The latest round of absurd Baldur's Gate 3 mods include a better Bing Bong and mankinis for the boys

Wyll, Gale, and Astarion in lime green mankinis
(Image credit: baeator)

Whatever the Baldur's Gate 3 modders have been drinking, I'd like a double. They've given us mods that make your entire party scrabble around on all fours, add an entire roguelike mode, and commit a war crime against Astarion's hair follicles. And they haven't slowed down yet.

The latest round of uploads to Nexus Mods include a couple of highlights. The first is for the Shadowheart Nation, giving the cleric of variable goddesses an improved imp-summoning ability. Referencing a running gag from the actual-play video where some of the Baldur's Gate 3 voice actors played their characters in a game of D&D (since canonized in the game's epilogue), Shadowheart was first given the ability to summon an adorable imp named Bing Bong in a mod released last year. It's now been tweaked by another modder and released as Better Bing Bong, which makes several changes to the original.

For starters, Bing Bong now levels up as you do, gaining more hit points and a higher proficiency bonus as well as more abilities. He also causes fire damage if you throw him at someone (you monster), and the amount of damage caused also scales based on your level. If you can't bear the thought of accidentally killing your sweet baby by throwing him at an owlbear, you can toggle throw damage immunity.

Next up is Mankini, a mod that adds a new variety of underwear gentlemen elves, half-elves, and humans can wear. It's the mankini from Borat, in four different sizes, and it's fully dyeable if you'd rather have it in boreal blue or lush burgundy. To install it you'll also need the Tutorial Chest Summoning mod, which a bunch of mods rely on as a way of distributing new items.

Full modding support is coming to Baldur's Gate 3 in patch 7, complete with a mod manager. That update's closed beta has been delayed, however, thanks to a bug that broke passive dice rolls. Even without official support, the BG3 modding community is thriving. Beyond the silly mods like these, they've also given us more straightforwardly useful tweaks, like the essential mod to remove the party size limit.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.