Highlights

  • Elden Ring's environmental storytelling and implicit questing lacks typical RPG journal and UI features, leading to rewarding clues hidden throughout the game.
  • Patch 1.03 introduced the Dancer's Castanets questline, where players deliver a seemingly useless item to Lady Tanith in Rykard's boss room, resulting in dismissal and mockery of Patches.
  • The Dancer's Castanets may provide backstory for Tanith, suggesting she was a dancer who strayed from her roots under the influence of the God-Devouring Serpent.

Elden Ring has been thoroughly investigated in the time since its release, and even its most obscure content has been addressed by many fans across the internet. In the vein of other FromSoftWare titles, the world of The Lands Between is layered with environmental storytelling that guides implicit questing which lacks the typical journal and UI quality-of-life features some RPG players expect. Clues left throughout Elden Ring usually lead to a reward of some kind when followed properly, but one quest affected by post-game patches still has some players confused by its ambiguity.

The game was combed through immediately upon release, but one of Elden Ring's most mysterious items became the topic of speculation following a patch by FromSoft. In April 2022, the game received a small update that provided additional content for the questline involving FromSoftware's Patches. It was assumed that this would be further clarified in future updates, but the item that came with patch 1.03 is still one of the most useless in the entire game.

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The Dancer’s Castanets Sidequest

Finding Patches in the Shaded Castle

Following an update that moved his location from Volcano Manor after defeating Elden Ring's Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, Patches can be found in the Altus Plateau’s Shaded Castle. He has unique dialogue for this situation and will give the player a strange item to deliver. Known as the Dancer’s Castanets, it’s an item that has no discernible purpose in terms of gameplay and purely exists to be delivered to another NPC. This isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for a Soulslike game, but the result of completing this task has surprised many players.

Tanith in Rykard’s Boss Room

Following the chain of events in the Mt. Gelmir portion of Elden Ring, Lady Tanith of the Volcano Manor can be found in the boss room of Rykard after his defeat. As she will make clear to the player, she is thoroughly focused on consuming her lord’s writhing corpse. Most players are likely to choose to kill her for her rare armor set and face the Crucible Knight that spawns after, but the 1.03 patch added the option to give her the Dancer’s Castanets before this. Delivering the item to Tanith will result in nothing but a complete dismissal, with her seemingly uninterested in anything but eating Rykard.

The Ambiguous Meaning of the Dancer’s Castanets

FromSoft’s Patches as a Running Joke

Patches is an NPC that has appeared in several of FromSoftware’s most prominent titles. There isn't necessarily any narrative consistency between these different iterations of him, but he is always an untrustworthy trickster who leads the player into a dangerous situation.

The situation with the Dancer's Castanets in Patches' Elden Ring quest seems to be a way to put him down and make fun of him, as Tanith’s harsh rejection of his present appears to indicate how little she cares to recognize his gesture. Given that Patches tends to be such a conniving and selfish individual, his one honest show of affection being shut down so dismissively could be a humorous dig at a character who has wronged many players.

A Deeper Look Into Tanith’s Lore

While it appears within a sidequest related to Patches, the Dancer’s Castanets might also give some backstory to Tanith. Some players have theorized that she indeed used to be a dancer who came from a foreign land, providing more context for her relationship with Rykard and how it began. The lore behind Elden Ring's Tanith and Rykard only substantiates the dedication she showed to him until the end, and perhaps her reaction to the relic of her past could only be meant to emphasize just how far from her roots she strayed under the influence of the God-Devouring Serpent.