Is there a mod for companion quest timers in BGII?

Christian79

If you are playing with only few rests some companion quests (like Jans) take forever to start. I know you can edit your saves or use the console to spawn the messengers. But I was wondering if there is really no mod that decreases the time companions need to be in party for their associated quests to trigger.

Ammar

I don't know one, and I think I know most big tweak mod packs. For what it's worth, if you are playing naturally without taking people for a bit just for their companion quest, it is probably not an issue since it is just one quest, so it will trigger eventually. With romance dialogue it is more of an issue, Jaheira takes so long to romance that if you know the game you will probably end it before going through it.

One thing that helps is knowing what are real-time triggers and what are game-time triggers. According to the Wiki Jan it is game-time (I think companion quests generally are), so you could just sleep a lot.

Christian79

Romance Timers can be fixed (accelerated) with Tweaks Anthology as far as I know. So I hoped there would be something similar for Quest trigger timers.

According to Wiki Jan needs to be 15 days in your party for his quest to trigger. You really have to dawdle around to see this happen "naturally" before leaving for spellhold. This might be alright for newer players, but if you know what you are doing or if you want to challenge yourself by somewhat minimizing your rests these timers are way too long.

sarevok57

at this point, it looks as if you will have to use the cheat console to summon in the messengers if you want to accelerate it, plus if your game has already started, you probably can't change when the messenger comes since the game will save the "15 day" one

although usually when it comes to companions it usually only takes a week at most, or they have to enter an area ( like keldorn visiting the government district for example )

jmerry

Jan doesn't need to stay in your party for his quest to trigger; the timer starts when you first recruit him, and keeps running even if he's not with you. If you pick him up again and the timer's expired - bam, quest.

Basically all of the quest timers are based on game time; you can run them down with aimless travel, and run them in parallel whether the NPCs are with you or not.

Romance timers are at least partially based on real time; if you have the game running in the background and check back every so often, you can progress through a lot of talks in hardly any game time.

DinoDin

FWIW, almost all of the companion timer quests offer very meager rewards. Little experience. Rarely any good items. As someone who's done a nearly full completionist playthrough, trying to trigger every NPC quests, I'll say that generally it's just not worth it if you aren't planning on keeping them in the party. The small exceptions are Jaheira (not really triggered by time anyways) and the EE companions, of course.