If you thought Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was hard, one player has taken it to the next level by defeating the entire expansion on uncapped New Game+ 1,000 – a terrifying, souped-up difficulty level that allows enemies to deal "millions" of damage.
While Elden Ring gets progressively harder on New Game+ runs – with enemy health, resistances, and attack power increased – FromSoftware capped this scaling at NG +7, so there's a limit in place when it comes to how hard things can get. Even if you went all the way to NG +100, it'd be no harder than +7. That's usually the case, anyway, but Twitch streamer Skumnut decided to release these shackles and give the game a go at NG +1,000. That's four digits of extra difficulty, which, as the streamer explains on Twitter, gives every boss 500,000 health, ridiculously high resistances, and a lethal amount of attack power.
Just to make matters worse, Skumnut also opted to avoid using Scadutree blessings, which are crucial to the DLC if you want to boost your own resistances and attack power, and skipping them makes the expansion painful even when you've not cranked the difficulty up so high. Granted, increasing your resistance might not matter much when bosses can kill you several times over in one shot, but the Scadutree attack boost is huge. Needless to say, you can understand how, by the end of the run, the streamer had managed to rack up 967 deaths, and unsurprisingly, many, many of those were at the hands of the brutal final boss, Promised Consort Radahn.
You can watch Skumnut's victory against Radahn in the clip below, but this is barely a fraction of the full fight. At the start of the battle, Skumnut summons certified cool dude NPC Ansbach, but the poor guy can't even finish his dialogue before he's taken out in a single swing of one of Radahn's swords, and the streamer has to pull off a flawless no-hit run to avoid meeting the same fate. However, with such high resistances and health, it takes just shy of 16 minutes to chip down Radahn's HP bar, which is a ridiculously long time to play without making a single mistake, even with Black Flame dealing HP-based damage to slightly help offset the absurd enemy scaling.
I did it. Elden Ring DLC NG+1000 (uncapped NG+ scaling) has been completed with NO scadutree blessings. Every boss has 500,000 HP per bar, resistances boosted by an insane amount, damage from enemies are in the millions, etc. The Elden Ring Sicko does it once again. The Climb. pic.twitter.com/bqr047Nf4LAugust 27, 2024
We wrote about Skumnut's NG +1,000 antics earlier this month, when a 500,000-HP Messmer finally kicked the bucket. At the time of writing, the streamer had made it to Radahn and accumulated 540 deaths – a number which increased dramatically over the following weeks. I frankly can't imagine the pain of fighting Radahn for so long, but props to Skumnut for sticking with it.
You can check out our guide to Shadow of the Erdtree final boss Radahn for some tips to help you take down Elden Ring's toughest foe.
