Noted Souls YouTuber Lance McDonald has uncovered some, hm, intoxicating content that was cut from Elden Ring’s final build fairly late into development from the looks of it. By working with another YouTuber named Sekiro Dubi, the two restored a surprisingly extensive mechanic FromSoftware removed that had you collecting dreams to make alcohol. Hey, the Lands Between is a sad place. Everyone could use a drink or two to numb the pain after getting bodied by the Starscourge Radahn again.
Sekiro Dubi, a youtuber who uploads videos on FromSoft games, posted a video over the weekend of a “cut content feature” from Elden Ring he found in the network test version of the game. The feature was about collecting “dream mist,” a fog-like cloud emanating from creatures, by using the removed item St. Trina’s Crystal Ball. To demonstrate how the mechanic would’ve worked, Sekiro Dubi went scooping up the dreams of various unconscious creatures including those shitty land octopuses in Limgrave.
McDonald walked through the differences in the network test version of the game versus the final version, where remains of the features and storylines can still be spotted. For example, Stormhill Shack in Stormhill was previously called Scavenger’s Shack, except in the older version a monk named Reeling Rico occupied the hut before Roderika sat there. This Rico was a total alcoholic who eagerly hoped you’d help him craft the “dreambrew,” a forbidden drink known as “the nectar of the demigods.” In practice, it’s this alcoholic beverage composed of at least two dream mists that can be used to “uncover someone’s deepest darkest secrets.”
Talk to Rico and he would’ve given you St. Trina’s Crystal Ball, an item used to gather the dream mist from sleeping beings. As illustrated by McDonald’s video, there were supposed to be soundly sleeping creatures dotting the Lands Between with this dream mist hovering over them. Collecting their dream mist with the crystal ball and returning to Rico the alcoholic monk at the Scavenger’s Shack would net you one bottle of dreambrew, which would then open up new dialogue options if you offered the drink to certain NPCs. For example, if you gave the dreambrew to the merchant Kalé in the Church of Elleh, he’d joke about being “an honest merchant of good standing” before accepting the dreambrew and immediately knocking out after drinking it. The lightweight ended up having a horrifying nightmare about fire burning his eyeballs with you standing right next to him, which is a reference to a larger lore thing involving the Flame of Frenzy and the story of all the merchants. Talk about deep, dark secrets.
McDonald told Kotaku over Twitter messages that members of a community modding Discord server dedicated to Souls games uncovered many aspects of this cut content before him. He just used all that research and reverse engineered Elden Ring to stitch the questline back together.
“I jailbroke my PlayStation 4 which allowed me to create a backup copy of the network test,” McDonald said. “I hacked it to remove the network checks among many other things through similar methods.”
Trina, for what it’s worth, is a fairly enigmatic figure in the game, mostly only appearing in relation to sleep-related items such as this one. But like all things Elden Ring, there’s the strong suggestion in this video that Trina might simply be in some sort of different dimension or something. It also appears that you can see remnants of the cut content all over the place, notably when it comes to Seluvis’ potion-centric questlines.
This isn’t the only piece of cut content Elden Ring players have found, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. So far, what’s maybe the most ridiculous is a pair of removed underwear dataminers are equipping through various hacks. There’s no telling what other secrets the Lands Between is hiding, and maybe getting NPCs drunk on some dreambrew would’ve spilt the tea.