Elden Ring mods: the best mods and how to install them | TechRadar

Elden Ring mods: the best mods and how to install them

Elden Ring mods are the perfect way to stir up and enhance your journey through the Lands Between. What better way to enjoy FromSoftware’s latest action RPG epic than to change it to your liking.

Like those of many games, Elden Ring mods vary from practical to ridiculous. Some hand you in-game advantages with which to radically alter your experience, while others provide minor quality-of-life improvements that allow you to enjoy slaying the game's bosses that much more. Of course, some mods are just plain silly, and you'll wonder why anyone went to the trouble of making them. We'll let you be the judge of where the mod that turns tree sentinels into Thomas the Tank Engine lands.

Since Elden Ring was first released, its community has been busy creating fan-made content, leaving no dearth of mods to pick between. To save you time searching, we’ve rounded up the best of them – whether you’re after a new mechanic to dig into, want a leg up, or just want a way to pause the game, you’ll find it here.

Remember, though, if you want to start experimenting with mods you’ll need a PC copy of Elden Ring. Be careful when you’re rummaging through the game’s files, it’d be a shame to accidentally delete your 50-hour save file through an accidental misclick. Make sure to back up your Elden Ring save before you get too deep into modding. And remember to stay offline, too, as the Elden Ring anti-cheat algorithm doesn’t take kindly to player modifications.

How to install Elden Ring mods

(Image credit: Future)

Installing Elden Ring mods is easy. In fact, you’ll likely have a much harder time taking down the grueling bosses of the action RPG than you will modifying it. Once you’ve got a couple up and running, the whole thing will become second nature.

1. Go offline

Before doing anything else, you must force Elden Ring into offline mode. If the game detects you using mods while connected to multiplayer servers (even if you’re not actively playing with others), it’ll presume you’re cheating and ban your account from accessing multiplayer content. Avoid that, since it can’t be reversed.

To force the game to boot offline, you must disable its EasyAntiCheat service. The game will detect the anti-cheat software is disabled and prevent you from connecting to multiplayer servers. It won’t ban you for disabling the software, though.

Fortunately, disabling the anti-cheat software is simple. Head to the location where you installed Elden Ring. If you’re playing on Steam, that’ll be steam\steamapps\common\Elden Ring\game on the drive where you installed the game. Find the start_protected_game.exe file and rename it to something (anything) else and add “.not” at the end. When you do so, its file type should be listed as NOT and you’ll be unable to run the exe.

Next, find the elden_ring.exe file and duplicate it. Rename that to start_protected_game.exe and load the game through Steam. You will now be unable to connect to its multiplayer servers.

To be doubly sure, a popup on the main menu should tell you that the game is “Unable to start in online mode”. If you see that, you're golden.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

2. Download a mod loader

Now we can get going. You’ll want to download the Elden Ring Mod Loader, a nifty tool that’s required to boot up many of the mods available across the internet. Head over to Nexus Mods to download the tool. Once downloaded, extract the folder to steam\steamapps\common\Elden Ring\game.

3. Find some mods

Now, you’ll need to find and download a mod you fancy the look of. Nexus Mods has a massive collection to browse through. Find one you like, click through, and download it.

4. Add mods to your folder

Once they're downloaded, navigate back to where you installed the Mod Loader. You should now see another folder titled “mods”. No prizes for guessing what to do next. Drag the downloaded mod into that folder (you might need to extract it from a zipped file first).

5. Launch the game

Return to Steam and launch the game as normal. All installed mods should load. If you want to remove a mod, simply delete its folder or file from the “mods” file.

Best Elden Ring mods

Item and Parameter Randomiser

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

Embrace numerical chaos with the Item and Parameter Randomiser mod, which muddles up the stats and functionality of nearly every item in the game. The mod shuffles around the location of over 4,000 map items and scrambles the stats of weapons. The idea is to offer a totally different playthrough of Elden Ring and one that is far more open to chance.

That’s both good and bad. Sometimes, you’ll find powerful items earlier than you would in a regular playthrough but you may also come across several copies of near-useless objects. Loot tables are shuffled around, too, so you can’t be sure what items enemies will drop, and even the weather can be randomized as an optional extra. If you aren't happy with the random world that’s been lumped on you, don’t worry, you can always reset the mod for a new seed.

Ultimate Start

(Image credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment)

Ostensibly created to ease new Soulsborne players into the game, the Ultimate Start mod is a fabulous way of testing Elden Ring's many playstyles. It hands you a ton of powerful items to use, weapons to try, and incantations to cast. You’re given 100k runes for quick leveling and everything you need to unlock all of the game’s shops.

