Elden Ring marries open world design to SoulsBorne difficulty and exploration for a fantastic combination. Players can't get enough of it and are clamoring for more, which no doubt made the leak of its Barbarians of the Badlands DLC a happy occurrence for many.
A huge part of Elden Ring is creating a strategy for tackling the immensely powerful foes that make up the majority of the game's landscape. This involves equipment and consumable items that give special effects to characters, usually represented by icons under the player's stat bars. There are a lot of these, making keeping track of the powerups and debuffs applied at any one time a bit tricky.
One player decided to make a point about the somewhat preposterous nature of the buff/debuff icons in Elden Ring by setting out on a quest to acquire as many of them as possible at one time. This is tricky, since several can only be acquired through specific environmental interactions and others have a time limit. Stacking buffs is one problem magic users have in Elden Ring, as time can run out on them very fast. But this player succeeded on their quest, and the results speak for themselves.
This is, to put it bluntly, a lot of icons, and the fact that they are all stacked up at once is even more impressive than it seems. For starters, two of the icons indicate that the player cannot teleport to a Site of Grace, while another indicates a nearby Stake of Marika. Getting this means getting teleported to or trapped in a dungeon, then leaving it without sitting down and finding a Stake of Marika somewhere nearby. Then of course there's stacking up the buffs themselves, which is a lot like becoming Iron Man in Elden Ring: it's a lot to put on, and must be done carefully.
The reason it must be done carefully is many similar buffs don't stack, but some do, and they give different icons. For example, a consumable might give the same buff as one of Elden Ring's real-world look-alike medallions. Sometimes these will stack and give two icons, sometimes they won't.
This makes stacking icons like this a test of patience and knowledge about the game, and requires both proper timing and patience. The playerbase of Elden Ring seems to have reached the point where players know the game so well they can pull of ridiculous feats. If this isn't proof enough, one player already beat Elden Ring with a piano. Only time will tell what comes next.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
