Dragon Quest Builders 2

This page details bugs of Dragon Quest Builders 2.

This page or section needs more images. There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this. Specifically: The big bash tutorial with no hammer, pushing Malroth out of his cell on Moonbrooke.

To do: You can clip the camera underground when the seabed starts to shift to pitch darkness but before it boots you back to shore. There's at least three flavors of item duplication glitch. It is very easy to sequence break in this game, and thus break story quests. A lot of these were fixed in update patches, but some gamebreaking progression bugs persist.

General Bugs#

Giving Malroth's weapons to NPCs#

If an NPC is given a weapon and the player very quickly opens their inventory and swaps its place on the hotbar with a Malroth-exclusive weapon, the NPC will equip it. This only works if the Malroth-exclusive weapon is moved to the hotbar from the inventory, and not from another place on the hotbar.

Cutscene death causes respawn at default coordinates#

Killing yourself during a "cutscene" by falling off the world will spawn you at default coordinates instead of the last place you were on the shore. In this context, "cutscenes" include the animations for finishing a blueprint and leveling up. With the exception of the Isle of Awakening which spawns you at the Hermit's mountain, the default coordinate spawn is the center of your base.

"Failed to log in" text box nesting softlock#

The text box that says "Failed to log in to the game's server." does not revoke control from the player, allowing them to interact with objects, talk to characters, or start cutscenes while said text box is about open. This generally results in the game failing to return control to the player and softlocking as a result.

The typical way to trigger this would be to pause the game while offline, go to the ingame screenshots menu, close screenshots while the game is still attempting to connect (indicated by the animation in the corner of the screen), and then quickly interact with something.

Pacifist Stone and Gold Golems#

Please elaborate. Having more detail is always a good thing. Specifically: Do they attack enemies when allies, but not in the player party? For example: when monsters spawn on the Isle of Awakening.

Recruited Stone and Gold Golems do not attack enemies when accompanying the player. All types of wild Golems and recruited (regular, no material specified in their name) Golems are very capable of attacking, so this seems to be an oversight.

Moving stationary NPCs with Magnet Blocks#

Magnet blocks can push other blocks around, including NPCs standing on or beside these blocks. Many out-of-town stationary NPCs can be moved into town with magnet blocks. When an NPC is moved in this manner to within a town's boundaries, they become residents of the town.

Unintended NPCs added to towns in behave in varying ways, with some behaving like humans despite being monsters, some wandering around, or some just doing nothing at all, and they often either have blank names or obvious placeholder names. Unintended NPCs stuck in a "do nothing at all" state can be made to follow the player (along with all the other residents in town) with the War Banner.

Story progression softlocks#

This game is somewhat notorious for the ways you can softlock it, though these are often something the player needs to deliberately be attempting to trigger. Some of these are fixable, some of these are not.

Despawn limited quest items#

To do: List of items you can do this with.

There are some quest items that are not flagged as essential during their quests, so they may eventually despawn if they are dropped from the inventory. Some instances of this were bandaided by adding these items to monster drop lists. Despawning an item requires that 512 dropped items be spawned, generally through explosives or with a golem, so this is fairly unlikely to occur unless done deliberately.

For example, the Goddess statue in the Furrowfield church can be lost if it is dropped and despawned, making it impossible to repair the church's altar, and thus impossible to complete the main story.

Later in the game a throne is required to complete a story build. Brownbeard does not confiscate thrones from the inventory, so it is possible for the player to permanently lose all of their thrones by placing them on an Explorer Shore and leaving. This makes the "complete a throne room" story quest impossible to complete. However, the player would have to deliberately dispose of the extra thrones on Moonbrooke and in the one in the gift chest, making this extremely unlikely to happen irreparably unless done deliberately.

Unable to start the Harvest Festival#

The player may be unable to start the Harvest Festival on Furrowfield, with no hint as to why. This is often caused by the sidequest for the Bodkin who wants to see green grass being missed. This quest is very easy to miss, and the NPC that triggers the quest marker for this quest is also easily missed. This can be fixed by simply doing the sidequest.

Isle of Awakening#

Go to bed early during the prologue#

During the Isle of Awakening prologue sequence of the game, the player has free reign to explore most of the Isle of Awakening before anything is really active. There is a pre-placed bedroll placed in the Scarlet Sands area near the beach. Sleeping on this bed instead of the one you are supposed to make as part of the tutorial sequence will cause the cutscene camera to zoom across the map to where you are supposed to be.

Learn Big Bash early#

Big Bash is an upgrade to the player's hammer obtained by becoming level 6. The game does not have any restrictions preventing the player from learning it before they obtain a hammer. This is however incredibly unlikely to occur in normal gameplay, as it requires that the player to ignore the Isle of Awakening tutorials and kill around 1800 slimes. There seem to be no long-lasting issues from doing this, though it does make the Big Bash tutorial look very silly, as the player character will pantomime the motions as if they had the hammer.

The method for learning Big Bash seems to have been changed fairly late in development, so this oversight is likely a result of that. Developer commentary indicates this ability was originally learned from Britney at a specific point in the story.¹

Furrowfield#

Rosie displays wrong dialogue#

If you skip the spoilspore cutscene when you first enter Furrowfield, done by simply not interacting with it after Malroth points it out, talking to Rosie will display incorrect dialogue. This dialogue is from later in the game when Pastor Al arrives at the town. Doing this also cancels her "cowering in fear" animation and she will just stand by idly. Rosie will not progress to guiding you to town until you go interact with the spoilspore.

