Tips for scouting the area faster?

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Exploration is fun but to 100% search the map to get the fog all liftet feels often like a slog, the movement is just to slow for my characters, are there any advices to move faster over the map? I tried to split my group in several directions but most often times I run in to dangerous random encounters for that.

[Fantasy Fan]

There should be a configuration file located in your Documents/BGEE folder that you can right click then open with wordpad or your choice of text editor. Hit Ctrl+F then type in "frame" without quotes and change the value after Maximum Frame Rate that is by default 30 to a higher value.

I changed mine to 42 which is a nice speed boost without being too fast, but be aware that this sets the game's frame rate to a higher value which means that everything will be faster, not just your run speed. So enemies will move faster along with NPCs and everything else in the game.

While it's not a perfect fix, the only other way I know of is to use EE Keeper to change your own run speed by entering a value between 0 and 7 with 0 being default IIRC. However, since enemies won't move at the same fast speed that you do, this trivializes the difficulty since you can endlessly kite and shoot enemies.

[Mako]

There another way but it's a bit... tricky : use wild mage's hiatus effect for reveal all the map. Isn'tt the best idea, but it did work since it work even inside

[Chocos Ramabotti]

Sadly I don't have a wild mage, I guess have to recruit that one I met in beregost (that's the german name of the second town) but even then I don't like that class so much because of the RNG and that it encourages save-scumming. (I do it often and fairly regularly but I still feel not good about that)
I recently found one okay'ish strategy, I can use the familiar spell of my sorcerer and transform it into a wolf, the wolf is hyper fast, a lot more than every enemy I encountered so far, it's the perfect scout unit.

[Black Sheep Inc]

The mage spell Clairevoyance will instantly clear the fog of war from exterior areas, though you won't be able to see enemy positions or item drops with this method. The Paws of the Cheetah are also a solid option, since they double a character's movent speed and will stack with both the Haste spell and Oils of speed if I recall correctly.

[Godsarm]

I've done it a couple of different ways...If you take Rasaad into the party, he has a bit higher movement rate. You can also use a Thief or Ranger to Hide in Shadows and that way you are only moving one character around so the path finding isn't as bad. Or...just have you mage cast invisibility on one character and have them scout the entire map, again moving only one character. This playthrough I cheated, I used EE Keeper and gave everyone Paws of the Cheetah. While I was at it I gave us a Bag of Holding so I don't have to spend most of my time managing inventory.

[red255]

invisibility 10 foot radius.

feel free to split your party to search faster.

[anferFFmax]

Mechanically, I would suggest changing the frame rate to 60 instead of the default 30. 60 is sweet. To do this go to your documents folder, find the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition folder, and inside you will see the Baldur.lua file. open it with a text editor program like the notepad included in all versions of windows. And look for the parameter "SetPrivateProfileString('Program Options','Maximum Frame Rate','30')" and simply change the 30 for 60. Save and close the file. You may want to make a copy of the file for backup before doing the change.

As for the exploration part. Well you can't explore all of the map. The original devs screw up with this, and there are maps that even after you moved around all of the area you still have a good chunk of the map in dark. This doesn't hurt your gameplay since there is literally nothing on the unreachable areas of the map. But it still looks buttugly on the are map.

The only way around this is to use the cheat code "C:ExploreArea()" to get them all. If you want to use it without feeling like you are cheating, you can do what I do, which is only use the code after your toon has explored the full length of the explorable area in the map.

As for gameplay. As others have suggested, use the "Invisibily" spell in your exploring toon to make it safe to explore.

You could also haste the toon (before making it invisible) to speed up it's movement rate. This may be a problem if you exploring a place that's full of traps, since you are going to be running into them quicker than what you can detect them with this method. So you have to use the "quicksave" option a lot.

Make sure you clicked the "search" icon on the right of your map so that secret containers mark up as you approach them.

I simply take my time with exploration. I park my party in the area where they started. Cast my long lasting summons in case I get jumped. And the only long lasting summons are the skelletons. And then I send my thief fullly invisible to walk around this map, making note markers in the map noting foes, and people of interest. Then, I have him/her return to the party, decide where to go 1st, and go in in mass!

This is my general exploration approach to the BG series, I do it even in BG2.