I Counted Every Box in Baldur’s Gate 3: The Completionist Who Dug Through the Game’s Code to Find Every Crate, Chest and Barrel

Newbie says they couldn’t stop thinking about it. From a technical standpoint it’s fascinating: who placed so many containers, how were they populated with loot, and crucially — how many exist in total?

First, Newbie defined what counts as a “box”: any container for items, typically rectangular, sometimes with a lid, and usually crafted from wood, metal, or cardboard.

They also accounted for Baldur’s Gate 3’s many branching routes and world states. If a container can appear under any valid set of conditions in the game world, it was included in the count — meaning the tally covers every possible version of the map a player might encounter.

A few tricky decisions followed. Items in companion camps that look identical were counted separately, on the basis that they represent each character’s personal gear. Conversely, visually identical locations that are effectively duplicates had their boxes excluded to avoid double-counting.

I Counted Every Box in Baldur’s Gate 3 – YouTube

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With the counting rules established, the hard work began. Newbie couldn’t practically walk the world and count every container by hand, so they unpacked the game’s archives and converted the binary assets into inspectable data files.

Searching the files wasn’t as simple as CTRL+F for “box.” Containers in the game’s data use many different names, though several common keywords helped narrow the search. After filtering everything that could reasonably be a crate, chest, or barrel, Newbie identified 438 distinct container templates that together account for the game’s more-than-17,000 instances.

To refine the results they reviewed dozens of 3D models so the script could correctly tag keywords and distinguish templates. In many cases templates share appearances but have different internal names, so each template was counted independently where appropriate.

“Once all the filters were in place, I combined the data: which templates qualify as containers, how many instances of each exist, how many visual variants they represent, which levels are actually playable, and how often each should be counted — that produced the final total,” Newbie explains.

They also compiled a breakdown of relative frequency: classic crate-style containers account for roughly 72% of all entries, chests about 7%, and barrels the remaining 21%.

Is this information useful? Probably not in any practical sense, but it’s impressive diligence. Newbie published the data and documented the whole method, and I’ll certainly never play Baldur’s Gate 3 without noticing just how many containers fill its world.

Baldur’s Gate 2 writer once doubted players would care about romance in an RPG: “People don’t come here to romance — they come here to fight s**t and battle dragons.”