Usually talking to NPCs before you are supposed to yields unique dialogue, generic small text bubble dialogue, or the "[Player] tries to strike up a conversation... But there's no response." line.

Triggering Britney's stone sword request early#

If you happen to equip Britney with a stone sword after recruiting her but before talking to her again to start the "find Wrigley" quest, she will instead display text and a completion popup for her stone sword request. This is clearly unintended, as she talks about Wrigley as if he had been recruited, when he is not present in this scenario.

Orc & fertilizer sidequest#

If you hammer the orc's tilled soil blocks, turning them into normal soil blocks when they enter your inventory, you will not be able to complete her sidequest to sprinkle them with fertilizer. You can fix this quest by putting the tilled earth blocks back down. ...Which can only be accomplished by tediously carrying tilled blocks made by the farmers in town with the Builder's Gloves or wait until postgame where you get a hammer that lets you keep tilled earth blocks in your inventory.

Giving Malroth normal weapons#

During the Harvest festival, when Malroth has a pumpkin stuck on his head, he can be given normal weapons. It appears the character weapon lock that normally restricts him to Malroth-only weapons gets bugged during this sequence.

Khrumbul-Dun#

Madusa clones#

Madusa's fake clones during her boss fight count towards the "killed" count in the Builderpedia.

Postgame monster raids#

For some reason, monster raids on the town base still occur at random on Khrumbul-Dun after finishing the story. This is the only story island it happens on, so it seems to be an oversight.

Skelkatraz#

To do: The death loop and Malroth interaction sections could use some elaboration.

This section of the game is wildly, infamously broken, and is easily the most broken segment of story progression. This story segment places the player in a "prison escape" storyline, and boy, is the game bad at keeping you from escaping before you're supposed to, among numerous other issues.

Out of bounds exploration#

You can hoard sand blocks, one of the few blocks you can break with your bare hands, important since you have no tools during this segment, and use them to build sand stairs anywhere you want. You can sneak past quest progression triggers, guards, and just generally mess around the entire island. The game generally tries to prevent this by having a guard catch you if you wander too far off from the intended zone, but its fairly easy to avoid with bruteforcing.

Captured by guards death loop#

With particular block placement, it is possible for the game to spawn you into a "captured by the guards" trigger after being captured by the guards, trapping you in what is basically a death loop. Fortunately, the game does have a failsafe, after you sit through this ten or so times, it offsets you over a few blocks.

Incorrect Malroth interaction dialogue#

There are some midquest moments where talking to Malroth will instead replay his dialogue from a previous cutscene-including the scene's camera panning-instead of his usual "party banter" type of dialogue. One specific instance is after you get locked in The Hole.

Incorrect death scene#

Most of the time, dying has the guards haul you back to your cell or the most recent checkpoint. However, some segments have the Hairy Hermit from the hub area rescue you; this does not match what is happening in the story and is likely either a mis-assigned death screen or the game's default screen for when its not properly defined.

Burn down the storehouse#

The player is given a short quest where they are instructed to use a torch to light a haystack on fire, thus setting a field of vegetables ablaze. While more of a game mechanic oversight with how fire spreading works, the player may instead walk into the storehouse and set it on fire, as it has haystacks stored within. This is very clearly not intended and not at all accounted for, as NPCs do not react to this.

Infinite sand#

The segment where you repair a tower with sand blocks involves a Skeleton NPC that will give you blocks to make the repairs with. He will give you the blocks every time you talk to him. Forever. (Until you repair the tower, anyway.)

Even FURTHER out of bounds#

During this section's dramatic ending sequence where you break through a troop of monsters and make a mad dash for your ship, the game does not actually... make you to leave, once you reach said ship. You can turn around now have free reign of the prison, as all the guard capture triggers and most of the NPCs are disabled. You can also use your newly-returned glider to glide across the ocean and mess around in the pseudo-out-of-bounds that are hidden in the far corners of the map, off-island and obtain lategame blocks before you are intended to.

Moonbrooke#

Save Data allocation issue#

There is not enough space allocated in save data for the last "chunk" of the 700 chunks comprising Moonbrooke's map. Being 0x110 bytes short, it seems the developers forgot to account for the file header, which takes up exactly that amount.

As a result, the game will load whatever data happens to be there as blocks when loading the full map. This effects blocks at an obscure corner of the map, and can cause a chunk of nonsense "corrupted" blocks to appear, generally manifesting as a slab of some regular earth block variants or a very random looking assortment.

Pushing Malroth out of his cell#

The "build a prison cell" sidequest has a window of opportunity between finishing the titular blueprint and reporting back to the quest giver where the player can modify the contents of the prison cell by placing blocks or furniture. The player can force the game to place Malroth aboveground by filling the entire cell with blocks. This can move him outside the trigger zone that disallows the player to approach him, if he is spoken to in this state he will display dialogue that is otherwise unused.

Malhalla#

Gargoyle attack animation bug#

Ally Gargoyle villagers in Malhalla seem to have their animations set improperly. Instead of attacking, they play their "enemy spotted" sword flourish-esque animation repeatedly, and don't appear to do any damage. This can be rather hard to spot, as the village defense battles in Malhalla involve a dozen other perfectly functional ally combatants.

References#