Larian finally throws its hands up as one 1,400-hour Baldur's Gate 3 player beats every backup possible, including a magic fish, to doom the world and find new content

gamesradar.com:

Nearly a year after Baldur's Gate 3's full release, dedicated players are still unearthing rare interactions tied to fail-safes and backup fail-safes designed to prevent us from unwittingly breaking the game. The latest find comes from 1,400-hour sleuth Proxy Gate Tactician, who found a lucky merchant, magic fish, spontaneous kobolds, and a true soft lock tied to some of the most important items in the whole RPG: the Netherstones. 

The Netherstones are, uh, borrowed from the RPG's three main villains and used in the fight against the big bad Netherbrain, so they're pretty important - and since they're late-game items, you should take the rest of this breakdown with a big ol' spoiler warning. Proxy Gate, who you may know for putting out a $500 bounty for an extremely rare Karlach cutscene, wanted to see what happens if you lose these items in frankly unthinkable ways, like chucking them into the sea or a soon-to-explode factory. 

"I can only think of it being an Easter egg for someone intentionally trying to lose the game," the investigator tells GamesRadar+. "It's tough to find anything new in the game still, but backup NPCs are likely the most unexplored. There are several more backup NPCs I've found that aren't well known about, and only appear in your game if the player killed specific NPCs. Some are backups of backups even." 

Losing the Netherstones under ordinary circumstances – well, ordinary compared to what we're about to talk about, but still pretty unlikely – will usually prompt the Emperor himself to either remind you of the stones or transport them directly to your camp. That, or you'll instantly get a game over if the stones are outright unrecoverable. But what if you were to, say, drop the stones in the undersea Iron Throne and then blow it up, making the area off-limits? 

Larian planned for this, it turns out. Proxy Gate found that this Iron Throne corner case causes a change in the Sahuagin encounter on the nearby shore of lower Baldur's Gate city.