Baldur’s Gate 3: How to Heal Your Party In and Out of Combat

When it comes to difficulty, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t pull any punches. The game isn’t unfair, and if you’re smart (or lucky), you can demolish most enemies before they ever know you’re there. But eventually, a goblin is going to stick you in the back with a dagger, or maybe an owlbear gets a lucky hit in and claws your face off. Either way, you will need healing, and unlike Final Fantasy, yelling “Curaga!” won’t cut it.

Here are some of the most notable ways to keep your heroes alive in and out of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s punishing combat sequences.

Baldur’s Gate 3: How to Heal During Combat

While in the middle of a brawl, your healing options are somewhat limited. Your most reliable choices are healing spells, skills, and items.

Spells and skills are fairly self-explanatory. Just make sure you have the required spell slot, click on the ability, and follow the instructions in the tooltip. For instance, Cure Wounds says you can heal one ally you can see within 18 meters. So choose that spell, select the injured party member, and they’ll instantly receive the benefits. Other healing skills, such as Second Wind, only work on the caster, but they otherwise patch up characters all the same.

Just be sure to read the instructions whenever you use one of these powers. For instance, you can use Cure Wounds so long as you have the spell slots, but Second Wind is only usable once per short rest (more on that later). Also, pay attention to whether the spell says it’s a normal action or a bonus action as that may determine how you can (or should) use that spell. For instance, you can use one action to heal a party member in dire need of health and a bonus action on another character who needs a bit less health. 

While skills and abilities are excellent sources of healing, your go-to source of curatives during combat will likely be items (primarily healing potions). You can buy these at plenty of NPCs or craft them yourself. Just click on the item icon, and your character will chug it down for a quick bit of health. And since using a potion counts as a bonus action, you can save your main action for something else (such as swinging an axe at a nearby enemy).

Interestingly, healing potions (and all potions in general) can serve double duty as healing grenades if you chuck them at your allies. You can only do this by opening a character’s inventory, right-clicking on the potion, and selecting “Throw” from the drop-down menu. Anyone hit by the splash is healed, and the more tightly packed party members are, the more will be hit. Alternatively, you can set a potion down on the ground and attack it for an even bigger curative splash (the potion’s splash will be bigger, but it won’t heal more damage). Some spells and food items can also be used to cure characters, but they don’t quite have the impact of a lobbed potion. Furthermore, if a character dies during combat, you can revive them by using a Scroll of Revivify on their corpse

On a side note, healing in this game sometimes means more than just increasing someone’s current HP. Baldur’s Gate 3 has plenty of status effects to worry about, including damage over time conditions such as Burned and Poisoned. If you need to get rid of these hobbling problems ASAP, search the tooltips of your appropriate spells, abilities, and items, and use them accordingly.

Baldur’s Gate 3: How to Heal Outside of Combat

Once a battle is concluded, you will probably need to patch up a character or two. Like in combat, spells, skills, and potions work wonders. In fact, if you dispatched a group of bandits, some of them might have some extra healing potions on them. Just use these as you would in combat. If, however, you don’t want to waste these resources, Baldur’s Gate 3 provides a few extra options.

Resting can close up some wounds using the power of game logic. Select the Rest icon on the far right of the UI, which will bring up the Rest Menu. You can choose to Short Rest, Long Rest, or visit your campsite. You can Short Rest twice a day (technically three if a Bard uses Song of Rest) and doing so will heal characters for about half of their health.

However, unless stated in a spell or skill’s tooltip (or a character is a Warlock) a Short Rest will not regenerate spell slots or charges. The only way to recover all of your health and abilities in one swoop is with a Long Rest. You can either choose a Long Rest from the Rest Menu or by visiting the camp and clicking on the campfire. While Long Rest completely recovers all health and abilities, Long Rests also require Supplies. Every food item and Camp Supply you pick up adds to your Supplies total, and you need 40 Supplies to take a Long Rest. If you are running low on Supplies, you can turn a Long Rest into a Partial Rest, which doesn’t use the resource but doesn’t fully patch up characters either.

If a character dies, sleeping at a camp won’t bring them back to life. Scrolls of Revivify work as they do while in combat, but if you don’t have any, you must rely on more…necromantic means.

Early in Baldur’s Gate 3, you will encounter a character known as Withers. Despite his undead appearance, he will join your party, not as an active party member but as a traveling merchant of sorts. By talking to him in camp, you can ask him to bring an ally back to life (for a fee, that is).

During the game’s opening chapter, you can find some Mind Flayer restoration pods. Interacting with these will fully heal your party, but don’t learn to rely on these Illithid contraptions. Once your journey through the Forgotten Realms properly starts, you won’t encounter these healing stations anymore. Even still, keep your eyes peeled for special interactions, NPC, or even just the odd loose Healing Potion that may be able to offer a little relief when you need it the most.