Currently the PC I played this game on and made screenshots with is unavailable so the guide won't have any screenshots, I will hopefully add them later, currently I will do my best to explain in text.

When you open up the Journal that shows quests and also game map you can click on town icons to narrow down quests by specific town.

If you own a teleporter stone for a town icon you clicked on you can double click it and it will automatically equip your character with the teleporter spell so you don't have to look for it in the inventory (it gets overcrowded with items) and don't have to assign it to hotbars.

You can also see specific town reputation by clicking on the town icon.

Additionally, you can below the map are 2 icons.

Main and All

If you have Xardas teleporter stone double clicking on Main will teleport you to Xardas' Tower.

If you have a Varant Temple teleporter stone double clicking on All will teleport you to that temple where water mages are.

There are double purpose tabs in game. They are identified by having a slash / between them. Such as Miscellaneous/Documents in inventory, which can normally be accessed during trades or when you use a chest. Just click twice on it and you will be able to switch between them.

The Misc tab has things like gold coins, components, trophies etc. and the documents store books, recipes, maps etc.

In quest Journal there is also a double purpose tab. You can swap between Quests and Characters. Characters tab allows you to see what characters reside in town. That includes people of interest, traders and trainers and if you click on them you can see their dialogue.

You can double tap an item in inventory or on hotbar to consume 2 items in a row. Eating works while running

An old Gothic trick that allows you to agro NPCs to draw them out and beat em up or assassinate.

Draw a weapon in front of an NPC, make sure only that NPC sees you do that. They will threaten you twice asking you to sheath the weapon. On the third time they will start fighting you. This works in towns. If they do not hit you and you manage to lead them outside the city walls you can fight them. If they hit you with people watching then people will start helping the NPC. If you hit the NPC then you will have started a fight. So only fight the NPC once you are outside of town or where nobody can see/hear you fight.

Sometimes if you have a high reputation in town and everyone's name is Green then people might help if you NPC attacks you but not always and not everyone. So better lead them somewhere safe.

Once you beat up the NPC you can loot them. And if you task was to assassinate them you can hold right click button with which you block on your mouse and then click left mouse button while targeting the NPC that is lying on the ground. You will impale and kill them

Another way you can agro some NPCs is by using Terror. NPCs with Strong Will like Leaders and Mages will be agroed and will start fighting and following you. You can take them outside and finish them 1 v 1.

Pickpocket when fails also makes a person agro against you. The only downside is that after you beat them up outside of town 1 v 1 they will be angry at you and won't talk to you so keep a few Amnesia scrolls ready.

Additionally, you can use Terror to make people run away from town. You will need to chase after them and have a sleep spell ready. Once out of town cast the spell on them and they will fall asleep and stop running. Take their weapon. Then beat them up.

Terror is also handy if you need to commit a crime and there are only few people watching. You can send them away and either ambush the target or steal something.

So you can win arena fights the easy way even playing on hardest settings.

You are going to need sleep scrolls/spell, no gold on your person, knock down ability from thief tree (40 thieving I believe) and a blunt weapon of any damage amount (dmg does not matter).

You want to ask the arena master to start the fight, sometimes you have to pay them so pay them and after that you need to find a chest where nobody can see and put your gold coins inside so they do not get looted after you get beaten up.

Then equip the sleep spell, come to arena where the fighter is waiting for you but do not fight them. Just put them to sleep. Do not save the game or reload after this point because they will wake up. When an NPC is holding a weapon and they fall to sleep, the weapon drops beside them. Go in the arena and take their weapon.

If you have pickpocket skill and you haven't stole from the NPC yet or you have unspoken dialogue lines you can talk to the NPC to wake it up. Make sure to have your blunt weapon equipped. Once you exit the dialogue NPC will forget about the fight and start walking away from arena. !You can't leave arena because the fight is not complete and you will lose it if you do, the same rules do not apply to NPC!. Get your blunt weapon out hold right click targeting NPC and then charge left click attack by holding to knock the NPC out before they leave arena. Now quickly loot the npc.

You will be beaten up by anyone who is watching because you just knocked out the NPC. Quickly sheath your weapon so NPCs do not take it away from the ground once they beat you. And the gold you have will be looted but you already stored your gold in a chest and only the gold you took from NPC will be looted, but you get to keep everything else you took off the NPC.

