Baldur's Gate 3 Camp Collections: Pets, Books and the Slow Achievements Worth Starting Early

Scratch is found in Act 1, west of the Emerald Grove, on the trail above the Owlbear Cave, guarding the body of his dead master. Speak to him kindly, calm him down, and invite him to your camp by offering your scent. He arrives after your next Long Rest and stays at camp for the rest of the campaign. That arrival is the whole recruitment: there is no quest marker to follow and no reward popup to confirm it, which is why players walk past a dog on a trail and only learn about him hours later from someone else's screenshot.

Once Scratch is at camp, two achievements open up. Fetch Quest, at 38.2 percent, is playing fetch with him: throw his ball in camp and he brings it back, and the achievement pops when the game registers the game of fetch, which also unlocks summoning him as a familiar you can call into the field. Petting him in camp for the first time also earns approval from several companions, which is a small reason to do it early and a good reason to visit camp between quests rather than only when you need to rest.

The owlbear cub starts in the same neighbourhood as Scratch and takes two acts to finish recruiting, which is why it is the most commonly half-finished camp collection in the game. In Act 1, visit the Owlbear Cave near the Emerald Grove and meet the mother and cub. Whether you fight the mother or retreat, the cub ends up at the Goblin Camp after your next Long Rest, where it is kept as a miserable attraction. There, speak to it, use Speak with Animals if you have it, and either win the chicken-chasing game run by Krolla or buy the cub's freedom. Then invite it to your camp, and deal with the Goblin Camp itself, because the cub cannot safely leave while its captors still hold the camp.

The payoff is You Have Two Hands for a Reason, at 24.9 percent: pet Scratch and the owlbear cub at the same time, in camp, once both of them live there. It is a one-button moment that needs two acts of setup, and it is the best example in this guide of why camp collections reward patience more than power. If you only recruit one of the two animals, you do not get half an achievement. You get a camp with one pet and a reason to start the other recruitment on your next run.

Shovel is the third camp-adjacent companion and the only one that starts with a scroll. In the Blighted Village, enter the apothecary, find the hatch behind the counter, and work down into the cellar. Behind a stack of crates, a lever opens a secret passage into a cavern of caskets, and one casket holds the Scroll of Summon Quasit. Cast it, and the quasit Shovel appears with a personality far larger than her size and a dialogue that lets you rename her Fork or Basket if you prefer. The achievement, Rude, Crude, and Full of Attitude, at 17.1 percent, pops on finding and summoning her.

Keeping her is a separate step from summoning her, and it is the part players get wrong. A wizard can transcribe the scroll into a spellbook, and a warlock, wizard or sorcerer who talks to her through the summoning dialogue can learn Find Familiar: Cheeky Quasit permanently, once per Short Rest, with permanent invisibility that makes her an excellent scout. If you only cast the scroll and never complete the dialogue, you get the achievement and lose the familiar. Do the conversation, not just the casting.

Bookworm, at 38.9 percent, wants 100 different books read in a single playthrough, and it is the camp collection that most players fail by inventory management rather than by effort. The game counts a book when you open and read it, not when you pick it up, and it counts each distinct title once. Hoarding books in the camp chest does nothing. Reading them as you find them does everything. The honest difficulty is that the game shows no counter, so the habit has to replace the tracker: open every book, note, and letter you loot, in the moment, before it goes into a container.

Where you read matters less than when. Libraries and book-heavy areas reward a sweep: the Sorcerous Sundries tower in Act 3, the temples and archives along the way, and every bookshelf in every house you already loot for gold. If you reach Act 3 with the habit in place, the last twenty books arrive on their own. If you reach Act 3 with a chest full of unread books, you face the dullest hour in this guide: opening a hundred books one by one while nothing else happens. Start in Act 1 and the achievement feels free. Start in Act 3 and it feels like homework.

Dig for Victory, at 58.0 percent, is the most forgiving counter on this page, and the reason is a single item: a shovel. Carry one from the first hour, and Survival checks will reveal buried mounds as you travel. Dig up five buried chests in one playthrough and the achievement pops. Players who never carry a shovel walk over dozens of mounds without ever seeing one, which is the whole trick: the game does not hand you a shovel quest, it just lets a shovel turn the ground into loot.

Outsourcing, at 18.3 percent, is recruiting a hireling from Withers at camp. Hirelings are blank-slate companions with no story, and most players never hire one because a full companion party already fills four slots. Hire one anyway, for one fight or one dungeon, and the achievement is yours; the hireling does not need to survive the campaign or even stay in the party. Roleplayer, at 56.9 percent, is the background counterpart: complete ten background goals in one playthrough, which means playing the Inspiration prompts of the background you chose at character creation. Pick a background whose goals match how you actually play, and the ten arrive without grinding. Pick one that fights your instincts, and you will spend the campaign chasing prompts you do not enjoy.

Two more slow achievements live at camp and are covered in full in the missable guide: Homebrewer, three unique alchemical solutions brewed in one playthrough, which starts with extracting ingredients into the alchemy pouch instead of selling them, and Bottoms Up, a Long Rest taken using only alcohol as camp supplies. Both are camp-screen decisions, not combat feats, and both are easier the earlier you think of them. The camp chest itself deserves one habit too: send books, alchemy ingredients and quest curios to camp instead of carrying them, and the camp becomes a collection you can browse, not a backpack you dread opening.

The camp animals themselves are safe at camp. A summoned Scratch can fall in combat like any familiar, but losing the summon in a fight does not lose the camp dog: he is back at camp afterwards. The real risk to a camp collection is not death, it is never recruiting the animal in the first place.

No. Bookworm, like every counter in this guide, must be completed inside a single playthrough. A new campaign starts the count at zero, however many books your last character read.