Player invasions have been a staple mechanic of the Dark Souls and Bloodborne series. This returns to Elden Ring, where players can use recusant and bloody fingers to invade the world of another Tarnished. The goal is to kill the host player and, if successful, the invader will receive a rune arc and a Furlcalling Finger Remedy.
It didn’t take long for hackers to begin ruining the fun of many Tarnished across the Lands Between. Not only can the invasion mechanic be annoying to some, but community members have shared clips all over Reddit and Twitter that show hackers crashing host player games that corrupt save files.
When this happens and players reload their game, they are greeted with an infinite death loop, which places them in a state of perpetual falling where they die and the game reloads at the top of the fall. Without local saves as backup options, there aren’t many ways to fix it.
On Twitter, @EldenRingUpdate shows this bug or hack in action. Shown in the clip is a player invading and using some sort of sorcery or incantation that activates this glitch. It forces the host’s game to crash near-instantly. When the host attempts to reload the character, they load into an out-of-bounds area and continually fall over and over again.
How to stop it
Players that are concerned about being invaded have a few options when it comes to dealing with this, the first of which would be to avoid online play entirely. You don’t have to specifically play in offline mode due to the area-opt-in aspect of Elden Ring’s multiplayer features, but offline mode would be the safest way to avoid invaders. Offline mode can be initiated at the title screen.
The next way would be to back-up save files. The Elden Ring save files are found by going to the drive the game is on using this path: C:/Users/[name of user]/AppData/Roaming/EldenRing
The “view hidden files” aspect of file explorer needs to be enabled to see the save files. Then simply copy the folder into another safe location and update it as seen fit.
All is not lost if one falls victim to this abuse. Some players have reported that fast traveling to a Site of Grace will fix the problem. When the game loads, there is a very small window in which players should Alt + F4 to close their game. Doing this will give the player more time when they reload the save to open their map for fast travel.
When loaded back in, players should open their map and press the shortcut to open a list of Grace Sites nearby (Triangle on PS5 and Y on Xbox controllers). As quickly as possible, players should spam X on PS5 and A on Xbox to confirm the fast travel to a Site of Grace.
Overall, it’s recommended to avoid online play entirely as FromSoftware attempts to fix this.
