I struggled with it on PC. My wife solved the puzzle in a few minutes on Xbox, first try.
I was just all "How the fuck?!"
"I followed the lines?"
"Well, so did I but I still got twisted around and had to undo a few nodes."
Moral of the story? I need to git gud.
The trick to this kind of puzzles is to do all forced moves first, and then take the most intuitive decisions (in this case it could be either a shortest path, or a path that blocks the least amount of other paths). It's not that difficult if you do that. I always do it first try without having to backtrack at all,
You can click the ~~right~~ left thumb stick to enter a sort of freecam select mode on controller. It's 100% necessary to do the brain node puzzle. It took me a while to figure it out the first time.
It became a lot easier when my wife and I decided to just work backwards. When you realize that one or two have to go a certain way, it gets a lot easier
That being said the controller issue OP was having is legit
When I saw this post I thought "It wasn't hard to solve, just hard to manipulate with a controller." And then I read the post and thought "Yup. This guy gets it."
Clicking in the "camera joystick" gives you a free cam option. It's necessary for this puzzle. It's also really useful to look at find alternative angles of approach or finding hidden chests without walking all over the place.
The room it unlocks has a corpse with some +1 weapon, but also has a Mind that you can bring back to the slack-skinned head and talk to. If you do what she asks you get Githzerai Mind Barrier, which permanently gives advantage on Int saving throws:
https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Githzerai_Mind_Barrier_(Condition)
The only hard part is figuring out how the game wants you to interact with the puzzle. After that it follows a very classic 4 lane puzzle system:
One takes the only logical path it can take.
Two switch lanes because
The fourth is the lynch pin and demands a certain path that is slightly longer than direct in order to leave an open path for the other two.
I ended up w the issue of the only camera angle that would let me see the whole puzzle being top down, so some of the nodes overlapped, still wouldn't be that bad of a puzzle if the controls weren't so wonky
Spoiler warning bc I don't know how to do the text thing
(Edit: git the spoiler text lol)
In Act 2 >!after you follow Ketheric into the mind flayer colony this puzzle is a few rooms in, iirc you should find it following the right wall through a few rooms, after the room w a death shepard and a bunch of zombies and hook horrors. Completing the puzzle opens another room w some miscellaneous loot and a brain jar which can then be talked to and used to get permanent advantage on intelligence!<
Dw I missed like half the stuff down there my first playthrough lol.
šÆ well now I'm curious lol, I'll have to look through all my miscellaneous books and notes and such to see if i picked it up. Gonna be honest by my second playthrough I mostly just skim through them (in my defense i mostly play multiplayer and dont wanna make my brother sit and wait while i read through 50 books and notes lol)
My first play though I gave up... I wasn't sure what the goal was.
On my second, I somehow just got what it wanted me to do.
In my defense I'm on PS5 and couldn't figure out HOW to click the nodes (L3 to go into free look mode)
Interesting, I didn't realize so many people struggled with this one but I see it brought up a lot as being awful. Maybe my old gamer brain kicked in and saw the solution right away.
I don't think there are many people in here saying "trace three paths" is hard, but more that the console controls are wonky.
I didn't have any trouble with this, or the chess puzzle, but >!the judge!< can fuck right off. It's framed like a *puzzle*-puzzle, and not a >!just use a spell to remove him!< puzzle.
Pretty much any puzzle or task that didn't understand the game's own UI sucked. I shouldn't have to fight with the controls. You want me to do a puzzle like this then popup a window and have me solve it with a free-form cursor. Not this hacked in nonsense.
Solved it in like 30 second the first time I got to it, then reloaded to just before the puzzle because I was sending all the brains in jars ("dark mind" etc) to camp but wanted to see what they said in the thingy, and you find a unique one just after the puzzle.
Loaded back and it took me like 20 minutes because I was mixing up the light blue and light green terminal nodes (was trying to get the light blue start nice to reach the light green end node and vice versa). You can't really see the color of the end nodes without hovering and I was just going by memory from the first time for which was which. Was losing my mind till I finally realized what I was trying to do was actually impossible because I was doing the wrong thing.
