The Elden Ring speedrunning community is hungry for new exploits to crack the open-world FromSoftware game wide open and it might’ve just discovered one. As part of an ongoing $10,000 tournament, someone has found a way to displace the player character just enough to allow them to walk on air and skip huge chunks of the recently released expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree. Unbelievably, the tournament isn’t even over yet, but the community’s already found “the holy grail of DLC skips.”
As first reported by GamesRadar+, the glitch (which has been dubbed Legasus), involves interrupting the animation of summoning the player’s spectral steed, Torrent. Discovered by the player Joo, the glitch can be initiated in a variety of ways, including the use of the DLC’s perfume weapons or hitting a Site of Grace where players can rest.
Order Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree: Amazon | Best Buy | Humble Bundle
If the player manages to interrupt the mounting animation at the exact right frame, they can achieve a “limited no-gravity” effect that simply allows the player to walk on air. The initial animation isn’t so much canceled as it is “paused” while the player commits to another action. That last bit is especially important because in order to maintain the Legasus effect, you can never idle.
There are actually a million caveats to making Legasus work, which you can read up on here, but the gist of it is that movement isn’t exactly free once you manage to activate the glitch. You can only move forward or step backward and you must always be doing something like holding guard with a shield out. If you idle, you’ll be restored back to the point at which you activated the glitch, and if you accidentally break the effect somewhere else, you naturally risk plummeting to your death. Additionally, in order to turn, you have to use a bow, aim in the direction you’d like to go, and then dodge roll that way.
Once you get it working though, you can get pretty far, and players have been using it to get into areas like Shadow of the Erdtree’s Abyssal Woods (which apparently sucks ass) while skipping segments of it that might be a pain in the ass. That’s because you can also “unload” Torrent, which commits to the rest of the summoning animation and breaks the glitch exactly where you are, allowing players to tactically position themselves to die near checkpoints and respawn there.
The tournament that prompted this find is being held by Distortion2, one of the most prominent speedrunners of FromSoftware’s catalog, and a guy who’s beaten Elden Ring with nothing more than his character’s ass. The competition, which is going till August 11, challenges other runners to finish Shadow of the Erdtree under some barbaric conditions of Distortion’s choosing. The DLC must be completed at rune level 1 using weapons that can only be found in the expansion, and players can only raise their Scadutree Blessing—a separate leveling system implemented in Shadow of the Erdtree—one level per every defeated boss fight.
Yeah, it’s fucking brutal, but it also seems like exactly the kind of masochistic gauntlet that Souls runners love to take on. Given these early results, it seems like the tournament has already accomplished exactly what Distortion wanted, and kickstarted a new race to find cool tech for the next great Elden Ring speedrun.