Elden Ring modder chops down giant Erdtree for a performance boost
Elden Ring is, essentially, a game about people with different beliefs about a big golden tree. Some say it's god's grace made manifest, while others think it has an unnatural grip around their mortality and should be usurped of its power. K4richard, a disciple of the church of NexusMods, believes the tree is soaking up a little too much of their frame rate, so they got rid of it.
In Remove Erd Tree (FPS BOOST)(opens in new tab), a slightly misspelled mod (it's «Erdtree») for Elden Ring, K4richard deletes the centerpiece of FromSoftware's sprawling action RPG. That's like plucking the Death Star out of Star Wars or the ring out of Lord of the Rings; although their goal is to free up some frames, K4richard might have just written fanfiction that turns Elden Ring from a hundred hour adventure to a 20 minute short story.
K4richard's only other mod(opens in new tab) removes part of the model for one of the game's final bosses—who is, notably, fought near the Erdtree. Seeing this, I asked K4richard if he had something against the golden tree.
«The closer I got to the Erdtree the more demanding the game became,» K4richard told me of their struggle to maintain a stable frame rate in Elden Ring's second half. It's fitting that, in the final sections of the game, the physical and thematic core of the world held them back from finishing it.
K4richard plays the game on a five-year-old graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce GT 1030(opens in new tab), and an omnipotent tree wasn't going to get in their way. So they did what any PC gamer would do, and fixed it themselves.
«The Erdtree and a bunch of particle effects were clearly the root cause of the problem. After removing the tree and a couple of particles I was able to play at 30 fps on
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