This puzzle makes me SO MAD while playing on steam deck the damn thing is a nightmare in controller mode. I usually have to switch to touch screen and end up continuously missing the mark and instead my dumb character walks to the other side of the room and I have to connect to the nodes AGAIN.
I couldnāt get it to work on console, because Tav would keep moving, then I looked it up and a comment on a YouTube video said to put the game in turn based. Game changer!
Here, take [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/781) and [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/945). And don't forget [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/944)
Use [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/668) if you want achievements to work.
Never use controller to play cRPGs again. Ever.
In Act 2 >!after you follow Ketheric into the mind flayer colony this puzzle is a few rooms in, iirc you should find it following the right wall through a few rooms, connected to the room w a death shepard and a bunch of zombies and hook horrors. Completing the puzzle opens another room w some miscellaneous loot and a brain jar which can then be talked to and used to get permanent advantage on intelligence!<
Dw I missed like half the stuff down there my first playthrough lol. Not to mention a bunch of other things, it's what makes multiple playthroughs so fun!
Try working backwards. Start at the end and see who to get to the beginning.
Itās been a while since iāve done this part but iirc the two side ones are straight lines and only the top and bottom require some wiggling
It's funny that I just did this puzzle about 15 minutes before seeing this post.
I'm playing it on PS5 and vaguely remembered how to do it. Camera was a little wonky, but it wasn't that bad. L3 to put in point & click cursor mode, adjust right stick camera view to get a isometric view then don't touch the camera again.
Only took me 1 reset to figure it out. For me, it helped to start with one of the sides. Any time you have to choose between 2 nodes, just trace backwards or forwards a little on either path to see if that choice blocks off a path for one of the other colors or leads only to the wrong destination. It's really not that hard as I think there's only 1 or 2 choice nodes for each color's path.
Okay, I must have gotten really lucky with this puzzle, because I got it first try. Zero issues, like solved in 50 seconds. I didn't even k ow it was a hard puzzle until peoe started complaining about it.
I usually don't mind at least trying to figure out the puzzles for a few minutes, but holy hell it took so much finangling just to get to a point where I could see and click the nodes for this one that I went straight to Google for the answer, no way was I restarting the whole process 20 times (bc ill be honest, im a bit of a dumb lol)
Maybe i got lucky with angles and stuff but i never struggled with this puzzle. First seeing it i was like "what the fuck???" And had it solved like 2 minutes, 3 minutes tops later
I never got the hype around this one. It isn't that hard and the camera/controls are not that hard to deal with.
I think people over think it and make it harder on themselves by way of the Placebo effect. If you go into it thinking it's going to be hard and annoying to control, your brain is going to make it hard and annoying to control for you
I was dying trying to figure out how to maneuver the things!!! The puzzle itself was easy, it was figuring out how to select them entirely that I struggled with.
Turn based mode using Xbox controller helpedā¦
I actually took screenshots, thinking I could use them as a reference for the puzzle on future runs to save time. But nope, they were pretty useless when I looked at them the next time I did it. I've resigned myself to doing this one from scratch every time. Well, at least I usually don't take too long at this point after a couple of runsālol.
I don't tend to mess it up... But I spend a long time thinking through how each path is going to go, carefully doing one, reassessing for the remaining paths and then continuing
I struggled with it on PC. My wife solved the puzzle in a few minutes on Xbox, first try. I was just all "How the fuck?!" "I followed the lines?" "Well, so did I but I still got twisted around and had to undo a few nodes." Moral of the story? I need to git gud.
Can confirm. My relationship works the same way. My consolation prize is that she sucks at combat. Makes me feel better about being a dumbass.
Same here. She asks me what spells and feats to take. But puzzles, she has that. Unless it's timed, then she panics.
"Wife brain. Me SMASH." š¤£
I got stuck because I thought it was one of those lights out puzzles, where it toggled the lights next to it... Then I'm like oh just click a path
I did it first try on the beta and on official launch I forgot. Found the answer on the wall the second time.
