Elden Ring is, basically, a game about people with different beliefs about a big golden tree. Some say that God’s grace has appeared, while others believe that it has unnatural control over their own mortality and must be usurped from its power. K4richard, a disciple of the NexusMods Church, thinks the tree sucks up too much of its framerate, so they got rid of it.
In Erd Tree Removal (FPS BOOST) (Opens in a new tab), a slightly misspelled form (it’s “Erdtree”) for Elden Ring, K4richard omits the central part of FromSoftware’s sprawling action RPG. This is like plucking a Death Star from Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings; Although their goal is to free up some frames, K4richard may have just written a fan story that transformed Elden Ring from a hundred hour adventure into a 20 minute short story.
The only other K4richard’s device (Opens in a new tab) It removes part of the model of one of the game’s final bosses – who fought in particular near Erdtree. Seeing this, I asked K4richard if he had something against the Golden Tree.
“The closer you get to Erdtree, the more demanding the game becomes,” K4richard told me of their struggle to maintain a steady frame rate in the second half of Elden Ring. It is fitting that in the later sections of the game, the physical and objective essence of the world prevented them from ending the game.
K4richard plays the game on a five-year-old graphics card, Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 (Opens in a new tab)And the mighty tree will not stand in their way. So they did what any computer gamer would do, and they fixed it themselves.
Erdtree and a host 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 30fps on a low-end PC. 15fps increased by a whopping on the GT 1030! This mode practically lowered the requirements The game’s graphics card,” they wrote.
To install the mod, you must have Mod Engine 2 for Elden Ring (Opens in a new tab)It is available for free on GitHub. You can then take the K4richard file, drop it into the mods folder inside the Mod Engine 2 directory, and load the game using the dedicated offline mode launcher. If you want to get rid of particle effects as well, you will need this mod (Opens in a new tab) (Minor spoilers for a key event in the story.)
I can see why K4richard committed this sin against the golden tree cult system, where deleting the tree increased the frame rate by about five to 10 frames per second. On modern hardware that can already run the game at a steady speed of 60fps, this isn’t a huge problem, but for low-spec PC gamers, this might be the key to finishing the game. Don’t look closely though, some branches remain hanging in the sky, a bug that k4richard plans to fix in a future update.
I haven’t had a chance to ask what K4richard will delete from Elden Ring next, but I have a few ideas. What is the Elden Ring’s quest to become the Master of Elden like when the Elden Throne is moved to the Recycle Bin? Nobody likes Caelid what if they erase her? There are a lot of things in Elden Ring that I’d rather not deal with. I think the game needs more mods don’t be afraid to shave a little fat.