How to activate cheat codes in Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition on Steam

I’m not a big gamer by any standard. I have quite a few computers games but they mostly fall into five categories:

1. LEGO games—I love these, as do my three boys.
2. Call of Duty/Battlefield first person shooters—I only play the story-mode versions on easy level for the cinematic experience.
3. Story/walking simulator style games (Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, Firewatch).
4. Multiplayer, party-style games for my children (Screencheat, Sonic All-Stars Racing, Mini Motor Racing Evo).
5. Baldur’s Gate family Dungeons & Dragons’ role playing games.

Apart from the LEGO games—which are part adventure, part puzzle games—for the most part, I enjoy games for their cinematic and story-telling properties. I want escape and entertainment rather than spending hours building an empire or working out some kind of complex strategy.

Cheat / debug mode

So, for the last few years in Baldur’s Gate (in the few moments that I’ve had a chance to play it) I have activated the cheats (or debug mode). This gives me access to the entire game inventory to equip my character accordingly and a better chance to survive the adventure.

Clue: I have never yet completed Baldur’s Gate, despite owning it since about 1999 (I still own my original copy on five CD-ROMs).

Having just reinstalled my PC, I was disappointed to discover that the old way of activating cheat mode (by editing baldur.ini) had changed. This is how I managed it today (on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, with OneDrive installed).

1. Locate the folder at Documents > Baldur’s Gate – Enhanced Edition. On my desktop PC this was in the default Windows 10 Documents folder within OneDrive; on my laptop it is in C:\users\<username>\Documents. It will depend on how your computer was set up.
2. In a proper text editor (e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ or TED Notepad) open the file Baldur.lua.
3. Add the line SetPrivateProfileString('Program Options','Debug Mode','1').
4. Save and close the file.

Now when you run the game, you can enter the game console by pressing Ctrl + Spacebar. It looks like this, at the bottom of the screen:

This allows you to enter codes that generate items, amongst other things. For instance this code allows generates a set of Ankheg Plate Mail armour for your current character:

C:CreateItem("PLAT06")

The older versions of Baldur’s Gate used the code CLUAConsole: but this has now been shortened to a single, uppercase C: followed by a colon.

Here’s how my intrepid fighter character started his adventure in Candlekeep:

Download the cheat codes

Feel free to download my full list of cheat codes, arranged by type (clothing, jewellery, weapons, magic, and miscellaneous).

You can look up what each item is on the Baldur’s Gate Wiki.

Baldur’s Gate EE cheat codes (DOCX, 30 KB)

Updated

2017-04-17 Updated the location of Baldur.lua as it was in two different locations on two PCs running Windows 10. It depends, I guess, on whether Windows 10 is told to use OneDrive as the default save location.