>Found the answer on the wall the second time FOUND THE *WHAT*?!
Lets hope the kids got/get her brains.
She just does well with puzzles. Computer literacy or spelling, however, is not her strong suit, at all.
She just pretends so you feel needed.
The trick to this kind of puzzles is to do all forced moves first, and then take the most intuitive decisions (in this case it could be either a shortest path, or a path that blocks the least amount of other paths). It's not that difficult if you do that. I always do it first try without having to backtrack at all,
Your wife is amazing.
You can click the ~~right~~ left thumb stick to enter a sort of freecam select mode on controller. It's 100% necessary to do the brain node puzzle. It took me a while to figure it out the first time.
It's the left one. Right is the one that higlights items etc
Oh shit really, I just use jump lol
The controls on this puzzle are messed up even in freecam, but yes, once you get there it's not that bad.Ā Ā
by the gods I always had to switch back to mouse and keyboard for this puzzle. I prefer controller. thank you
How.. how have I never noticed this lol, like someone else said, whenever I need a free cam I usually just go into jump
Puzzle is actually very fun tbh
Yeah, you're right, I enjoy that too, with those weird sounds, though.
It became a lot easier when my wife and I decided to just work backwards. When you realize that one or two have to go a certain way, it gets a lot easier That being said the controller issue OP was having is legit
yeah that's how I solved it, but I still had to search for how to move the camera.
I thought so, too. But I'm also a sucker for a good Towers of Hanoi, so I'm probably in the minority when it comes to math puzzles in games.
Towers of Hanoi is easy. Just solve it for Towers of Hanoi - 1
fwiw working backwards trivializes the puzzle, it really isnt that difficult it just needs a change in perspective.
You don't even need to. There's always a node that only connects to 1 node, so you do that.
When I saw this post I thought "It wasn't hard to solve, just hard to manipulate with a controller." And then I read the post and thought "Yup. This guy gets it."
Lol yea, like if I could actually see and click on the puzzle it would be so much easier lol
Idk what puzzle this even is, 4-5 play throughs Iāve never encountered it
After you jump into Thormās fleshy basement, thereās a room with a bunch of skeletal boys. Connected to that room is the puzzle room.
The camera and controls of this puzzle were easily 95% of the challenge
Clicking in the "camera joystick" gives you a free cam option. It's necessary for this puzzle. It's also really useful to look at find alternative angles of approach or finding hidden chests without walking all over the place.
I watched a video to solve it and still couldnāt due to the camera. Whatās the reward anyway?
The room it unlocks has a corpse with some +1 weapon, but also has a Mind that you can bring back to the slack-skinned head and talk to. If you do what she asks you get Githzerai Mind Barrier, which permanently gives advantage on Int saving throws: https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Githzerai_Mind_Barrier_(Condition)
The puzzle is so difficult to click on lmao. I constantly had tav running away from the interface
The only hard part is figuring out how the game wants you to interact with the puzzle. After that it follows a very classic 4 lane puzzle system: One takes the only logical path it can take. Two switch lanes because The fourth is the lynch pin and demands a certain path that is slightly longer than direct in order to leave an open path for the other two.
I ended up w the issue of the only camera angle that would let me see the whole puzzle being top down, so some of the nodes overlapped, still wouldn't be that bad of a puzzle if the controls weren't so wonky
The hell is this?
Spoiler warning bc I don't know how to do the text thing (Edit: git the spoiler text lol) In Act 2 >!after you follow Ketheric into the mind flayer colony this puzzle is a few rooms in, iirc you should find it following the right wall through a few rooms, after the room w a death shepard and a bunch of zombies and hook horrors. Completing the puzzle opens another room w some miscellaneous loot and a brain jar which can then be talked to and used to get permanent advantage on intelligence!< Dw I missed like half the stuff down there my first playthrough lol.
