Elden Ring’s soap consumable seems out of place among scarlet and other status disorders, but a fan finds a funny connection to its implied history.
Elden Ring contains a wealth of lore and context that players may never learn or discover if they never look into the descriptions of certain objects. Such item descriptions may also change due to any Elden Ring‘s armor is altered or not, and of course more knowledge can be dug up from contextual events, such as where objects usually occur or how they can be manufactured.
Crafting is a new feature for FromSoftware with Elden Ring, and many processable items and consumables may not seem very useful at first glance. However, many products have great uses beyond what is explicitly described about them in their product sheets, while it may take some contextual hints to recognize what other product presentations suggest about the product in question. E.g, Elden Ring‘s crystal arrows are effective against stone structures such as imps. An object that is apparently misplaced in Elden Ring now has a funny context after a fan researched it.
In what they consider “an ugly realization”, Redditor u / pethris seems to have discovered the truth about soap based on its whereabouts and the means by which players can make it. Redditor has determined that the item can only be found in the Ainsel River and Siofra River, but the latter is the only place where its recipe cookbook, Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [17], can be purchased from a grocery store that also sells individual soaps. Likewise, molten fungi are found only in Siofra or Deeproot Depths, implying that “no one above ground knows the concept of soap.”
This may or may not be FromSoftware’s intention with the soap’s story as it relates to the Middle Ages, but it’s still an interesting connection to make in terms of where objects reliably come from and how it can make sense in the overall narrative. Between the lakes of scarlet rot and regular noxious swamps found everywhere Elden Rings open world, it seems likely that soap would be a rather secret or unheard of substance.
Soap is useful in Elden Ring for its ability to cleanse accumulations such as toxin buildup. Soap, along with boluses and other items, adds to a long list of consumables that players have at their disposal in such cases. However, no one can have such a funny, implicit connection to their whereabouts.
It is rather bad to buy soap from Elden Ring‘s merchants because of how easily players can make it. Soap is made simply with melted mushrooms, as it is a “plant-based soap made from mushroom juice”, as its product description explains.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S.
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