Ultimate Start puts you in a solid position to find which combat style suits you. It’s no good sinking 20 hours into the game before wishing you’d pumped up Faith and Arcane for serious spell-slinging damage, or prioritized Dexterity for fast and flashy sword attacks. Bear in mind that it automatically makes you a Wretch, but that’s no problem. Once you’ve landed on a preferred style and created a new, proper save, pick one of the Elden Ring classes that's more appropriate.

Enhanced Moveset Utility

(Image credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment)

Playing any FromSoftware game with a mouse and keyboard can be finicky, but this Elden Ring mod lets you unlock the full potential of your trusty hardware companion. The Enhanced Moveset Utility remolds the game’s control scheme to better fit keyboards. Its main feature is the ability to assign incantations and items to specific hotkeys, letting you deal them out much faster mid-fight.

It comes with a couple of other improvements, too, like removing the input delay when rolling in the vanilla game and assigning the sprint and roll actions to different buttons. Editing the Elden Ring’s control scheme is a simple but surefire way to make it feel more intuitive. That’ll be particularly handy if you spend most of your time squashed beneath the sabatons of the game’s bosses or impaled on their weapons.

Pause the Game

(Image credit: Bandai Namco / TechieW and iArtorias)

You didn’t pick up Elden Ring because you wanted a walk in the park. Like the Soulsborne games before it, this is a tough beastie to best. But it can be made a little easier with the ability to pause the game. In the vanilla version, navigating through its menus to sort your inventory or check out the map doesn’t halt the action around you. You’re just as liable to attack, making for some untimely deaths.

You can change all that with the Pause the Game mod. It does exactly what you’d expect - adds a pause option so you can take a breather. You can rest easy, safe in the knowledge that no wandering monstrosity will unsportingly insta-kill you while you’re distracted in the game’s options menu.

Hard Mode

(Image credit: Garden of Eyes via YouTube)

Think yourself a master Tarnished, do you? Think you’ve beaten everything the Lands Between can throw at you? The Prepare to Die (Hard Mode) mod overhauls the game’s difficulty for those who really want a challenge. Enemies can deal more damage, can hear you from further away, and are a tad smarter. Their stats and AI have been modified, so you can’t rely on your old tricks to beat them. This is an Elden Ring mod for Soulsborne experts or masochists.

As well as offering a new challenge, it may well encourage you to change your playstyle. The mod’s description suggests using the telescope to scout out enemies from a distance before engaging them, distracting enemies by throwing weapons toward nearby walls, and separating large mobs into smaller groups. The idea is that you’ll not only face greater threats but must change how you play to overcome them, offering a new style of the game altogether.

Ultrawide Support

Elden Ring doesn’t natively support ultrawide monitors. If you’re playing on one, you’ll find thick, ugly black bars on either side of your screen. If you try to play the game at a 21:9 aspect ratio, or larger, the game will automatically display in 16:9 instead. That’s a bit of an eyesore, and a blow to anyone wanting to take full advantage of their setup.

But there’s a workaround. Popular freeware Flawless Widescreen enables ultrawide monitor support for hundreds of games, letting you play them at your monitor’s native ultra-widescreen resolution. Download the Flawless Widescreen installer, enable the Elden Ring plugin, and you’re good to go. While users initially reported framerate dips and stuttering when the mod was first released, later updates have since fixed those problems; it should now run smooth as butter.

FPS Unlocker

(Image credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment)

In its vanilla state, Elden Ring is limited to 60fps, which is generous in comparison to the 30fps caps on many PC games, but not fast enough to meet the frame cravings of many players. This  Elden Ring mod removes the cap altogether, letting the game reach the refresh rate heights that your hardware allows.

The Elden Ring FPS Unlocker tool also comes packed with a few other handy features, such as letting you change your field of vision, alter the game speed, and even stopping you from losing Runes when you die. All the options are kept within a nifty overlay screen, so you can adjust them on the fly. Setting up the FPS unlocker can be a bit cumbersome the first time, but the mod’s lengthy description walks you through all the steps in detail.

Tree Sentinel Thomas

(Image credit: Bandai Namco / skymoon)

The anthropomorphized children’s train has become a staple of modding communities everywhere. If a game supports fan-made content, there's a good chance someone has made a mod incorporating Thomas the Tank Engine. Elden Ring is no different. The Tree Sentinel Thomas Mod replaces the horses of the optional Tree Sentinel bosses you’ll encounter throughout the game with the titular train.

Is it a particularly smart mod that will revolutionize the way you approach the game? Absolutely not. Is it a hilarious mod that will have you in stitches? Also, absolutely not. But it does continue a long tradition of modding Thomas the Tank Engine into places he doesn't belong, and that shouldn’t be neglected.

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