Baldur's Gate 3's latest hotfix declares 'No more free lunches' as it stops you bamboozling merchants with boxes, confusingly also makes it easier to literally give people free lunches

Larian is done with Baldur's Gate 3, but Baldur's Gate 3 isn't done with Larian. The studio just put out the game's 23rd hotfix, fixing a bunch of crashes and bugs and, notably, declaring "No more free lunches!" which is—in the case of this specific patch—metaphorically true, but entirely inaccurate in a literal sense.

That's because, amidst all the ho-hum patch notes you'd generally expect, Larian has implemented two key fixes in hotfix #23. The first is that you can no longer hornswoggle the game's merchants with a Matryoshka doll-style trick, and the second is that the game will no longer collapse under its own weight if you throw a Black Pudding Platter at someone.

Prior to this hotfix, BG3 players had been getting one over on the game's merchants by buying multiple items but only paying for one of them. How? Sticking them in a container. 

For whatever reason, the shopkeeps of Faerûn struggled to process it when selling, for instance, a bunch of health potions that had all been put in the same bag, meaning they'd only charge the price of a single one of 'em, even when you had a bulging sackful. 

Alas, those golden days are behind us, Larian says that "The tradespeople of Baldur’s Gate have also had a word with our people, and we both agree that container-based antics, while amusing, are damaging the economy."

So, yes, "No more free lunches" is true in the sense that you can no longer Criss-Angel-Mindfreak merchants into giving you free gear. But also, the game won't crash anymore if you yeet a Black Pudding Platter at friend or foe. That is, if anything, a quantitative increase in the number of literal free lunches on offer, at least for the game's NPCs.

Heady stuff, I know, but the patch notes aren't all philosophy. We've also got a bunch of crash fixes, rectified scripting errors, and various other little repairs. You know, hotfix stuff. You can find the full patch notes below (beware some light Act 2 spoilers):

Baldur's Gate 3 Hotfix #23 patch notes:

Crashes and blockers

• Fixed a bug causing you to get stuck in Lae'zel's recruitment dialogue if you saved halfway through the dialogue and then loaded that savegame.
• Fixed a potential rare crash related to our particle system.
• Fixed a crash when throwing the Black Pudding Platter.
• Fixed a crash during Character Creation.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when selling a container with items in it, buying it again, and then selling it again.
• Fixed a rare crash related to VFX material loading.
• Fixed a bug preventing you from equipping items and using spells because an item kept being equipped.
• Optimised Poltergeist auras to reduce memory usage and prevent an out-of-memory crash.

UI

• Fixed an issue where selling all wares didn't remove the proper gold amount from the trader inventory.
• Fixed a bug letting you generate gold by buying multiple items but only paying for one of them if you dragged the items into a container.
• Fixed a bug letting you 'buy' a stack of items for free when dragging the stack into a container and using the item splitter.
• Fixed equipped items blocked by shapeshifting being tradable, allowing you to get paid even if the items don't transfer to the trader's inventory.

Scripting

• Fixed clubs from the Moonrise Towers Prison getting automatically equipped when you picked them up.
• Fixed a bug causing Nightsong to continuously gain and lose the Soul Caged condition if she had a condition that provided Immunity to being Incapacitated.
• Fixed Balthazar not finishing his turn when he is too far from the Colony ritual spot to reach it in one turn.
• Fixed a bug where a civilian would call for help and a group of Flaming Fists would appear, but instead of moving to the crime scene, they would just stand where they were spawned.

Code and gameplay

• Fixed a bug causing party members to be wrongly ungrouped and fixed savegames in this broken state.
• Fixed randomly occurring issues with dialogues, like repeating lines and options not showing up correctly.
• Fixed some characters missing their spell SFX when going from camp to the world.
• Fixed the bulette getting permanently stuck under the ground when you passed by in Turn-Based Mode.