If you don't have any dialogue to wake the NPC you can either wait until they wake up on their own or save and reload the game.

If you were doing paid arena fights the rewarded money should be enough to continue with the next fight that way you don't have to recover your gold from chest and can just continue fighting

When you start the game it starts off with a fight for Ardea. Once the fight is over NPCs are automatically all Green towards you. The rebel NPCs who took over the town. And then you have your trusty companion friends like Milten, Gorn, Diego, Lares etc. from older Gothic games that you arrived with. They are also Green towards you.

The thing is. Friends faction and Rebel faction are 2 different factions. If you start beating up one of your friends the rebels will try to defend you. That will result in a big big fight. And while your Friends are pretty strong at the start of the game, the town will be able to take them out, slowly.

Additionally, they wont kill each other most of the time, unless someone fires an arrow during the last hit. So watch out for that. You don't want any important NPCs dying. So save and reload in that case.

The fight will be quite long. You will get to loot a lot of Rebel NPCs that will be knocked out by your Friends and you will get to loot your Friends for some precious loot too. That will help you start the game with a lot of money. And if you manage to land knock out hits you will get some exp too. But that is not important.

What is important is the items they all carry. So you get to loot lots of good equipment, including expensive ranger bows and berserker axe from Gorn etc. at the starting level when it would have been impossible to win those fights and you couldn't use the Green Knockout trick.

Before robbing the town blind I highly urge you to first acquire positive Green reputation by doing quests and favors in town. Because if you start robbing you will receive negative reputation among people that will paint them Orange permanently and you will not be able to do this trick.

You are going to need people trusting you in town you are doing this (being Green) and Thief 40 Skill Knock Down. Any blunt weapon.

The way game handles reputation is that once NPCs turn Green (friendly) towards you you can beat anyone in town and they won't care and in some instances they will even defend you. You can only lose this reputation if you kill people or steal things from them. And if you are playing Content Mod with Consequences then via some quest choices that affect factions (more on avoiding consequences in later section)

So once the city is Green and before you started robbing it you can get your trust Blunt weapon and start knocking down NPCs from behind by Holding Right Click and Charging Left Click Attack.


Like in that video. By the way a very useful skill, one of the best skills in the game, especially if you are playing the game on Hard like any Gothic game should be played. Allows you to assassinate people easily without fighting them as all you have to do is pierce them on the ground. You can even sneak skill enemy camps that way.

Anyway, once your reputation is Green in towns nobody will mind if you start knocking out people and looting them. Additionally, nobody will come up to you and beat you up for breaking the law. It is not considered bad like stealing.

You will farm up a lot of EXP and whatever Items NPC hold. And you won't kill anyone so you won't trigger rebellion or kill important quest NPCs.

After you farmed all the NPCs in town you can proceed with ruining your reputation and turning it into Orange by robbing the town blind.

So the only major downside of being a thief is that you get beaten up and gold is taken from you.

No problem. Find a safe chest in town, put all your gold there.

Now you can go around town robbing everyone and everything.

You can use pickpocket (but it is generally not worth it and you will be stopped a lot) and you can steal things from chests, houses and vaults.

If you have Make excuses skill from thief tree you will be able to talk your way out of being caught more times than without it. But you will be caught eventually. I do not mean being caught as if someone saw you steal. No. You must be unseen. But NPCs in Gothic 3 will eventually suspect and blame you for killing or stealing anyway, even if they don't see you do it. They will accuse you of things going bad since your arrival and you deem you guilty. With killing that is really bad because the town will turn hostile on you if you kill too many people (you can avoid this and I will tell you how in another section) but with stealing they will just keep beating you up. So making excuses skill will allow you to dismiss their accusations more often and get beaten up less. Never offer them bribes because making excuses does not work on bribes and they will beat you up, besides all your main money supply is in a chest, safe in town.

So the stealing loop is like this, steal a lot of stuff, talk your way out or get beaten up, eventually get beaten up anyway, get a small amount of stolen gold taken from you but you keep all the items you stole. Do not get knocked out with your weapon out as it will also be taken away then. Do not resist. Unequip armor and just let NPCs beat you up.

An old Gothic trick from the previous games.

