The map of Elden Ring has changed quietly with each patch

elden ring has received a handful of patches since its release in late February. Developer FromSoftware has made a number of improvements to the game’s performance, fixed a few bugs, and rebalanced a whole host of abilities and weapons to tone down the most obvious overpowered options.

Like many Japanese developers, FromSoft is guilty of making changes that are not mentioned in the patch notes. Players must discover and document these themselves to try and keep track of them actually Changes from one patch to another.

These changes are usually relevant, which is why players tend to look for them. But some go completely unnoticed — unless you’re an eagle-eyed modder. YouTuber Illusory Wall, who has made a career of digging deep into FromSoftware’s games to discover cut content, break boundaries, and track hidden changes, posted a video about a specific unlisted change you might be aware of wouldn’t even pay attention.

This is the beautiful world map of the game. In their video below, Illusory Wall – with the help of other community members – shows how the map of the most important regions of the Elden Ring has changed since the game’s release. FromSoft has obviously cleaned up the map to track areas and improve the accuracy of how the game’s physical world is represented.

This also applies to the illustrated card pickups that players acquire to dispel the fog of war. Most of the changes are benign and seem to have been made to get rid of areas that no longer exist in the world or to add locations that weren’t previously represented on the map.

The YouTuber speculates that certain sections of the map were the result of procedural generation, which is why the developer had to go back and update them with what was actually added later. However, some of the removed land masses and such might indicate that FromSoft originally had a plan for them but ultimately removed them due to time running out.

This is quite common for the developer, as many have spotted cropped content as well as removed mechanics in most of the studio’s games. It’s likely that FromSoft updated the world itself in later patches for its other games, but since Elden Ring is the first to include a world map in this way, there’s practically a record of those changes.

Catch up on anything you may have missed in this massive game with the help of our Elden Ring guide.