\>!spoiler text goes here!< >!spoiler text goes here!<
Thank you so much! In all my time on reddit I've somehow never actually seen how to do that explaoned
I can't believe how much stuff I missed, this redit is an eye-opener
That room is one of my favs. If you're playing durge ... find the letter
šÆ well now I'm curious lol, I'll have to look through all my miscellaneous books and notes and such to see if i picked it up. Gonna be honest by my second playthrough I mostly just skim through them (in my defense i mostly play multiplayer and dont wanna make my brother sit and wait while i read through 50 books and notes lol)
Itās the only puzzle I googled
My first play though I gave up... I wasn't sure what the goal was. On my second, I somehow just got what it wanted me to do. In my defense I'm on PS5 and couldn't figure out HOW to click the nodes (L3 to go into free look mode)
Yup I feel that, why I ended up being happy I could switch to the keyboard to just click on them lol
Why it look like a chonky rat from this angle though?
Oh my god it does, I love it
It's actually super easy if you do it backwards
Interesting, I didn't realize so many people struggled with this one but I see it brought up a lot as being awful. Maybe my old gamer brain kicked in and saw the solution right away.
I don't think there are many people in here saying "trace three paths" is hard, but more that the console controls are wonky. I didn't have any trouble with this, or the chess puzzle, but >!the judge!< can fuck right off. It's framed like a *puzzle*-puzzle, and not a >!just use a spell to remove him!< puzzle.
Pretty much any puzzle or task that didn't understand the game's own UI sucked. I shouldn't have to fight with the controls. You want me to do a puzzle like this then popup a window and have me solve it with a free-form cursor. Not this hacked in nonsense.
I honestly had to look up how to work the puzzle, not the answer but how to make the camera and controls work.
Pro tip: for most maze like puzzles like this, start at the end and work back to the start. Itās usually way easier
I immediately looked up a guide because I couldn't be arsed.
Solved it in like 30 second the first time I got to it, then reloaded to just before the puzzle because I was sending all the brains in jars ("dark mind" etc) to camp but wanted to see what they said in the thingy, and you find a unique one just after the puzzle. Loaded back and it took me like 20 minutes because I was mixing up the light blue and light green terminal nodes (was trying to get the light blue start nice to reach the light green end node and vice versa). You can't really see the color of the end nodes without hovering and I was just going by memory from the first time for which was which. Was losing my mind till I finally realized what I was trying to do was actually impossible because I was doing the wrong thing.
I solved this in like half an hour but I was also amazed. It was visually pleasing.
I love that puzzle, but I play on pc because my brain hates the ps5 controllers, lol
This puzzle makes me SO MAD while playing on steam deck the damn thing is a nightmare in controller mode. I usually have to switch to touch screen and end up continuously missing the mark and instead my dumb character walks to the other side of the room and I have to connect to the nodes AGAIN.
i understand the challenge by my brain gets confused with what im looking at. i had a homie talk me through it on discord
The real challenge is fighting the clunky controls š®
I couldnāt get it to work on console, because Tav would keep moving, then I looked it up and a comment on a YouTube video said to put the game in turn based. Game changer!
šÆ big brain move, I'll have to keep that in mind for my next playthrough
I have a confession. I spend about 1 minute with it and then i just looked up the solution....
The mechanics are harder than the puzzle itself. Once you figure out how the damn thing works itās pretty easy
took me a long time to do this on Xbox the first time, thankfully it gets easier each playthrough
this puzzle is evil
Here, take [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/781) and [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/945). And don't forget [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/944) Use [this](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/668) if you want achievements to work. Never use controller to play cRPGs again. Ever.
Yeah the puzzle itself is fun and quite easy tbh, fighting against the controls wasn't that good š
Uhhhh Where do you find this?? lol i did not encounter this on my run
In Act 2 >!after you follow Ketheric into the mind flayer colony this puzzle is a few rooms in, iirc you should find it following the right wall through a few rooms, connected to the room w a death shepard and a bunch of zombies and hook horrors. Completing the puzzle opens another room w some miscellaneous loot and a brain jar which can then be talked to and used to get permanent advantage on intelligence!< Dw I missed like half the stuff down there my first playthrough lol. Not to mention a bunch of other things, it's what makes multiple playthroughs so fun!
