Baldur's Gate 3 Coatings, Grenades and Arrows: Carry These

A Void Bulb costs 3 gold. Thrown, it pulls every creature within 5 metres of the impact point into one spot unless they pass a DC 18 Strength save, and hands your caster a pre-packed formation for whatever area spell comes next. Omeluum sells them. The Nautiloid is littered with them during the prologue.

That is the state of the third consumables budget. The elixir slot is your morning routine and potions are your panic button — but coatings, grenades and special arrows are a separate pile of combat power with its own rules, and the rules are documented almost nowhere in-game.

The consumables budget nobody spends

The three item families do three different jobs:

• Coatings ride on a weapon. One bonus action smears a vial onto your equipped weapon set, and for the next 10 turns every hit carries the rider — a poison tick, a paralysis save, a −3 to an enemy caster's spell DC.
• Grenades are thrown as an action and hit an area: damage, surfaces, blinds, or a DC 18 pull.
• Special arrows replace a single ranged attack with a better one — extra elemental damage, a surface, a teleport, or double weapon damage against the right creature type.

None of these touch your elixir slot, your spell slots, or your concentration. They stack on top of everything else you are already doing, which is exactly why they win the fights where everything else is spent.

How coatings actually work

The wiki's Coatings page carries the rules the tooltips skip:

• Applying a coating costs a bonus action and works on any weapon type.
• The coating lasts 10 turns, and only one coating can be on a weapon set at a time — a second application replaces the first.
• Dual-wielders coat both weapons with one bonus action. Melee and ranged weapon sets are separate, though: coating your sword does nothing for your bow, and each set needs its own vial.
• Poison coatings do not add on-hit damage. They apply a condition that deals its damage at the end of the afflicted creature's turn, and re-applying the same coating gives no extra effect. The exceptions that do add flat on-hit damage are the coating from Broodmother's Revenge and the Dipped in Poison condition from dipping.
• Poison-immune enemies shrug off more than the damage. Per the wiki, most creatures immune to Poison damage are also immune to Basic Poison, Drow Poison, Crawler Mucus, Karabasan's Poison and Malice — the five coatings whose payload is a condition rather than a number. It also records exceptions: Ketheric Thorm is not immune to Crawler Mucus despite his Poison immunity.

Like elixirs, most coatings are craftable: one specific extract plus one any-of-a-type extract. Basic Poison is Vitriol of Bonecap plus any Ashes; Wizardsbane Oil is Essence of Gremishka Tail plus any Suspension. The wiki notes on several item pages that buying the finished vial from a merchant is usually cheaper than buying the ingredients — the opposite of the elixir economy, where brewing wins.

Every coating in the game

Eighteen coatings are obtainable in a normal run. The condition, its save DC, how long it sticks to the target, and the item's value in gold:

Read the toxin rows honestly: 1d4 to 1d10 once is not why you carry these. The damage toxins are the weakest use of the slot. The conditions are the point.

Four coatings worth memorising

Crawler Mucus is a save-or-lose in a 50-gold bottle. A hit forces a DC 13 Constitution save; on a failure the target is Poisoned and Paralysed until it makes the save — and the wiki spells out the vicious part: the save happens at the end of the affected creature's turn, so a creature that starts its turn paralysed loses that turn before it even gets to roll. Paralysis also hands your melee auto-crits from within range, the same interaction that makes Hold Person the workhorse of Honour Mode. Karabasan's Poison applies the identical condition; Sister Lidwin in the House of Healing sells exactly four of them, and they do not restock.

Drow Poison is the budget version: 30 gold, DC 13 Constitution, and the target is Poisoned and Asleep until it saves or takes damage. That "or takes damage" clause makes it self-defeating on a damage-dealer's weapon — put it on a support character's offhand, drop one enemy out of the fight, and hit that enemy last.

Wizardsbane Oil is the anti-caster tool the game never advertises. While its condition sits on the target — 2 turns per hit — the victim takes a −3 penalty to spell attack rolls and spell save DC and has Disadvantage on concentration saves. Ten turns of that on a martial's weapon turns an enemy mage fight into a formality, for 40 gold, no save attached.

Purple Worm Toxin is the one damage toxin that earns its price, and not for the 1d10 — for the DC 19 Constitution save, the highest of any coating. The wiki also logs a bug worth knowing in both directions: Advantage on saves against being Poisoned — Dwarven Resilience, Protection from Poison — has no effect against this toxin due to an incorrect line of code. On an attack that hits multiple targets, only one of them can be affected per swing.

Dip: the coating that costs nothing

Dip is a common bonus action every character has, and it is a free coating with a 3-metre reach. Per the wiki's Dip page:

• Dipping into a Fire or Hellfire surface, or any Burning object — a torch, a candle, a burning party member — grants Dipped in Fire for 3 turns. Dropping a carried torch costs no action, which makes fire damage a bonus action away in any fight.
• Dipping into a Simple Toxin, Serpent Venom, Wyvern Poison or Purple Worm Poison surface grants the corresponding coating for the full 10 turns.
• Dipping into Water washes your current coating off.
• The dipped effect is mutually exclusive with bottled coatings — it is a coating as far as the game cares.

