Since they finally received the massive DLC announcement they’d all been craving, Elden Ring players have all been basking in the warm glow of knowing that work on the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is definitely underway.
Many have also decided to undertake intense boss battle prep sessions that’ll likely help keep their skills as sharp as possible until the expansion’s arrival, even if some of the abilities honed by beating the game with a Bop-It or using the energy of your mind might not be completely relevant to the upcoming challenge.
If you’ve recently spent several hundred hours doing things like trying to defeat Malenia in first-person and fancy looking at the game from a different perspective while you recharge your batteries, you might want to take a look at a fan’s handiwork, which is currently taking Reddit by storm.
How impressed are you by this amazing re-creation of Elden Ring’s topography?
This cartographic creation is the subject of a recent thread on the subreddit r/Eldenring, the denizens of which have temporarily torn themselves away from Photoshopping Iron Fist Alexander into all of their favourite films to marvel at the work of user Alherath, who has produced a hand-drawn and painted re-creation of the game’s entire map.
In their post about this impressive composition, Alherath included an array of pictures that show both what the map looked like while it was still a work-in-progress and give you a closer look at some of the most detailed sections of the complete version.
“I envisioned it as a restoration, since the in-game map is so weathered.” they revealed in reply to one of the thread’s comments, separately explaining a bit of their method by adding: “(In the beginning,) I opened the game and taped my paper over the biggest monitor I had. Once I had the main proportions and wasn’t anxious about (having) the Weeping Peninsula fall off the bottom, I could just focus on the line work!
They also quipped: “I owe my life to the creators of the Elden Ring map app, without them I would have gone crazy trying to pan around in the actual game.”
Among the horde of Tarnished heaping praise on Alherath for their titanic effort, user _too_much_noise_ added to their compliments by asking: “Why don't you expand on it and try to imagine what the DLC’s map will look like?”
Alherath responded to this request by saying: “I'll definitely draw the DLC map when it comes out! Honestly, the entire time I was doing the cloud in the central ocean, I was thinking ‘If they alter this for the DLC it's going to be such a pain in the (bottom)’.”
Regardless of whether you’re now booting up your copy of Elden Ring to do some side-by-side comparisons between its map and Alherath’s, make sure to follow us for coverage of some interesting streamers and guides to Shadow of the Erdtree as soon as it arrives.