A mod for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate Trilogy-WeiDU and Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, by Anomaly
Baldur's Gate has many NPCs available for recruit (as many as 25), but some of them are very far from the roads or can only join the group really late without real reasons, and because of that they are rarely used ; players already got their well-rounded party when they meet them.
BG1 NPCs at Beginning is a mod for Baldur's Gate designed to move many NPCs that are far away from the main road to Nashkel to allow them to join the party at the early stage of the game, except of course NPCs that are prisonners.
The 11 moved NPCs are : Quayle, Kivan, Viconia, Ajantis, Faldorn, Alora, Tiax, Eldoth, Safana, Coran, Shar-Teel.
The mod also takes care of altering the joining dialogue if the original dialogue cannot fit with its new location or the knowledge of the PC at that stage of the game. It also takes care of the timed quests, making sure they are still doable by increasing the allowed delay or pausing the timer until PC seems to be far enough in the game to do the quest.
The idea to move the NPCs that are far away is not new, there is already four other mods that do something similar :
Sword Coast Stratagems allows to move Eldoth, Quayle, Shar-Teel, Tiax and Viconia. The latest version does not allow it anymore, this feature has been moved to the Tweaks Anthology Mod.
BG1 NPC Project allows to move Alora, Eldoth, Quayle and Tiax.
Tweaks Anthology allows to move Alora, Eldoth, Quayle, Shar-Teel, Tiax and Viconia, grouping moving features from the two previous mods.
Even if those NPCs are closer to the beginning with those mods, they may not be easily accessible nevertheless ; for example Alora is moved to Gullykin.
There is also a much older French mod for original BG1, called All NPCs at Beginning. Designed by Filipe_FR, it moves the same NPCs as this mod, but group most of them at the Friendly Arm Inn (which becomes overloaded), and does not extend quest timers, something that can be problematic, with Coran in particular.
BG1 NPCs at Beginning is the only mod that allow to move so many NPCs so they can be recruited on the road to Nashkel without detours, while extending quest timers and allowing you to finely tune which NPC is moved, under BG1, BGT and BG:EE.
If you wish to install Sword Coast Stratagems, BG1 NPC Project and/or Tweaks Anthology, please install them before BG1 NPCs at Beginning. This will avoid the latter to ask about moving NPCs already moved by one of the former mods, if you have installed the corresponding components.
This mod can be installed like any other WeiDU mod.
On Windows, expand the mod archive in the BG1, BGT or BG:EE folder, then double-click on the setup-bg1npcbeg.exe file
On Linux, make sure you got WeiDU 245 minimum in the PATH, expand the mod archive in the BG1, BGT or BG:EE folder, then at the console and in this folder, type weinstall bg1npcbeg
Note : BG1 NPCs at Beginning handles encodings automatically when installing in an foreign language ; you have nothing to do.
Here are the new locations for the moved NPCs :
The Russian translation was done by prowler. The German translation was done by Gast. The Polish translation was done by Bartek.