Shadow Of The Erdtree mod resets the difficulty to Elden Ring levels and gets rid of Scadutree fragments

Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC yet hovers at Mixed in the blood-encrusted annals of the Steam user review consensus. As Nic wrote earlier in the week, a portion of the negative feedback is aimed at the expansion's difficulty, which is certainly a Thing To Hear after years of being told by kindly gamers that I only hand out low review scores because I can't press the buttons in the right order.

As publishers Bandai Namco have sweetly observed, struggling players are perhaps forgetting that you can raise your overall power level by gathering Scadutree Fragments, a system of collectibles designed to ensure a tough challenge even for endgame players, while giving you the option of effectively rebalancing the expansion through exploration. The downside there, as a few people have pointed out, is that some players don't want to hunt for collectibles before they can topple the bosses.

Here to save the day and reconcile the warring parties are the modders and in particular, Sereenaty, whose Normalized DLC damage mod (thanks, VG247) adjusts damage dealt and received within the DLC areas to be more in line with the base game, theoretically doing away with the need for Scadutree Fragments. As the modder sums up, "if you're tired of having your entire build thrown in the Trash just because you're not into collectibles, this mod is for you". The mod also swaps out the bulk of the game's Scadutree Fragments for Rune Arcs, though you'll apparently still receive a few Fragments from enemy drops.

My schadenfreude about the internet's git-gudders being hoisted by their own quote-dunks aside, I don't have a magic disappearing goat in this particular Elden horse race. I haven't played Shadow Of The Erdtree yet, partly because a lot of people at the Treehouse are already playing it and partly because I'm more interested these days in psychedelic bee products. Still, I'm interested in the angle that searching for Fragments in Erdtree is a chore you must undertake if you want to make headway, and how that differs from the experience of levelling a character by gathering runes. If you're playing, I'm keen to know whether you feel like you're being forced to search for them, or whether discovering them is coming about as part of routine exploration, which is the major thrill of any From Software game for me.

People who don't want to mod Erdtree and also don't want to be speared and barbecued by any given foe should definitely check out our guides section. Ollie, Kiera and Jeremy have put together a list of all 50 Scadutree Fragments and their locations. They also strongly recommend that you fight Erdtree's bosses in this order. Forget modders - guides writers are the true champions of the realm. They git gud only to ensure that we might git gud in turn.