We all know Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki loves poisoning players, but apparently there exists an inconspicuous wall in FromSoftware’s latest game that can inflict a toxic status effect just as well as any swamp.
As prolific Elden Ring hacker Zullie the Witch shows in her latest video, a specific section of rocky wall located below the Volcano Manor’s Temple of Eiglay (i.e. where most folks will fight their first Godskin Noble) is able to inflict a poisonous status effect. It’s easy to miss, however. I didn’t even know you could safely fall to a nearby ledge until seeing it pointed out.
After seeing it for myself, I can understand how more daring Tarnished might have been confused. Walking into the wall, it’s almost as if your character is stepping into the same goop found elsewhere in the game, complete with fitting sound effects. The poison even sticks to you if you roll, appropriately causing the status to briefly continue building up despite leaving the danger zone.
Zullie explains that the wall being poisonous has to do with something known as “hit material,” a chunk of code that essentially tells Elden Ring how a surface is supposed to interact with the player. Hit material denotes two things: what kind of footstep sounds the game should play as the character moves through different terrain and if the environment should inflict some sort of damage or status effect.
Somehow, the wall in question was tagged as “hit material 25” during Elden Ring’s development, and it’s this apparent typo that makes that small section of geography poisonous to the player character.
As more time passes since Elden Ring’s launch, we continue to learn more and more about how it was created. It’s obvious that making games of all sizes is hard, but it’s still funny to see how even something so rich and ambitious is barely held together by duct tape. Kudos on getting this one out the door in decent shape, FromSoftware.
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