Baldur’s gate 3‘s the placement of more esoteric player choices continues to surprise me two months after launch. Players recently found a way to rescue and recruit Mintara, a secret companion that can usually only be teamed up with by killing a group of Tieflings and descending the the “evil” way— without the need to resort to such bloodshed. All without the use of mods or code. You just… turn her into a sheep.
Actor Karlach from Baldur’s Gate 3 about the role of the beloved barbarian
The method first appeared on a Chinese forumbefore distributing further Reddit. YouTube user Arui has a long two-part passage of the entire ordeal, and while it’s complex and entirely based on a bug that Larian Studios may someday fix, it does allow you to have Mintara on your team alongside characters who wouldn’t normally approve of her.
Mintara appears in Baldur’s gate 3First appearance as one of the three leaders of the Goblin Camp, which you must infiltrate in order to rescue the druid companion Halsin (who f*cks like a bear). In a standard playthrough, you would have to choose between killing her along with the other leaders or siding with her, allowing her to become a party member, albeit at the expense of others who disapprove of your actions. To combine the two, you need to make sure Mintara survives the battle, but trick the game into thinking she’s dead, allowing you to advance the plot without killing the Tieflings.
To do this, you’ll need to attack the goblin camp like normal, but instead of killing Mintara, you’ll have to knock her out. It requires you use non-lethal attacksis a setting you can change at any time in your Passives menu when using a melee weapon. Therefore, archers and spellcasters must attack accordingly. If you knock out Mintara and kill the other leaders of the Goblin Camp, the game will count it as a victory. But Mintaro will still be alive, and after a A long vacation will wake up in the same place where you knocked out her light. You won’t be able to interact with her yet, but she will stand still until you decide to attack her again.
Next, you’ll need to make some progress in the game, both to level up and learn a few abilities, and to activate a fast travel point in the shadow-cursed lands at Moonrise Towers. You will need a a torch as a source of light and will face some tough enemies, but once you activate the fast travel point outside the fortress, you can go back to the first area to get Mintara.
This is where you’ll need two key spells to pull this off: Polymorph and Beast Domination. The first will allow you to turn Mintara into a sheep, and the second will make her follow you with no problem. Polymorph can be learned by a Bard, Cleric (with Trickery Domain subclass), Druid, Mage, Warlock (with Sculptor of Flesh Eldritch Invocation), or Sorcerer. Clerics (with the Nature Domain subclass), druids, wizards, and warlocks (with the Archfey or Great Old One subclass) can be taught to dominate the beast. Make sure you split both abilities between two different party members, as they both need to maintain concentration to do this.
Use Polymorph to turn Mintara into a sheep, then use Dominate Beast to keep her close. This will bind her to your party and allow her to fast travel with you back to Moonrise Towers. Once there, go inside and the game will open a court scene where she will judge her commanders in the fortress. You’ll need high Charisma to pass this segment, but if you can convince her would-be executioners to throw her into their underground prison, you can go down into the cells, take a few more Charisma checks, and pass her as an ally rather than an enemy.
Ultimately, this is still a bug and it’s unclear whether Larian will fix it, so we’ve reached out to the studio for comment. But despite the feat, the story lends itself quite well to the situation where Mintara realizes she’s being manipulated by your enemies and decides to side with you to get revenge. So, narratively, everything works itself out. This whole deal is a pretty ingenious use Baldur’s gate 3system to do what seemed impossible. He pushes the boundaries, but works within the rules – some real tabletop nonsense. Honestly, I wish Larian would reward this by officially supporting this method. It may require a bit of cleaning up and rewriting of dialogue, but if I were the DM of the campaign and the players were effectively violating my settings, I’d rather let them continue down the path they’ve set than send them back to my original plan.
