Beyond manticores and kayrans and Dagon, one near-mythical monster in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt continues to haunt players above all else: a little floating sledgehammer that pops up between Geralt's legs.
The Witcher 3 is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in just six months but a bizarre bug — a glitch, not an endrega — continues to be a problem for the rare player who is unlucky enough to be cursed with it. It sees a small blacksmith's hammer appear between Geralt's ankles and stay there perpetually.
Reddit user Idratherhikeout brought it to fans' attention once again this week when they posted an image of Geralt with the infamous hammer. "I got infected by the sledgehammer bug," they said. "Is it still not fixable?
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"I am playing Witcher 3 for the Nth time and I now have a sledgehammer between my legs," they continued. "It’s always there. Walking. Under roach. Under me swimming. Weirdly it switched to Uma during their scenes at Kaer Morhen. Any known fix?"
The short answer is no. CD Projekt is now deep in development on the next Witcher game so has long since moved on from The Witcher 3, and told IGN there are no plans to address the hammer bug. Some infected players have allegedly found success by shifting back a few saves and deleting all the infected ones, but there's no guaranteed fix.
Every player who does come across the bug seemingly spawns a few dozen who simply find it hilarious though. "Why is this so funny," said one user in the comments. "I quite enjoy this," said another.
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This comes despite the hammer bug being around for years. "Help. Why is there a hammer under Geralt?" asked Zelter7 in July. "What the hell is this hammer doing between his legs. It's everywhere," said PaschalisG16 in 2023. "There is a constant floating hammer between my Geralt's feet," said Divexz in 2017.
It was even there at launch, evidenced by tgat's post on June 4, 2015, barely two weeks after The Witcher 3 launched. "What's the floating hammer under Geralt?" they asked, innocently.
"So, for a couple game hours now I haven't been able to figure out what this thing is. It looks like a small sledgehammer or blacksmiths hammer and its standing upright on the ground between Geralt's legs, and it moves with him.
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"Even in cutscenes, it'll be in the shot, but not under Geralt, it's always where he eventually ends up. So it seems like some sort of character mark. Anyone have any idea?" But no one did then, and no one does now.
This little bug has thankfully not impacted the overall reception of The Witcher 3, which has otherwise gone down as one of the most beloved video games of all time. CD Projekt updated it with the Next-Gen Update in December 2022 and more recently released an official mod editor on PC called REDkit.
Players have used it to grow The Witcher 3 even more, adding everything from a morality and reputation system that adds even more consequences to Geralt's actions to a fully customizable character creator that lets players take on the role of a sorceress.
These have breathed more life into the game while CD Projekt focuses on its many upcoming Witcher projects. The next mainline game is codenamed Polaris and will star a new protagonist, and an entry with more mass appeal is being developed at The Molasses Flood too. Fool's Theory is also developing a remake of the original The Witcher in Unreal Engine 5.
Image Credit: PaschalisG16 on Reddit
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