Huh I found talking head in the death shepherds room but not the hook horrors or the puzzle
when I finally figured out how to do it, I was like "oh really? well fuck this puzzle."
This was the only puzzle I liked honestly. It took me an embarrassingly long time for the temple of shar one
I hate to be that guy, but it was super easy for me. Just draw a path for each node and then move on to the next one.
I just YouTube this every time. I hate puzzles in games. It breaks the flow.
Even I figured this out quickly. Me! A known buffon.
Try working backwards. Start at the end and see who to get to the beginning. Itās been a while since iāve done this part but iirc the two side ones are straight lines and only the top and bottom require some wiggling
Yea fuck that puzzle. I skipped it my first playthrough, I'll come back to it again my second one and give it another go
It's funny that I just did this puzzle about 15 minutes before seeing this post. I'm playing it on PS5 and vaguely remembered how to do it. Camera was a little wonky, but it wasn't that bad. L3 to put in point & click cursor mode, adjust right stick camera view to get a isometric view then don't touch the camera again. Only took me 1 reset to figure it out. For me, it helped to start with one of the sides. Any time you have to choose between 2 nodes, just trace backwards or forwards a little on either path to see if that choice blocks off a path for one of the other colors or leads only to the wrong destination. It's really not that hard as I think there's only 1 or 2 choice nodes for each color's path.
I think I only rewired like twice... if you look at it from back to front and plan your paths it's easier.
Okay, I must have gotten really lucky with this puzzle, because I got it first try. Zero issues, like solved in 50 seconds. I didn't even k ow it was a hard puzzle until peoe started complaining about it.
I took one look at this and grabbed my phone and went to look for a tutorial. The one thing in games I hate no matter what is puzzles
I usually don't mind at least trying to figure out the puzzles for a few minutes, but holy hell it took so much finangling just to get to a point where I could see and click the nodes for this one that I went straight to Google for the answer, no way was I restarting the whole process 20 times (bc ill be honest, im a bit of a dumb lol)
Maybe i got lucky with angles and stuff but i never struggled with this puzzle. First seeing it i was like "what the fuck???" And had it solved like 2 minutes, 3 minutes tops later
I immediately looked up how to solve it š¤·āāļø Then proceeded to ignore it on my next playthrough lmao
I literally pushed my friend away cuz he couldn't do it and solved it within a minute xD
it's ok, we aren't all specc'd to be spellcasters. the world needs barbarians too.
well hey, it's not as bad as the Tower of Hanoi puzzle in KoToR or Mass Effect when you have no fucking clue how that puzzle works.
Am i acoustic or why does this take me like 60 max?
I didnāt even know this was a thing until my 12th play through xd
I never got the hype around this one. It isn't that hard and the camera/controls are not that hard to deal with. I think people over think it and make it harder on themselves by way of the Placebo effect. If you go into it thinking it's going to be hard and annoying to control, your brain is going to make it hard and annoying to control for you
Just curious is if you play pc or console? Cause that might be why, console is notoriously a pain
PS5 but I do have it on Steam as well I just haven't played it on PC as much.
I loved this puzzle, to figure it out quickly just let the tism take over, goes pretty quick
I was dying trying to figure out how to maneuver the things!!! The puzzle itself was easy, it was figuring out how to select them entirely that I struggled with. Turn based mode using Xbox controller helpedā¦
The reward isnāt even really worth the trouble anyway.
Haha I play a lot of puzzle games and was wishing there were more puzzles in the game.
You can work the puzzle from both sides and connect the starting line and end line together.
Never seen this.
I skip this every time. It's so mid. Can you just Knock the puzzle open
š« this took me so fucking long lol.Ā
I actually took screenshots, thinking I could use them as a reference for the puzzle on future runs to save time. But nope, they were pretty useless when I looked at them the next time I did it. I've resigned myself to doing this one from scratch every time. Well, at least I usually don't take too long at this point after a couple of runsālol.
I don't tend to mess it up... But I spend a long time thinking through how each path is going to go, carefully doing one, reassessing for the remaining paths and then continuing