Longtime Souls series data miner Lance McDonald has revealed the initial stages of a cut NPC quest line in the Elden Ring building from the game’s console network test in November 2021.
Stormhill Shack (formerly Scavenger’s Shack), where you meet Roderika in the finished game, is empty in the network test building, but Lance was able to re-implement the NPC that was once meant to live there: Monk Jigo.
Jigo has been “seduced by the good lady alcohol” and asks for your help in securing the ingredients of “Dreambrew”, a legendary spirit with magical properties. This quest is linked to another curiosity from the network test: non-hostile, dormant animals hidden all over the world. They were supposed to deliver “Dream Fog”, which you would then collect for Jigo using St. Trinas crystal ball. St. Trina is a cryptic character in Elden Ring’s story associated with sleep and dream, and it seems they were originally planned to have more of a presence in the game.
Lance also gave a glimpse of Dreambrew’s end use: gifting it to NPCs for bonus dialogue. Lance gave his first Dreambrew party to merchant Kalé at Limgrave’s Church of Eleh. This put Kalé to sleep, and while the continued sound in the game is only the grocer’s snoring, the subtitles briefly describe his nightmare of being tortured by the insane flame.
This seems to have been thought of as a lengthy quest where Dream Mist provided yet another collectible to go hunting for in Lands Between, and the subsequent NPC talks provide more context to Elden Ring’s story.
In the finished game, players are able to battle an optional boss in a character’s dream at the end of Fia’s questline. It’s currently unclear whether the Dreambrew questline would have ultimately included similar gameplay involved, jumping into characters’ dreams or just the bonus dialogue. We can probably expect further study of this abandoned story and gameplay mechanics in future videos of Lance.
Lance, for his part, has also covered the strange giant heads, which appear in distant scenes in the network test, but are absent in the last game. Fellow Souls series data amateur Zullie the Witch has also been following a steady stream of insightful Elden Ring videos.