Elden Ring's 363 words

The catacombs

In 2022 two researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Florence Smith Nicholls and Michael Cook, went into a ruined church and a small dungeon near the start of Elden Ring and wrote down every note other players had left there, the way you'd record bits of pottery on a dig. They called it the first formal archaeological survey of a mostly single-player game, and they meant it. (Smith Nicholls and Cook, 2022)

At the end of a corridor in the Stormgate Catacombs, right before a doorway, someone had left Be wary of up. There's an Imp stuck to the wall above that doorway waiting to land on your head. Next to it was fire ahead, about the jet of flame in the next room, and in that room someone had written Be wary of fire and then Try attacking, which reads like terrible advice until you find out the fire trap switches off if you hit it.

In the church they found Seek lover on the exact spot where Ranni, a witch you only meet at night, eventually turns up, and Could this be a love? a few steps away. Across the two places they counted 18 notes and 22 bloodstains, the red marks the game leaves wherever another player died.

How a note works

You can't type anything. You pick a shape like Be wary of …, Try …, If only I had a … or Praise the …, drop one of the 363 words into the gap, and if you want to, stick a second half on with and then, but or one of eight other joining words. That works out at 823,565,325 possible notes, and nothing outside them is allowed.

The note then sits on the ground in other people's games for days. When somebody rates it, the game heals whoever wrote it, wherever they happen to be at that moment, including halfway through being hit by something large. (Upcomer)

Asking for help works the same way. If a boss keeps killing you, you can put a sign on the floor, a stranger gets pulled into your game, the two of you fight it together, and the second it dies they vanish, and you never find out who they were because there's no way to ask.

Where people stop

Steam publishes the share of a game's players who have earned each achievement, and most of Elden Ring's 42 are for killing a particular boss, so the list is more or less a map of where people quit. A quarter of the Steam players who own it never got as far as Roundtable Hold, the hub the game sends everyone to in the first few hours.

The first proper wall is Margit, the Fell Omen, a hunched knight standing in front of the first castle, and 29 percent of players have never got past him. About half have gone by the middle of the game. Malenia, the optional boss with the scariest reputation, has been beaten by 36.4 percent.

Working out how many people finished is annoying, because the endings come with three different achievements. More players have the one for the Age of the Stars ending (28.2 percent) than the one for becoming Elden Lord (23.9 percent), so at least 28.2 percent saw an ending of some kind.

The 363 words

The words live in the game's menu under twelve headings, and below they're in the same order you'd scroll through them. Most of it is what you'd expect from a game about castles and monsters, so you can write Try attacking tail or Hidden path ahead and actually help somebody.

Then you get to Concepts, which has 59 words including joy, despair, hope, love and regret, and Phrases, which is 30 things you might say to a stranger, like so lonely..., I want to go home... and don't give up.

The rude ones

It isn't a polite list. There's liar, traitor, wicked sort and pathetic sort in there, and players have spent four years combining words into dirty jokes, the most famous being Try fingers, but hole, which I'm not going to explain. (Inverse) What a note can't do is reach a person, because it has no name on it and lands on the floor for whoever walks past, so the worst it can really do is send someone the wrong way.

Yui Tanimura, who directed Dark Souls II, which had the same notes, said in 2014 that most of the ones his team saw were helpful and only a handful were there to trip people up. The one he remembered was a single word, Friend, left next to the body of a player who'd had a horrible death, and rated very highly. (GamesBeat, via GameBanshee)

Leave one

Same magnets as the game. Pick where in the game your note belongs, put it together from the same shapes and words, and it stays here for the next person, who can mark it good. There's no text box, so nobody can sneak in a word that isn't on the fridge.

The car in the snow

Hidetaka Miyazaki, who made Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, told Keza MacDonald at Eurogamer in 2010 where all this came from. He was driving up a hill in a snowstorm and got stuck, and so did the car behind him. (Eurogamer, 28 May 2010)

“The car following me also got stuck, and then spontaneously the one behind it bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill. That's it! That's how everyone can get home! And then it was my turn, and everyone started pushing my car up the hill and I managed to get home safely. I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove, though. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped the car.”Hidetaka Miyazaki to Eurogamer, 2010, quoted by Keza MacDonald in PC Gamer

On the way home he wondered whether the last person in the line got home too, and figured he'd never meet any of the people who had pushed him.

“Precisely because it's fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer. Like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much.”