Guide for Pillars of Eternity (2024)

There are no difficulty related achievements in this game so the first thing I recommend doing is selecting the “Options” menu and selecting “Difficulty”. You can play around with these to give you the advantage you like but I had everything selected except “Auto-level New Companions”. This allowed me to take greater control of what I wanted in a party member when recruiting them for the first time.

Back out of this menu and then select “Auto-Pause”. Like most games in this genre, this feature automatically pauses the game under certain conditions. Again, you can set these as you like, but I recommend activating only the following:

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Centre On Party Member
Character Death
Low Endurance
Low Health
Hidden Object Found
Enemy Spotted
Stop Party Movement
Combat Start

Have all other conditions unselected. Back out of the options menu, making sure to save changes when prompted to do so. You can now select “New Game” to begin your adventure.

Because there are no difficulty-based achievements, you are safe to select “Story Time” difficulty but feel free to set this to whatever challenge you would like. I will be basing this walkthrough on the story time difficulty setting.

A Note on Controls

Pressing while next to an NPC or interactive container will make your character interact with that thing. Holding will highlight all interactives in the area.

acts only as a back or cancel button.

Pressing will pause the game. You are still able to issue commands while paused, and as soon as you unpause with the commands are completed.

Pressing will cause a cursor to appear. You can then use the left thumbstick to move the cursor and press to move your character to that exact location. This will be helpful for disarming traps or finding secret locations.

Rotating will move your character(s). Rotating while holding will allow you to direct your character(s) to a particular interactive. Clicking will put your character(s) into stealth mode.

Rotating will pan the camera. Clicking will re-center on your character(s), but also toggle whether the camera follows your characters or not.

Hitting the or will flick through your active character. Hitting both together will select all characters in your party.

Pressing will bring up a general radial menu, where you can bring up your character detail sheet, journal and inventory, amongst other things.

Pressing will bring up the combat radial menu, where you can select skills to activate and switch out weapon sets (you can have 1-4 different weapon sets to switch between. I usually have a melee and ranged set to switch between).

Pressing or will zoom your view in and out.

Pressing or will toggle slow and fast mode. These make all movement/animations slower or faster depending on the toggle and can be useful in moving through a quite area much quicker. I spent most of my time playing with fast mode activated; it makes the game considerably quicker.

is where you can save and load your game.

brings up a map that can be toggled between local and global maps using and .

Disposition

You will need to sink points in conversation responses on only three different choices when you can help it, to obtain the achievement:

Disposition
Attained rank 3 in at least three Dispositions
2 guides

Every time there is a disposition conversation option, I will keep a running tally of what I have put my points on, like this:

[Passionate 1]

Collecting Resources

I won’t be explaining every single container or collectible resource on the maps unless they are secret or quest items, but you should be exploring fully and collecting all resources. There are labeled maps of each area in this guide to show where each collectible in the area is. These will be used to craft enchantments, food, scrolls, potions and traps for the following achievements: