Attention Elden Ring players. Users on Reddit and Twitter have shown that Elden Ring Hackers enter players’ games, crash them and send the players into recursive loops, doomed to die once they log back in.
Demonstrated in the video by @EldenRingUpdate on Twitter, you can see an intruder activate a skill that immediately crashes the game. This is followed by subsequent login attempts where the player is loaded off-premises and falls.
⚠️Elden Ring PSA for PC Players⚠️There is an exploit going on on PC where hackers will corrupt your save file while invading you. First they will crash your game, then when you open it again your character will constantly drop dead… pic.twitter.com/8et3bl8T1IMarch 18, 2022
In terms of prevention, there are two real options for the player concerned:
- Avoid playing online: You don’t necessarily have to start Elden Ring in offline mode. Co-op and invasions are opt-in by area, and you can choose not to concern yourself with this aspect. However, this is far from an ideal solution.
- Back up your saved files: Elden Ring saves are located in C:/Users/[name]/AppData/Roaming/EldenRing (you must have “view hidden files” enabled in File Explorer to see them). Just copy the folder whose name is a long string of numbers and keep the backup somewhere safe, and update it as you see fit.
If you find yourself a victim of this prank and don’t have a backup of your saved files, some users have reported a solution to get yourself out of the deadly loop. It’s still possible to bend to another place of grace while falling, with the only complication being that you have a very small window to do so before dying and being sent back to a loading screen.
Draiganedig on the Elden Ring subreddit claims that Alt-F4ing from Elden Ring will give you more time for the maneuver the next time you log in, but I haven’t been able to test this. Pressing “Y” on an Xbox-esque controller while on the map screen will center your cursor on the Roundtable Hold site of grace (a useful quality of life feature, frankly, even outside of this situation). The idea is to open the map, quickly press Y during your short period between deaths, then start hammering the button to “confirm” your choice, which defaults to “A” on Xbox gamepads. I’ve embedded a video of a Twitch streamer, Kaimitsu_Enju, who successfully performed the maneuver:
A similar hack that corrupted save files using bugs left behind by intruders existed in Dark Souls 3, and I remember bugged intruder items floating around in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on Games for Windows Live. There have been concerns in the community that a full malware security vulnerability present in Dark Souls 1-3 multiplayer could be carried over to Elden Ring, but Bandai Namco acknowledged the issue and nothing of the sort appears in the month since its release. van Elden Ring. However, Dark Souls 3’s PC servers will remain offline.