Put Telekinesis spell in the hotbar and use it to look for items. It helps you locate items hidden in houses, plants in the wilderness and items hidden all over the world. It basically targets them. You do not need to actually use the spell. Just use it to highlight items and then sheath the spell and pick them up.

Ranged spells and Weapons work the same way but for NPCs. You can instantly see NPCs hiding in the foliage or darkness, from afar too.

In older Gothic games you had to edit ini for this to work.

In this game all you need to do is to crouch and you can spam left click to pick up items, plants fast. Because there is a lot of looting in the game you don't have time to watch the slow animation every time

This is useful for End Game.

If you attack a town and start taking over it, possibly kill some important NPCs and it will trigger the town to become RED and kill you on sight, the town will become so mad they will try to seek you out across the map. But more consistently they will travel to closer towns.

So for example if you go to Cap Dun and kill their leader then go to Ardea chances are battle music will play and NPCs from Cap Dun will come to kill you, they will start fighting the rebels from Ardea and it will be a big epic fight and will make it easier for you to take over Cap Dun.

But you should also be warned that important NPCs could die in friendly towns that way.

I also had this happen with Trelis. I assassinated their leader and teleported away. After a few hours of playing I went to do quests in Montera. Then after a bit of time battle music started playing and I did not understand why. Then I heard fighting and saw Orcs from Trelis coming in squads in a big long line attacking rebels around Montera because they came there looking for me.

Then after I took over Trelis I did this on purpose and baited Orcs from Gildren into a fight with Trelis rebels.

Not sure if there is a limit to how far they go, but they definitely visit nearby towns.

I noticed that you can knock out friendly NPCs that you can't target to fight. Like your Friends. You can also knock out Orc Warlords and Zuben and other important NPCs when they are sitting on their thrones. I did use a long blunt weapon Branch to do that though.

it is pretty overpowered and allows you to basically insta kill a boss humanoid NPC like Zuben provided you impale them on the ground. This also allows you to kill NPCs like Gorn

Unfortunately, Murder ability at least when I tried it did not work through Thrones. (It works like impale strike with a sword but from behind). It got caught into the thrones, whereas Knock Down hitbox managed to connect.

Additionally, immortal NPCs can still take poison damage slowly. Poison does not scale depending on the weapon so even on the worst melee weapon the damage is the same. Poison can be applied via Beliar Spell or via piercing weapon attack or arrow attack

There are some NPCs in game, primarily Orc Leaders that if you fight them with a melee weapon will not be knocked out but will die.

If you do not want to kill them there are several things you can do to avoid doing that.

You can knock them out using Knock Down thief skill. In their throne room and even loot them but sometimes it could be problematic.

You can also quickly cast Terror spell on them. Because they have strong will they will agro and follow you but if sheath the spell in time the guards won't agro. And you can take those orc leaders outside town. Make sure they don't hit you when others are watching and don't hit them.

Once out of town you put them to sleep, take their weapon. When they wake they will go back, this is the time to knock them out and loot them. That won't kill them.

Another way to knock them out without killing them is using poison. If they lose their last health to poison from your weapon or spell they will also be knocked out and not dead.

Since NPCs in Gothic 3 will blame you for killing townspeople and town guards even if you are not seen doing that, you are best not to over do this to avoid triggering rebellion or turning your reputation Red so everybody in town tries to kill you.

The game only counts you kill someone when you are the one who strikes the deathblow.

So what you can do is agro your target out of town, even beat them up and take their weapon away so that they have little health left, then agro them again once they wake and take them to the nearest monster or enemy faction and have them kill your target for you.

You won't have a kill count for that NPC then and nobody will blame you in town. You can kill as many NPCs in town this way as you like without becoming seen as murderer. But still do not go over the murder limit because you might accidentally free the town of its faction.

First, I advice you to use the swords with longest reach. Reach is shown in numbers with latest community patch and balance updates. The longer your sword the easier it is to do combos and land hits while avoiding damage.

To perform the combo Hold Right Click and Charge Left Click to Pierce (poisoned blades will apply poison here), then without Holding Right Click charge Left Click to do a power attack and knock your enemy down, quickly press Left Click to connect a light attack to enemy mid air as they fall.

