Elden Ring Secrets & Easter Eggs: What the Community Found

01 Illusory Walls — and the 50-Hit Mystery

Elden Ring carries forward FromSoftware's tradition of hiding paths behind fake walls, but the community quickly discovered the mechanic goes deeper than expected. Almost every illusory wall shatters on a single attack or roll. A handful, however, require repeated strikes — the most notorious, found in Volcano Manor, took one determined player approximately fifty hits before it finally gave way. This single discovery sparked a second wave of wall-checking across the entire game.

• How to find them: Attack or roll into any wall that looks structurally out of place — tight dead ends, decorative bookshelves you cannot move past, or any section where a room "should" logically continue.
• Shortcut tools: Using Margit's Shackle or Mohg's Shackle near a hidden wall instantly reveals it. The sorcery Law of Regression has the same effect and is the fastest area-wide check available to casters.
• Notable locations: The Academy of Raya Lucaria contains bookshelf walls hiding a balcony chest and the Comet sorcery. Sellia Hideaway — a dungeon relevant to Sellen's questline — sits behind an illusory rock face northeast of the Church of the Plague. Road's End Catacombs conceals three consecutive hidden walls that form the only path to the boss room.
• Why it matters: Hidden behind these walls you will find key sorceries, upgrade stones, and access to entire optional dungeons. Skipping wall-checking means leaving entire questlines — and some of the best gear — permanently locked.

02 Enemies in Disguise — Larval Tear Farming and a Fake Margit

Scattered across the Lands Between are enemies that look entirely ordinary until you damage them enough — at which point they reveal their true, far more dangerous form and drop a Larval Tear when killed. Larval Tears are the only item that allows you to respec your character at Rennala, making these disguised enemies among the most valuable optional encounters in the game.

• Limgrave: A slow-moving Wandering Noble near the Agheel Lake area suddenly transforms into a Runebear mid-fight. The tonal shift from "harmless wanderer" to "enormous mauling bear" has startled countless players.
• Liurnia: A Giant Lobster patrolling the lake shore disguises itself as a passive creature. Attacking it triggers a transformation into a Grafted Scion — one of the game's earliest and most lethal introductions to the combat system.
• Capital Outskirts: A Commoner near the Outer Wall Phantom Tree site of grace transforms into a copy of Margit the Fell Omen. This one drops no Larval Tear, making it purely a lore and surprise encounter — a reminder that the omen lurks in more places than his boss arena.
• Why it matters: Larval Tears are finite and tied almost entirely to these transformed enemies and specific chest locations. Knowing where they are allows you to plan respec opportunities rather than accidentally lock yourself out.

03 Mohgwyn Palace — Two Ways In, One is Missable

Mohgwyn Palace is the blood-soaked hidden realm ruled by Mohg, Lord of Blood, and accessing it requires stepping well off the beaten path. Most players stumble into it (if at all) through White Mask Varre's questline — one of the earliest NPC interactions in the game, and one almost nobody takes seriously at first.

• Route 1 — Varre's questline: Speak to Varre at The First Step, follow his questline through multiple steps including invading other players' worlds and anointing a cloth in maiden's blood, and he eventually hands you the Pureblood Knight's Medal — a use-once item that teleports you directly to the Palace.
• Route 2 — Consecrated Snowfield portal: In the western Consecrated Snowfield (itself hidden behind the Haligtree Secret Medallion route), a teleporter near the Yelough Anix Ruins sends you into Mohgwyn Palace without touching Varre's questline at all. This is the only access if you missed or refused Varre early on.
• Why it matters: Beyond the Mohg boss fight, the Palace's cliffside is the most efficient rune-farming spot in the base game. Players discovered that standing on the cliff and using the Bloody Slash or ranged abilities on the crowd of sleeping albinaurics below generates enormous rune counts per cycle, even before late-game multipliers.

04 Placidusax — The Hidden Dragon God

Light story spoiler ahead. Elden Ring contains one of its most awe-inspiring optional boss encounters in a location so well-concealed that many players complete the entire game without discovering it exists. Dragonlord Placidusax is an ancient two-headed dragon deity accessible only through a specific hidden action near Maliketh's arena in Crumbling Farum Azula.

• How to find it: After reaching the Beside the Great Bridge site of grace in Crumbling Farum Azula, head back down the elevator and navigate to the broken-edged cliffs overlooking the spiral structure below. At a specific exposed ledge, a context prompt appears to "Lie Down." Resting there sends you into a time-suspended arena where Placidusax awaits.
• No waypoints, no directions: The game provides zero hints that this encounter exists. The community pieced it together by exploring every edge and surface of the Farum Azula map after launch.
• Why it matters: Defeating Placidusax yields the Remembrance of the Dragonlord, exchangeable for powerful dragon-themed abilities. More importantly, the fight itself — a two-headed god dissolving in and out of gold lightning — is one of the most visually spectacular optional encounters in any FromSoftware game.

