Baldur's Gate 3's latest big update may have rolled out a whole bunch of fixes for various bugs and exploits, but one that's remained intact is quite appropriate for patch 7's plethora of 'evil' content because it involves you being a real meanie to merchants.
As highlighted in a post in Reddit, a fair number of exploits have survived patch 7, but one is essentially a more violent way to loot a silly amount of goodies from unassuming vendors, even though Larian has clearly been trying to put a stop to such antics as recently as this update. In the latest patch notes, the dev writes: "Fixed another trade exploit where items could be taken from traders without paying when moving them into a container by dragging them onto the icon of the container. That's enough now."
Unfortunately for those poor merchants, this working alternative is significantly more painful. As Reddit user CCYellow writes, while you can normally only loot part of a merchant's inventory if you kill or knock them out, it's a bit different if you sell them a container first. "If you sell a merchant a container and put their whole inventory inside, everything inside the container will be available for looting when you kill/knock them out," the player explains.
"Anything inside the container will also not disappear when you reset their inventory, either by long resting or leveling up," they continue. "By abusing this, you can load up a single bag with dozens of resets worth of inventory, bonk them over the head, and then loot a bag of goodies worth 500,000+ gold, and they'll be good as new after a long rest."
I can't help but feel a bit bad for the traders at this point – will they ever be able to earn a living without being the target of shenanigans like this? Based on the recent fix, Larian is clearly keen for them to do so, so this exploit probably won't be around for long – be sure to try it out sooner rather than later if you're curious.
For more games like Baldur's Gate 3, be sure to check out our roundup of the best RPGs.