Elden Ring features a ton of lore and context that players may not ever learn or discover if they never peer into the descriptions of certain items. Such item descriptions may also change due to whether Elden Ring’s armor is altered or not, and of course, more lore may be exhumed from contextual occurrences, such as where items commonly appear or how they may be crafted.
Crafting is a feature new to FromSoftware with Elden Ring, and many craftable items and consumables may not seem particularly useful at first glance. However, many items have great uses beyond what is explicitly described about them in their item blurbs, while it may take some contextual hints to acknowledge what other item blurbs suggest about the item in question. For example, Elden Ring’s crystal darts are effective against stone constructs such as imps. One item that is seemingly out of place in Elden Ring now bears a funny context after a fan researches it.
In what they deem “a nasty realization,” Redditor u/pethris seems to have discovered the truth about soap based on its whereabouts and the means with which players can craft it. The Redditor has determined that the item can only be found in Ainsel River and Siofra River, but the latter is the only place where its recipe cookbook, the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [17], can be purchased from a merchant who also sells individual soaps. Likewise, melted mushrooms are only found in Siofra or the Deeproot Depths, which implies that “nobody above ground knows about the concept of soap.”
This may or may not be FromSoftware’s intention for the soap’s lore as it pertains to the Lands Between, but it is still an interesting connection to make in terms of where items reliably come from and how that may make some sense in the overarching narrative. Between the lakes of scarlet rot and regular noxious swamps found throughout Elden Ring’s open world, it does seem likely that soap would be a fairly clandestine or unheard of substance.
Soap is useful in Elden Ring for its ability to cleanse accumulations such as poison buildup. Soap, along with boluses and other items, adds to a long list of consumables players have at their disposal for such instances. None may have such a funny, implied context to their whereabouts, however.
Rather, it is ill-advised to purchase soap from Elden Ring’s merchants because of how easily players can craft it. Soap is crafted simply with melted mushrooms as it is a “plant-based soap made from mushroom juice” as its item description explains.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
