Baldur’s Gate 3’s accommodation of players’ more esoteric choices continues to astound me, two months after it launched. Players have recently found a way to rescue and recruit Minthara—a secret companion character who you can normally only team up with by murdering a group of Tieflings and going down the “evil” path—without having to resort to any such bloodshed. All without using mods or code. You just…turn her into a sheep.
The method first appeared on a Chinese forum, before circulating on Reddit. YouTube user Arui has a lengthy, two-part walkthrough of the entire ordeal, and while it is elaborate and entirely predicated on a bug Larian Studios could one day patch out, it does let you have Minthara on your team alongside characters who would normally disapprove of her.
Minthara appears in Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act as one of three leaders of the Goblin Camp you have to infiltrate to save druid companion Halsin (who fucks as a bear). In a standard playthrough you’d have to choose between killing her alongside the other leaders, or siding with her, thus allowing her to be a party member, albeit at the expense of others who don’t approve of your actions. In order to combine the two, you need to ensure Minthara survives the battle, but trick the game into perceiving her as dead, letting you progress the plot without killing any Tieflings.
To do this, you’ll have to attack the Goblin Camp like normal, but instead of killing Minthara, you must knock her out. This requires you to use non-lethal attacks—a setting you can toggle at any time in your Passives menu as long as you’re using melee weapons. So archers and spellcasters must attack accordingly. If you knock Minthara out and kill the other Goblin Camp leaders, the game will treat this as a victory. But Minthara will still be alive, and after a Long Rest will wake up in the same spot where you punched her lights out. You won’t be able to interact with her yet, but she’ll stand in place 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’ll need a torch as a light source and will face some tough enemies, but once you’ve activated the fast-travel point outside the stronghold, you can head back to the first area to get Minthara.
It’s here where you’ll need two key spells to pull this off: Polymorph and Dominate Beast. The first will allow you to transform Minthara into a sheep, and the second will make her follow you around without trouble. Polymorph can be learned by a Bard, Cleric (with Trickery Domain subclass), Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock (with Sculptor of Flesh Eldritch Invocation), or Wizard. Dominate Beast is teachable to Clerics (with Nature Domain subclass), Druids, Sorcerers, and Warlocks (with Archfey or Great Old One subclass). Make sure you split both abilities between two different party members, as they’ll both have to maintain Concentration to pull this off.
Use Polymorph to turn MInthara into a sheep, then cast Dominate Beast to keep her by your side. This will tether her to your party and allow her to fast travel with you back to Moonrise Towers. Once there, walk inside and the game will trigger a judgment scene where she’ll be put on trial by her commanders in the stronghold. You’ll need some high Charisma to talk your way through this segment, but if you can convince her would-be executioners to throw her into their underground prison, you can head down to the cells, pass a few more Charisma checks, and walk her out as an ally instead of an enemy.
Ultimately, this is still a bug, and it’s unclear if Larian will patch it out, and we’ve reached out to ask the studio for comment. But despite the exploit, the story adapts pretty well to the situation, with Minthara recognizing that she was being manipulated by your enemies, and choosing to side with you to exact revenge. So narratively, it all works itself out. The whole deal is a pretty ingenious use of Baldur’s Gate 3’s systems to pull off what seemed impossible. It pushes the boundaries, but works within the rules—some real tabletop nonsense. Honestly, I’d love to see Larian reward it by officially supporting the method. It might require a little clean-up and some dialogue rewrites, but if I were a DM of a campaign and players broke my setup this effectively, I’d rather let them keep going on the path they carved than divert them back to my original plan.