Elden Ring Nightreign players found one boring answer to the mystery of the game's 0.035% drop rate oddity, but insist there has to be more to the impossibly rare item
The Cord End in Elden Ring Nightreign is perplexing the community

A mysterious item in a FromSoftware game is confounding the community. Must be a day ending in 'Y'. An elusive drop from Elden Ring Nightreign with a hilariously boring use has players theorizing for some sort of deeper function.
In Nightreign, if you’re extremely lucky, you might find the Cord End. It's a small item that occasionally spawns in one of the churches. And by occasionally, I mean 0.035% of the time, once every 2,857 runs or so.
Useless on its own, the Cord End unlocks a door beneath the castle. In there, you won't find some godlike weapon or elixir of life. Just three Sacrificial Twigs, items that let you keep your runes after death. Handy, yes, but they seem like a small reward for essentially winning the lottery.
As much has spurred the community to investigate further. Multiple theories are going around, the most compelling of which, to me at least, is the notion of the twigs being tied to the Roundtable Hold. They both mention a "cutting-gifted tribe," suggesting they're both part of some elaborate sequence.
There are other ideas, such as that of having a specific party of three to equip the items. However, the problem is that the drop is so rare; investigating further is prohibitively difficult without a mod of some sort to uncover the Cord End more often.
Dataminers, including Zullie the Witch, are looking through Nightreign's innards at the moment. Not for this specifically, but if there's any suggestion of where this leads, it's likely to be signposted quickly. Of course, a possibility is it leads nowhere. This is FromSoftware, obtuseness is part of the territory. Watch this space.
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Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.
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