The Witcher 3 Gameplay Easter Eggs Nintendo Switch

Witcher 3 Easter Eggs on Switch: What Actually Exists and Where to Find Them

The Nintendo Switch port of The Witcher 3 is the Complete Edition, which means it has every hidden treasure area, secret dialogue option, and reference that the PC and console versions carry. Most people asking about easter eggs here are looking for things like the Mario mushroom in Skellige or the Crossroads signpost from The Witcher 1. They are all there. Nothing was removed for the portable release. What changed is visibility — you are playing on a small screen, often docked or undocked, and some of the more subtle environmental clues become harder to spot without pausing and looking around. The most commonly referenced easter eggs in the Switch version break down into three categories: visual references, audio callbacks, and interactive secrets. The Mario references are the easiest to find. There is a brown mushroom with red dots hidden behind a tree near the sawmill in Skellige, just past the bridge leading to Arremania. It looks exactly like a Super Mario Bros. power-up mushroom. There is also a second one near the windmill north of Crossroads. Both are static objects with no gameplay effect. They are just placement jokes. The Crossroads signpost appears in a few locations. The real Crossroads from The Witcher 1 is never visitable, but the town sign from that game shows up on a post near White Orchard during the early quest "Lilac and Gooseberries." It is easy to walk past because the area is still loading and your attention is on the quest marker. I found mine by finishing the initial fight with the relict and then actually walking toward the tree line instead of following Geralt's default path forward. The sign is about three meters off the main road, half-hidden behind some tall grass.

Hidden Treasure areas are the interactive easter eggs. There are twelve total across the base game and both expansions. Each one contains a diagram for a new gear set and usually some crafting materials. On Switch, the minimap does not always render the rune marks that indicate a Hidden Treasure location until you get within about fifteen meters. This is not a bug unique to Switch, but the lower resolution of the handheld mode makes the rune icon blend into the terrain more than it does on a 1080p TV. If you are hunting them systematically, unlock the map regions first, then check for small rune carvings on rocks or trees. The diagrams are in iron chests inside the ruins, and the chests can sometimes be locked behind a simple puzzle involving pressing a pressure plate or moving a lever. Audio easter eggs are less obvious. In the Hearts of Stone expansion, if you listen carefully near the Caeren Forest contract area, there is a distant sound of a horse whinnying that matches the audio cue from The Witcher 2 when entering a new region. It is subtle. Most players will not notice it on a first playthrough, especially with the Switch's downward-scaled audio output. It does not affect gameplay in any way. The CD Projekt Red logo easter egg shows up if you die and reload from a save. Before the loading screen fully fades in, there is a brief frame where you can see the studio logo at the bottom of the screen. It is the same as every other platform version. I originally missed this on Switch because I was playing in handheld mode with the brightness bumped up to compensate for the outdoor lighting. Lowering the brightness slightly made the logo visible during the transition. It is a single frame, so you would need to deliberately watch for it rather than just waiting for the game to load normally.

There is a counter-intuitive point about the Complete Edition on Switch that most guides skip. The game includes the next-gen update that was pushed out in late 2022. This means the Switch version runs at a different visual baseline than the original 2016 release. Some easter eggs that relied on older texture pops or missing geometry in the original port now behave differently. The mushroom in Skellige, for example, had a slight rendering artifact in the old version where it would flicker against certain backgrounds. The updated build does not have that artifact, so it looks more like a normal in-world object and is easier to overlook if you are expecting it to stand out visually. Another thing people miss is that a number of the "easter eggs" are actually just standard collectibles that were mislabeled in early wikis. The diagrams you get from Hidden Treasures were sometimes called secret locations in outdated guides. They are not secrets in the traditional sense. They are marked on your map once you discover the rune. The real secrets are the ones that do not trigger map markers, like the dialogue option with the drowners in the Velen swamp that only appears if you approach them while holding a sword drawn, or the NPC in Novigrad who references the developer's crunch culture if you talk to him during a specific time window in the main story. If you are trying to find all of this efficiently, do not rely on walkthrough videos alone. Record your own playthrough or take screenshots when you spot something unusual. The Switch version has a built-in screenshot function that you can trigger with the minus button. Going back through those images later is faster than re-traversing the same areas. I spent about forty-five minutes re-hiking the Skellige islands looking for a specific Hidden Treasure rune after I thought I had missed it. Turns out it was there the entire time, just too small to distinguish against the rock texture in handheld mode. I used the screenshot review method for the remaining six areas and found two more that I had completely overlooked on my first pass through Toussaint.

The main limitation of chasing easter eggs on this port is performance. The game is not buttery smooth on Switch, especially in Novigrad and Oxenfurt. Frame drops during combat can make it harder to notice environmental details because your focus stays on the HUD and enemy tells. If you want to do a pure easter egg hunt, play in a quiet area with no active contracts or random encounters nearby. The handholding quest markers and combat prompts disappear when you are not in an active mission, which reduces visual clutter on the smaller screen and makes it easier to spot subtle objects in the world.