The one-vial party trick

The two rules above combine into the best consumable economy in the game. Thrown toxins do not just splash a target — per the Coatings page, each thrown toxin also creates a surface of 1-metre radius, and those toxin surfaces are permanent. The Dip page completes the loop: the surface persists between Long Rests, and dipping a weapon into it grants the coating effect.

So one 65-gold vial of Wyvern Toxin, thrown at your own camp's floor, becomes a puddle the entire party can dip into for a 10-turn coating — every fight, forever. Four coated weapons per rest for the price of one vial, and it costs bonus actions only.

Grenades: split the stack first

Grenades trigger when the item is destroyed — usually by the 1 Bludgeoning damage the throw itself deals. That produces an expensive mistake, straight from the wiki: a stack of grenades detonates identically to a single grenade. Throw a stack of five Smokepowder Bombs and you get one explosion and four vaporised bombs. Split stacks into single items before you throw.

The regular grenades worth carrying, with the numbers:

Three standouts:

• Void Bulb at 3 gold is the best action a non-caster can donate to a caster: pull the room into a ball, then drop the Fireball or the Ice surface chain onto the pile.
• Smokepowder Bomb averages 16.5 Force damage in a 4-metre radius for 16 gold, and Force is the damage type almost nothing resists. Act 1 sells them at the Risen Road tollhouse, the Myconid Colony and the Shattered Sanctum.
• Flashblinder is a DC 16 Constitution save against 10 turns of Blinded — and against Steel Watchers the Malfunctioning rider lands with no save at all, which is why Bumpnagel sells them in Act 3.

One documented bug to price in: Alchemist's Fire lists Burning for 3 turns, but the 1-turn Burning from the fire surface it creates overwrites the longer condition, so in most cases targets burn for 1 turn. Buy it for the 3-turn surface, not the condition.

Special arrows: no quiver required

Baldur's Gate 3 has no ammunition system — every bow and crossbow fires for free, and "arrows" as items are all special consumables that replace one attack. The wiki's Arrows page carries the rules that matter:

• Special arrows work with Extra Attack, so a level 11 Fighter can fire three of them in one turn. The exceptions are Arrow of Salving and Arrow of Transposition, which cost the whole action.
• They cannot be used on off-hand ranged attacks or on special attacks like Horde Breaker.
• On the area-effect arrows, the damage applies only to the primary target — nearby creatures receive the conditions and surfaces, not the dice.
• Arrows cannot be crafted. Coatings and many grenades come out of the alchemy tab; arrows are loot-and-vendor only, which is the actual reason to stop hoarding them — the supply is not in your hands anyway.

The wiki singles out Arrow of Ilmater as one of the earliest and cheapest healing-prevention tools in the game — 20 gold to switch off a boss's healing for a turn. Arrow of Arcane Interference is a no-roll concentration break: where a coating like Wizardsbane makes the enemy caster likelier to drop the spell, the arrow just ends it. And Arrow of Transposition costs your action, but it is a 50-gold teleport with no spell slot and no class requirement.

Slaying arrows double your weapon damage

The slaying arrows work nothing like their tabletop namesakes, and the difference is the build advice. In 5th Edition they force a save against a pile of extra dice. In Baldur's Gate 3, per the wiki, they incur no saving throw and no damage roll of their own — they simply double the base damage of the weapon used to fire them against the matching creature type.

Doubling base damage means everything that inflates base damage gets doubled too, which is why the wiki calls out passives like the Sharpshooter feat as the natural pairing. A heavy crossbow Sharpshooter firing an Arrow of Undead Slaying at a mummy is doubling a number that already had +10 baked in. The family covers Aberrations, Beasts, Constructs, Dragons, Elementals, Fiends, Humanoids, Monstrosities and Undead — and the Humanoid one is very rare for the obvious reason that most of the game's dangerous enemies are humanoids.

Quick Action Checklist

• Coatings: bonus action, 10 turns, one per weapon set. Dual-wield coats both weapons; melee and ranged sets need separate vials.
• Poison coatings tick at the end of the target's turn, not on hit — the conditions, not the dice, are what you are buying.
• Crawler Mucus paralyses until a DC 13 save that only happens at end of turn — a creature that starts its turn paralysed loses that turn before it can roll.
• Wizardsbane Oil is −3 enemy spell save DC and Disadvantage on their concentration for 40 gold, no save.
• Purple Worm Toxin forces a DC 19 CON save, and save-advantage against poison does not work on it (documented bug).
• Dip is a free coating: fire surfaces and burning objects give 3 turns of fire damage; toxin surfaces give the real 10-turn coating.
• Throw one toxin vial at the ground and the surface is permanent — the whole party can Dip into it, and it survives Long Rests.
• Split grenade stacks before throwing. A thrown stack detonates as a single grenade and destroys the rest.
• Void Bulb: 3 gold, 6 m radius, DC 18 STR pull — the cheapest area-spell setup in the game.
• Special arrows fire with Extra Attack (except Salving and Transposition), and they cannot be crafted.
• Slaying arrows double base weapon damage with no save — Sharpshooter's +10 gets doubled too.
• Arrow of Ilmater blocks all healing on the target for 1 turn for 20 gold.