Elden Ring’s “spirit ashes” are one of its standout new features, letting you summon ghostly monsters to fight by your side. But now one Elden Ring modder, known as King Bore Haha, has taken the concept to a new extreme.
As mentioned, spirit ashes are summons you can call upon, but only during very specific moments in battle. To use them, you need to find the spirit calling bell, ensure you have ample focus points, and wait for a tombstone-looking icon to appear on-screen. Spirit ash summons are quite a boon during tough boss encounters, often serving as a deciding factor between surviving a fight and respawning at the nearest site of grace. I use them all the time, and they’ve saved my ass more than once.
On Twitter, King Bore Haha, a modder who’s working on a Dark Souls overhaul called Shadow of the Eclipse, tweeted a clip of himself seemingly conjuring a spirit jellyfish, one of the earliest spirit ashes you find in Stormhill. Except what appeared wasn’t a jellyfish, but something far more terrifying: one of those terrible, thresher-like chariots that one-shots you in dungeons. And it certainly one-shots the knights he points it at.
“This spirit ash is insanely broken,” King Bore wrote alongside the video. “No idea what [FromSoft] was thinking.”
The modder later returned to the scene of his crime with an even more ridiculous summon: a walking mausoleum. The gargantuan quadrupedal fortress’ jump is a giant area-of-effect attack, so King Bore took unavoidable damage. Still, he fared far better than his permanently flattened foes.
It’s worth reminding that these spirit ashes aren’t real, so don’t bother scouring The Lands Between for them. It’s just a modder having some fun.
King Bore told Kotaku that the chariot and mausoleum summons were “proofs of concept” for other ideas he’s working on, and that it’s not actually hard to implement a mod like, say, switching spirit ashes around. What’s hard is figuring out exactly what data needs changed, and where.
“The spirit ash system (internally referred to as the very cute ‘Buddy [System]’) has been implemented in parameters, which are essentially a series of spreadsheets that contain game data,” King Bore said. “FromSoft uses Microsoft Excel to implement this data. I swear to god this is true. Anyway, parameters are a great system for modding, they’re extremely accessible and easy to modify thanks to the hard work of the tool makers and format boys, who are all smarter and cooler than me. Since their hard work is already done, all that’s left for me is figuring out how these systems work and changing values to do what I want.”
Very modest words for a man who can summon a walking mausoleum.
As you may have noticed, Elden Ring players are doing all kinds of weird stuff in the game. Some folks are becoming deadly hedgehogs thanks to one particular weapon skill, while others are killing the turtle pope, because why not? Then you’ve got the select few willingly blowing themselves up just to score easy PvP kills. This game is wild, and I’m here for it.