Struggling with Shadow of the Erdtree’s difficulty? Hunt down these new items to improve your damage and defense.
Struggling with Shadow of the Erdtree’s difficulty? Hunt down these new items to improve your damage and defense.
The Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, was one of the most highly anticipated gaming experiences this year. That hype was humbled as players slammed into higher difficulty than they were expecting. But like other FromSoftware games, there are ways to smooth out that difficulty spike — namely, by collecting new items that make your character more powerful, some of which you can pick up just by exploring, no boss-beating required.
These items, called Scadutree Fragments, empower your character’s damage and defenses. They’re scattered around the DLC’s area much like the Golden Seeds that increase your amount of health and FP flasks in the base game. There’s another new type of item called Revered Spirit Ashes that likewise increases the strength of your summoned spirit ashes and ensures Torrent, your spiritual steed, can take more hits. But the Scadutree Fragments will likely make more of a difference when fighting bosses and making your way through dungeons.
Players who’ve waded deep into the DLC have recommended struggling players prioritize picking up these Scadutree Fragments to survive the tougher difficulty — even players over level 200 are having a rough time, so it does seem like FromSoftware more or less equalized the experience in the DLC by scaling the challenge to these fragments rather than give higher-leveled characters an edge.
Once you’ve picked up Scadutree Fragments, you’ll need to manually apply them while sitting at a site of grace — choose the new Shadow Blessings option from the menu (same with Revered Spirit Ashes too). Also note that, just like with Golden Seeds, you’ll need to collect an escalating amount of Scadutree Fragments to upgrade with each level. Your first upgrade will only take one, while the next three will take two Scadutree Fragments apiece, then three for the next few upgrade levels, and so on.
We haven’t found all of these yet, but we’ll post the location of each of the fragments that we find to help you in the early game. Note that most of these can be found just by exploring the Land of Shadow — we’ll point out if there are tough enemies guarding the fragments, but you can bolster your character by three to four blessing levels without having to face a boss.Why are Scadutree Fragments important?
FromSoftware always intended the Scadutree Fragments to be a balancing system allowing players to feel a sense of challenge no matter what level they are when starting Shadows of the Erdtree.
