It used to be easy to earn money in The Witcher 3 by killing cows over and over again. The game’s most recent patch, however, has a clever way of stopping you from exploiting the world’s bovine.
Patch 1.05, which just went live for PC players, brings with it many important changes, including a bigger text size for the game’s interface, a host of quest fixes, and more. The full patch notes are right here. What caught my eye, though, was this:
- Deploys the Bovine Defense Force Initiative
What the hell?!
It didn’t take me long to figure out his was a way of addressing the game’s easy money exploit.
Here’s how the exploit worked: kill some cows, collect their hides, meditate for an hour, and the cows quickly spawn back into the world. The hides were worth a pretty penny, so it didn’t take long to completely break The Witcher 3’s economy. Given that it otherwise takes dozens of hours to build up a decent amount of money in the game, it’s not a surprise CD Projekt RED would stamp this out.
Instead of removing cows from the world or reducing the price of hides, however, they summon an incredibly difficult enemy assuredly going to kill anyone but the most high-level Witcher 3 players.
Here’s how the whole sequence plays out:
It’d be entirely possible to slay this beast later in the game, but if you make it that far, you’re not going to have money troubles at that point, either.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.