I was scrolling my TikTok (the social media app governments love to ban), enjoying the usual gamut of Elden Ring memes, when I stumbled upon a new mod that lets you call up and hop into jets and tanks to murk fools in The Lands Between. This mod pack is broken af, and I just couldn’t stop laughing at it.
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Actually, that’s the name of, too: Elden Ring Broken AF Edition is the latest add-on by Garden of Eyes, a growing troupe of modders focusing on creating new Elden Ring content. The team has produced some cool mods for FromSoft’s latest kill-you-nonstop action-RPG already, like letting you spectate boss fights, turning the legendary hero Let Me Solo Her into a spirit ash, and adding flying broomsticks. The group’s biggest undertaking, first announced last August, is a complete overhaul with “fully functioning” gun parries à la Bloodborne, additional horse skins for Torrent, a host of new weapons, and more. While that’s under development, Garden of Eyes quietly worked on the Broken AF Edition mod pack, which dropped on March 28. The results are wild.
Elden Ring isn’t hard when you’re in a tank
You might think I’m being facetious, but this ain’t a joke. When you whistle to summon Torrent in Broken AF Edition, your Tarnished will jump into a fighter jet or armored tank to blast goons into smithereens. The vehicles come strapped with a few world-destroying weapons, such as bomb strikes, machine guns, nukes, and heat-seeking missiles. The best part? Shooting barely expends FP, the game’s stamina gauge, so you can literally perform a never-ending drive-by.
As you can see in the above video, Garden of Eyes turned multiple enemies into Swiss cheese, while making short work of a handful of difficut bosses, too. Having a hard time with Malenia, Blade of Miquella or Starscourge Radahn, two of The Lands Between’s most notorious jerks? Not Garden of Eyes, as he simply bombed both chumps into oblivion before zooming off to find more kills. Even Dragonlord Placidusax and the Fire Giant were no match for the explosive barrage, quickly succumbing to the hail of gunfire and missiles.
The mod pack was inspired by a YouTuber
Garden of Eyes’ Broken AF Edition mod pack was actually inspired by a separate mod found by a YouTuber. Skumnut (who used to stream on Twitch before getting permanently banned) describes himself as a “silly Souls guy.” He plays all the popular Soulslikes, from Bloodborne to Dark Souls to Elden Ring, with his videos regularly doing over 100k views. In a March 21 upload, Skumnut said he came across a “fully functional” tank in Elden Ring this year. Unfortunately, the mod’s creator posted it to the Chinese social media platform bilibili and had no intention of releasing it globally. So, Skumnut hit up Garden of Eyes on Discord to create something “you’ve never seen” in Elden Ring.
Skumnut told Kotaku over Twitter DMs that he was “super stoked” to get his hands on the mod after the “fantastic job” the Garden of Eyes team did. While he provided the ideas, Skumnut gave all props to Garden of Eyes for going “above and beyond” with Broken AF Edition. He also shouted out all the modders who are contributing to the game’s longevity.
“After working with Garden of Eyes, I now know the potential of modding [in] Elden Ring,” Skumnut said. “There are so many possibilities when it comes to modding this game, and I would like to see more crazy silly mods like this one in the future. Ones that no one would ever expect to see in Elden Ring.”
Garden of Eyes told Kotaku over Twitter DMs that Broken AF Edition is one of “multiple other overhaul mods” the team currently has available in early access via Patreon that “will be released for free later down the road.” He also confirmed the mod “swaps out” your trusty double-jumping horse Torrent and explained that the project’s hardest aspect was getting flying mounts to work
“The mod itself took around two weeks to create, but that’s because the base of flying mounts was already created from the Harry Potter flying brooms (which took around a month of constant work)“ Garden of Eyes said. “So the time for the Broken AF mod was mainly one of our team members Luna creating the bullets, and me creating item icons and descriptions, then compiling everything into a playable mod. The hardest part was definitely the flying mounts, as building a base for that took a lot of experimenting and trial and error to get done, and it allowed us to create flying hippogriffs, brooms, and fighter jets!”
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As Skumnut suggested, I’ve never witnessed anything like this in Elden Ring before. I’d love to see how my arch-nemesis Godfrey, First Elden Lord tries to deal with my newfound military mighty. What’s a puny axe to a freakin’ nuke?
Update, 04/06/23, 09:55 a.m. ET: Added comments from Garden of Eyes.