Baldur’s Gate 3 bear sex speedruns are finally here and already under an hour

If there’s one thing Baldur’s Gate 3 has been good for since its release, aside from swallowing up players’ lives, it’s been bizarre speedruns, with the long-awaited Bear% category now being an actual thing.

Yes, that’s right, some members of BG3’s dedicated running community have finally managed to put together a fairly rapid route through the game that ends with Halsin’s infamous ursine romance encounter. Given they’ve recently been dealing with some uncertainty surrounding their favorite sex% run strategy following the game’s latest patch, quite frankly it’s a wonder any of them have had the time.

The Bear% gauntlet has been thrown down by runner Weedmoder, who’s just put out a 50 minute and 30 second-long run that currently stands as the fledgling category’s world record time. “Basically, the goal is to complete Halsin’s romance questline,” Weedmoder explains in a YouTube video of their run, “His romance questline is very long, requires you to go all the way to Act 3 and do a lot of extra stuff.”

Kicking things off in what is now basically traditional Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun, and by that I mean escaping The Nautiloid in very jumpy fashion before employing the now infamous “Shadowboxing” strategy. Naturally, the next step is to save the grove, in order to begin scything through both the game’s main story and getting into the druid’s good graces.

In terms of why Bear% has taken so long for runners to set up a route for, Weedmoder picks out the fact that those testing the run had trouble discerning exactly which encounters and choices play into Halsin’s decision whether or not to offer the player a night of bear-based fun. For instance, how you deal with the tiefling Zevlor seems to affect the druid’s feelings towards you.

Once Ketheric Thorm has been “goomba stomped” at around the 48 minute mark, the run quickly progresses towards its climax, which is a very rapid selecting of the wonderful dialogue option “Large is what I’m here for.”

In other Baldur’s Gate 3 news, work on the highly-anticipated Xbox version of the game looks to be progressing pretty well.