You don’t have to rush to beat the main quest, but some sidequests do have time restrictions.
When I first started playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I figured I was on a time crunch: „I’ve got a tadpole in my head! I can’t dawdle!“ I wasn’t sure if this plot-important parasitization would progress to a critical state if I took too many long rests—the health and spell-restoring function of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Thankfully, this isn’t the original Fallout—you’re pretty free to take long rests whenever you see fit, even when some plot events seem like they might progress if you take too long. Sleeping can trigger scenes related to the main quest, but what we’ve found is that the quests themselves rarely advance without your input, unlike the notoriously time-limited companion quests of Baldur’s Gate 2.
