Baldur's Gate 3 has 54 Steam achievements, and the worst way to hunt them is the way Steam lists them: alphabetically, with 29 of them hidden. This roadmap ignores the alphabet and sorts the whole set by the only question that matters for planning: what kind of run does this achievement need? Most of them fall into four buckets, and each bucket wants a different kind of attention. Story milestones arrive on their own. Camp and life counters need a full playthrough of steady habits. Boss conditions need a save made before one specific fight. Endings and difficulty need whole campaigns of their own. Work through the buckets in that order and the list stops feeling like 54 separate chores.
The short version
54 achievements in total, 29 hidden, verified against the Steam schema for app 1086940 on 3 November 2026.
One normal story run earns roughly half the list without trying, including the rarest-looking story beats.
The genuinely rare ones are habits, not skill: Busker sits at 2.7 percent, Punch Drunk at 3.1 percent.
Only three achievements demand their own campaigns: the Dark Urge ending path, Tactician, and Honour mode.
The numbers, and what they actually mean
Steam's global percentages are a better planning tool than any tier list. Descent From Avernus, the prologue escape, sits at 89.0 percent: almost everyone who owns the game finishes the opening. The Plot Thickens, leaving Act 1, is at 50.1 percent, and The City Awaits, leaving Act 2, at 39.6 percent. That drop is the real shape of this game. Half the owners never leave Act 1, so any achievement tied to Act 3 is rare by geography alone, not by difficulty.
At the other end, the rarest achievements on the list are Busker at 2.7 percent, Punch Drunk at 3.1 percent, Foehammer at 3.2 percent and Jack-of-all-Trades at 3.2 percent. Busker and Punch Drunk are slow counters that most players never think to farm. Foehammer is Honour mode, which most players never attempt. Jack-of-all-Trades needs a level 12 character with one level in every class, which most builds never resemble. If you want a high completion count, farm the counters early and treat Honour as its own project, not as something to bolt onto a first run.
Bucket 1: story milestones you cannot really miss
Eight achievements simply mark progress, and a story run collects them in order: Descent From Avernus for escaping the nautiloid in the prologue, The Plot Thickens for leaving Act 1, The City Awaits for leaving Act 2, and All's Well That Ends Well for finishing the game at all. Expand Your Mind is the first parasite power you take, at 54.4 percent, and it belongs here too: most players swallow a tadpole power early and never think about it again. Repairing the Weave, at 44.7 percent, is the companion thread where you stabilise Gale's condition, and it is easy to miss only if you ignore Gale entirely.
Two more milestones sit on the prison and refugee threads and are worth knowing about before Act 2 ends: Under Lock and Key, rescuing all the prisoners from Moonrise Towers in one playthrough, at 26.1 percent, and Leave No One Behind, saving every tiefling refugee you can across the whole game, at 6.2 percent. The second one is the strict one. It is not a single rescue, it is a chain of rescues across all three acts, and one dead refugee camp early on quietly voids it. If you care about it, protect the tieflings from Act 1 onward and do not assume a later act can repair an early loss.
Bucket 2: camp and life counters that need a whole playthrough
More than a dozen achievements count things across a single playthrough, and every one of them is easier if you start the habit in Act 1 rather than discovering it in Act
3. Bookworm wants 100 different books read, Bedrolls and Breakfast wants four full Long Rests, Dig for Victory wants five buried chests dug up, and Roleplayer wants ten background goals completed. None of these are hard. They are only long, and the game does not show you a counter for most of them, so the habit is the achievement. Read books as you find them instead of hoarding them, rest properly instead of pushing on, and carry a shovel from the first hour.
The camp set is the most charming corner of the list and the subject of its own guide in this batch. Fetch Quest is playing fetch with Scratch the dog, You Have Two Hands for a Reason is petting Scratch and the owlbear cub at the same time, and Rude, Crude, and Full of Attitude is finding and summoning the quasit Shovel. All three need camp companions recruited in Act 1, which is why the camp guide in this batch starts there. Outsourcing, recruiting a hireling from Withers, is the odd one out at 18.3 percent: many players never hire one because a full companion party feels complete without it.
Bucket 3: one-window boss conditions
About a dozen achievements live or die inside a single fight, and they are the reason this roadmap exists as a companion to the missable guide rather than a replacement for it. Devil's in the Details means beating Commander Zhalk on the nautiloid before the prologue ends. Pest Control means killing the Spider Matriarch before her eggs hatch. A Grym Fate means killing the Adamantine Golem without the Forge Hammer. No Free Lunches means beating the Apostle of Myrkul before it eats any necromites. Fancy Footwork means beating Gortash without triggering any trap in his hall. Crash Landing means knocking the Wyrmway dragon out of the sky mid-flight. First Blood means killing Orin while her cultists are still chanting. Interfectorem Draconis means killing the red dragon in the Upper City. Every one of these is a normal fight with one extra rule, and every one of them is lost the moment the fight ends the wrong way.
The discipline for this bucket is one sentence long: make a named manual save before each of these fights, and do not overwrite it until the achievement pops. That rule does not apply in Honour mode, which restricts saving, so do the trick achievements on a normal run and keep Honour for its own campaign. Full methods for each fight, including the two that look impossible until you know the trick, are in the missable guide linked below.
Bucket 4: endings and difficulty, each a campaign of its own
Four ending achievements share one final sequence and split on the last choice: Hero of the Forgotten Realms at 24.7 percent, Absolute Power Corrupts at 6.6 percent, Ceremorphosis at 9.7 percent, and Sins of the Father at 3.4 percent. The last one is Dark Urge only, which is why it is the rarest ending on the list. You cannot collect all four in one run, and you should not try: finish one ending properly, then use the pre-finale save to see the others only if you are comfortable with how much that save-and-reload changes the weight of the choice. A cleaner plan is two campaigns, one heroic and one Dark Urge, with the finale save used for the remaining variants.
Difficulty is the same shape. Critical Hit, finishing on Tactician, is at 6.4 percent, and Foehammer, finishing on Honour, is at 3.2 percent. Honour mode adds legendary boss actions and a single-save structure, and it is the only achievement in the game that punishes a failed experiment with a lost campaign, so it belongs last in any sane plan. Do your trick achievements, your counters and your endings first, then start Honour with a build you already know, not a build you are testing.
A three-run plan that actually finishes
Run 1, the story run: play normally, protect the tieflings, start the Bookworm and digging habits in Act 1, save before every boss in bucket 3, and finish a heroic ending.
Run 2, the Dark Urge run: take the evil path, collect Sins of the Father and Murder in Baldur's Gate, and mop up any counters and tricks the first run missed.
Run 3, the Honour run: only after the first two, with a build you trust, and with no achievement experiments left to gamble on.
Questions players actually ask
Do achievements carry across playthroughs?
No, with one exception that matters. Counters such as Bookworm, Punch Drunk and Busker must be completed inside a single playthrough; progress does not carry to the next campaign. The exception is your Steam account itself: once an achievement pops, it stays popped, so different runs can each contribute different achievements toward the full set of 54.
Can I get every achievement in one run?
No. The four endings contradict each other, the two Nightsong spears contradict each other, and Honour mode cannot be combined with casual trick attempts that need save-scumming. A realistic full set is three campaigns, as laid out above.
Which achievement should a new player chase first?
None, deliberately. Start the habits instead: read every book, carry a shovel, rest properly, and save before boss fights. The counters will take care of themselves, and the boss conditions will still be there when you are ready to look them up.