One Baldur's Gate 3 player has shared a Wizard-empowering button that they only discovered after more than 100 hours with the game. And it turns out they're not the only ones.
In D&D, certain classes can 'transcribe' spells into their spellbook, giving them permanent access to the magic after a little bit of practice. It's a mechanic that Baldur's Gate 3 limits to the Wizard class, and charges a little bit of extra gold for - in the tabletop game, you'd spend a few hours learning a new spell, but time doesn't pass in quite the same way in Larian's CRPG setting as in the tabletop game, so there has to be a different payoff.
In Baldur's Gate 3, transcription lets you pay a certain amount of gold to consume a scroll but add it to your Wizard's spellbook, after which they can use it at their leisure. It's a valuable tool - Wizards are seriously squishy, but the more magical tricks they have up their sleeves, the more ways they can bring their powers to bear on the world around them, and the less likely they are to suffer as a result of their paper-thin HP bars.
Unfortunately, while some veteran players seem to have been making good use of the Wizard class' already-busy spellbook, they've entirely missed the transcription feature. In a post on Reddit, user montague68 said they'd finally spotted the feature - which is a single, small button on an already somewhat hidden part of the UI - after more than 100 hours with the game.
I'm an idiot. 100+ hours in and I just noticed this button. from r/BaldursGate3
The background of their post confirms that they've made it to Baldur's Gate itself, so they've definitely spent a serious amount of time with the game already. Worse, they seem to have one of the shorter playtimes for those who are also just finding out about transcription.
One commenter says they're 139 hours in. Another says they've already done an entire Wizard playthrough, and another still hits 150 hours. There's a 95-hour count, one 65, a 50-hour, but some players have made it even longer without discovering the button - 240, 280, and multiple people even have "300+" hours have been poured into the game, in sessions that must surely have made significant use of the Early Access period and still not learned about transcription. There's even one player who says they're finding this out after 460 of God's hours in-game.
To really rub salt in the wounds, several commenters are pointing out that there's even a tutorial tip about transcription, but it's pretty clear that several people clicked straight past that note. Whether that's their fault or Larian's is up for debate, but it's probably not a helpful little factoid for them at this point.
I'd like to take this opportunity to say that, as a person who did know about transcription but doesn't really like Gale all that much, you can do just fine by simply using scrolls as Ao intended - as single out-of-pocket cheeses of unsuspecting bosses. The Wizard of Waterdeep eats so many magical items during a normal Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough that you don't need to also feed him reams of paper to get ahead. He'll do just fine with the spells that Mystra gave him. Still, it's always nice to know everything that your character can actually achieve.
In Gale's defense, he did help me beat Baldur's Gate 3's hardest boss with D&D's most iconic spell.