05 Patches and the FromSoftware Tradition

If you have played any previous FromSoftware title, you already know Patches. The gleefully treacherous merchant has appeared in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and 3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro — and Elden Ring is no exception. His appearance is a long-running studio easter egg that veteran players look forward to with a kind of fond dread.

• Where to find him: Patches ambushes you in Murkwater Cave, Limgrave — presenting himself as a boss encounter. The key is to stop attacking once he surrenders, which he will do mid-fight. Killing him after surrender makes him permanently dead; sparing him opens his merchant shop.
• His signature move: If you follow Patches to Ruin-Strewn Precipice later in the game, he once again pushes you off a ledge — a callback to his identical trick in Dark Souls. He then throws you a Grovel for Mercy gesture, which is both an apology and a taunt.
• Jar Helm tribute: The Jar Helm — associated with Patches' questline in Volcano Manor — became a community in-joke because it resembles the iconic pot-helmet worn by "Let Me Solo Her," a legendary co-op player who helped thousands of players defeat Malenia. The item takes on extra meaning as a piece of living community history embedded in the game.
• Why it matters: Beyond the items and lore, Patches is one of the clearest signals that FromSoftware games share a continuous creative DNA. Missing him means missing a piece of the studio's sense of humour.

06 Berserk References — A Deep Tribute

Elden Ring was developed with significant creative input from Hidetaka Miyazaki and world-building contributions linked to the late Kentaro Miura, creator of the manga Berserk. The game is laden with deliberate references to Berserk's characters, imagery, and mythology — some surface-level, others buried in lore text.

• Radahn: General Starscourge Radahn — a massive warrior who held back the stars through sheer will — closely mirrors Nosferatu Zodd, Berserk's most iconic apostle. Both are colossal, horseback-riding warriors of superhuman strength. Radahn's tragic final state, consumed by Scarlet Rot but still fighting, echoes Zodd's own cursed existence.
• The Eclipse and the Golden Order: Berserk's Eclipse event — where a solar eclipse transforms a world — finds a visual echo in the Elden Ring's golden Erdtree and the way the world shifts around its fate. The burning Erdtree's visual presence deliberately evokes Berserk's apocalyptic imagery.
• Blaidd the Half-Wolf: Blaidd's design — a towering wolf-headed warrior bound in loyal service — is a clear nod to the wolf-knight archetype Miura made famous. His questline, ending in tragedy, carries unmistakable Berserk tonal weight.
• Why it matters: These references are not random — they are a considered tribute from one creative legacy to another. Understanding them enriches both the lore reading and the emotional resonance of the characters involved.

07 Hidden Mechanics the Game Never Explains

Several of Elden Ring's most useful systems are never described in any tutorial screen, item description, or NPC dialogue. The community reverse-engineered them through experimentation and careful observation.

• Weather and elemental damage: Rain actively reduces fire-based attack effectiveness — both yours and enemies'. The same rain increases lightning damage. Players fighting fire-breathing enemies in Limgrave's storms noticed the shift before the wiki confirmed it. Planning around weather events (or using them as a timing window) can change the difficulty of open-world encounters significantly.
• Torrent mounting invincibility frames: The animation of mounting Torrent grants real invincibility frames — you take no damage and suffer no stagger during the mounting sequence. This is not a tooltip; it was discovered by players noticing they were surviving hits that should have killed them mid-mount.
• Riding through poison and rot: Torrent prevents poison and Scarlet Rot buildup in open-world areas entirely. Swamps that would rapidly fill your status bar on foot are safely crossable on horseback. This does not apply in closed dungeons.
• Rainbow Stones as fall-safety testers: Throwing a Rainbow Stone off a cliff reveals whether a drop is survivable. If the stone shatters on impact, the fall is lethal. If it remains intact and glows, you can safely jump. This is the game's hidden tool for navigating the many tempting-looking ledge shortcuts.
• Crystal Darts and construct enemies: Throwing Crystal Darts at golem-type enemies — Erdtree Burial Watchdogs, imp-type constructs, and golem giants — inflicts a frenzy-like state that causes them to turn on nearby enemies. One dart can clear a room of constructs by making them fight each other.
• Message appraisals restore HP: Every time another player rates your left message as "Excellent," you receive a heal equivalent to one use of your Flask of Crimson Tears. Leaving genuinely useful (or entertaining) messages in high-traffic areas creates a passive healing resource that compounds over time.
• Paintings as treasure hunts: Seven paintings found across the Lands Between depict real locations. Finding the exact viewpoint shown in each painting — standing in the right spot and looking in the right direction — causes the ghost of the painter to appear and leave a reward. There are no quest markers for any of this.