While you're waiting for Shadow Of The Erdtree, Elden Ring has some free hair for you

This once verdant ground is now wrecked by the passage of time. My terrible nemesis looms before me, inevitable and devastating. Many have fallen to it, but I will overcome. Oh, Elden Ring? I was talking about male pattern baldness. It will eventually destroy all that was once beautiful about my hairline, but at least I’ll have five fancy new hairdos to pick from when the open world RPG’s newest free update releases this Thursday, 20th of June. There’s also some QOL tweaks to inventory management and summoning pools, but I can’t wear those, can I?

As decreed by the official Elden Ring twonker account, the voluminous goblet of Shadow Of The Erdtree is getting a pre-release appetiser in the form of a free update patch for the base game. This will no doubt plump the code-pillows for the majestic expansion to plonk itself down comfortably on, but it’s also bringing some more substantial changes. There’s those aforementioned hairdos - five of them, in fact. There’s also some inventory tweaks. Newly obtained items will display an exclamation mark, and a new ‘recent items’ tab is getting added, presumably to soothe potential inventory bloat after the expansion pieces out its new lore revelations on to several dozen pairs of trousers, each less illuminating than the last.

Good news for people with mates, too. Summoning pools - to my understanding, the groups of summonable allies in each region - can now be enabled or disabled individually through a new Map Functions menu. Active summoning pools will now be carried over to new game plus, too.

As you may have surmised, it’s Elden Ring frenzy at the treehouse this week. You can barely move without someone whispering cryptic prognostications at you. Just this morning, I asked Ollie how to get the new coffee maker working, and he told me to seek the ‘three unclosing eyes of the eyeless one’. Took me twenty minutes to work out he was talking about the plug socket, by which time he’d disappeared in a fit of manic laughter. A slippery one for sure, although you could do worse than booking up on his complete guide to Elden Ring’s lore and story. He writes as smooth as Vaati narrates, say I.