided by the item to fire a beam at your target and capture them remotely.
I can’t say for certain, but I expect somewhere in the world a Nintendo lawyer just felt a tingle.
ForKiramay warns that they “did NOT put safety rails” on their legally nonactionable creature collection sphere, and that capturing plot-relevant NPCs can easily break the story. Likewise, they recommend against moving a captured NPC between story acts, which I can only assume creates the possibility for a cascading breakdown of causal determinism.
But hey, if it means I can use Elminster in a mock Pokemon battle, I think it’s worth the risk. The BALL Character Capture mod is available on Nexus Mods now.