You don't even need to be a mage. You just need lots of mana potions, a shadow scepter artifact that allows you to cast fog or lots of fog scrolls, AoE scrolls or spells of your choosing.

Cast Fog before taking out a town or a huge orc camp. Cast AoE spell. Drink Mana Potion. Cast Fog again. If you have enough Mana you might be able to do 2 or even 3 spells before recasting fog.

Make sure to cast fog to the finish or it won't work. Don't move or you will break it. Fog creates an invisible circular barrier around the area it was cast in. It is rather small but NPCs wont be able to pierce it with arrows or magic. They won't pass it to attack you with a sword either.

However, if you cast it too close to NPCs some might be stuck inside the fog with you and then will be able to attack you.

You can try to adjust your position inside the fog if some npcs are hitting you with melee through it or you can just run and recast it further away.

I played as a warrior thief with some magic skills and by the end of the game I invested a little bit into magic. I never spent any LP on ancient knowledge. Fog allowed me to easily clear towns and Nordmar Orc camps on Hard with Alternative A.I. and Balance which was a bit of a pain fighting so many people with melee due to being knocked back constantly. So basically as a weak magic user I was able to do this.

Fog > AoE Spell > Mana Potion > Repeat

Taming is really strong in Gothic 3 especially if you tame the right animals.

It does not require a lot of ancient knowledge and does not cost much LPs even with Alternative Balance.

Taming is always powerful no matter what A.I. Balance you play on as NPC vs NPC rules remain as in Vanilla.

Besides, I did not feel like going around with companions who get stuck in places and having to wait for them all the time or them backing out of range for no reason.

Best animals to tame are wolves, wargs and bisons. Some animals and monsters are too strong willed to tame like Shadow Beasts. But generally any tamed monster is good to have even if it is not as OP as wolf.

They are OP because they constantly stunlock enemies. Really useful if you are fighting annoying things like Skeleton Mages. So having a wolf by your side is good.

Additionally, you can tame some really cool animals.

You can tame Zuben's Tamed Lions. You can tame the Tamed Lion of Shakior, The Lion of The Desert. Use them against them in combat or just lead them away to die somewhere to enemy NPCs.

You can tame all the wolves in Nordmar Wolf clan. But you can't kill them yourself or they will count as murdering a clan member. So take them away and make them fight some mobs in Nordmar and let them die if you want to get rid of wolves.

If you want to get rid of Ice Golems in Wolf clan you can use terror on them and then stay in close proximity of them so they don't use magic on you and try to hit you with their fists. Lead them away and make them agro on something else, just like wolves.

And finally, you can tame the Strongest Boss Wolf in the game - The White Ripper. This Wolf is very very very strong as a tamed pet. Possibly the strongest Tame in game. You can carry this wolf with you anywhere but it is a pain dealing with companions. If you can't beat this wolf you can make it fight your enemies until it dies.

If you want to heal your pet there are 3 ways you go about this

If your pet runs out of sight distance and comes back to you or you find it, it will have full health. If you save and reload the game all mobs in the game will have full health.

Or you can invest in Innos spell Hear Other. Which will allow you to heal your pet in combat while it is tanking and therefore you won't have to worry about the enemy regaining health if you reload and the pet will survive.

This is only for Content Mod 3.1 with Consequences Mod enabled.

Your decisions in game will affect how other factions see you. They will give you extra quests to atone for your actions or condemn you.

Some of these consequences can be delayed or bypassed.

Most of these consequences are given to you by Castle Gate Guards that block you from reaching the City Leader. And only few of them are given by Leaders themselves.

So once you earn enough town reputation and The Gate Guard allows you to enter the Inner Court Yard, Castle etc. to see the Leader. You can kill the Guard in any of the easy ways I have previously described, ideally by luring them out of town.

That way when you do a bad thing you nobody will stop you and you won't be banned from visiting the Leader and won't have to suffer some of the consequences.

If you are a pacifist you can also cast Sleep or Terror on the guard every time you pass him after you have done something that warrants consequences. But honestly that is too annoying to worry about that every time and sometimes you forget. So I just killed the guards

As for the Consequences Mod, it is cool but I wish there were more NPCs that would inform you of them or Guard NPC would respawn frequently. As it is stands now it is too easy to avoid them.