I have witnessed things no Tarnished should ever see. I have stared into the abyss of FromSoftware’s code and pulled out miracles. The year is 2026, and yet the Lands Between still tremble before the might of my… glitches. Yes, glitches. Those beautiful, logic-shattering loopholes that transform demigods into training dummies and turn legendary battles into comedy shows. After four years of patches, hotfixes, and desperate developer prayers, Elden Ring has been polished to a mirror shine—but scratch the surface, and you’ll find a handful of exploits so gloriously broken that they make me cackle louder than a mad perfumer.
Now, before you purists unsheathe your katanas, let me clarify something vital. The community often throws around the word “cheese” like it’s a rotten pot of exalted flesh. But listen: not all cheese is a glitch. Cheese is the noble art of making a tough game easier through in-game mechanics—like parrying Radahn’s meteor fall to instantly delete him. That’s skill, baby. A glitch, on the other hand, is the game itself bending over and saying, “Please, o mighty player, end my suffering.” Every glitch is cheese, but not every cheese is a glitch. And today, I’m here to worship the genuine, reality-warping glitches that still work in Elden Ring as of the 1.12 patch (because yes, we’ve gotten another dozen patches since 2022, and these bad boys survived).
The Universal Boss Off Switch
I screamed when I first pulled this off. Almost every single boss in Elden Ring—from Margit to Malekith—is vulnerable to one single glitch that feels like hacking the Matrix. It’s deceptively simple yet absurdly precise: you must cross the boss fog wall while your character is in hitstun. That’s it. If timed perfectly, the boss’s AI never activates. I once walked into Godfrey’s arena, and the First Elden Lord just stood there like a golden statue while I poked him to death with a torch. He didn’t even grunt. The trick, as taught by YouTuber Running Butcher, requires you to bait an enemy attack right at the mist’s edge. The moment you’re staggered, you stagger forward into the arena. The game loads the boss but forgets to turn on its brain. I’ve done this to Malenia’s first phase (not the second, sadly), to Radagon, to Mohg—anyone with a fog gate. The window is narrower than a noble sorcerer’s waist, but once you master it, you become a cosmic horror wearing a Tarnished skin.
Radahn and the Fire Giant: Gravity, the Ultimate Boss Killer
Radahn is immune to the fog-door AI glitch because his arena has no traditional mist, but oh, the stars have smiled upon us with an even more humiliating exploit. Picture this: I summon Torrent, gallop toward a specific, supposedly unclimbable rock wall, and start jumping at a cluster of weirdly textured branches. After a few awkward steed hops, I’m standing on air. Radahn, who has already begun his meteor madness, tries to follow me up. He charges, clips through the terrain, and then—splat—falls from an impossible height. His health bar evaporates. His second phase never triggers. I didn’t swing a sword. I just watched a demigod accidentally commit suicide because of a geometry error. This is the Tyrannicon method, and it’s still here in 2026, laughing in the face of every patch note. I can’t even be mad at the developers; this is art.
The Fire Giant suffers a similar fate, though it’s less about instant death and more about sheer pathetic helplessness. At the start of the fight, instead of engaging, I immediately spin Torrent around and charge off a nearby cliff, leaping out of the arena boundary. I land on a tiny platform far below, a secret ledge that was probably meant as background decoration. The Fire Giant’s AI wakes up but cannot reach me. He wanders around, confused, while I pepper him with serpent arrows for ten minutes. The first time I did this, I actually felt a little guilty. The mighty Flame God, reduced to a pincushion. But then I remembered his rolling attacks and laughed until I cried.
Malenia and Loretta: The Reboot of Doom
Of course, the hardest boss deserves the hardest glitch. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, has never known true defeat—unless you count the time I made her catatonic. This exploit, showcased by opossum, is so convoluted it borders on dark magic. Behind Malenia’s wooden throne, there are tangled roots leading upward. Through a series of precise jumps and wall-clings, you can escape the boss arena entirely and climb to its very entrance, above the fog gate. Then comes the evil genius part: save and quit. Reload. The game respawns you inside the boss room, but Malenia’s AI fails to load. She stands immobile. Even if you trigger her second phase by draining her health, she transforms into the Goddess of Rot, spreads her wings… and continues to stand motionless. I circled her for five minutes before striking the first blow. I’ve never felt so powerful and so dirty at the same time.
Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree, offers a much simpler version. In her Caria Manor battle, all you need is a corner. I back into the wall right beside the fog gate, quit to the main menu, and reload. When I return, Loretta is braindead—her AI never activates. I can leisurely cut her down. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on her Haligtree phantom, but honestly, one free Loretta is enough. The sheer absurdity of restarting the game while standing in a corner to break a boss’s will is something I will cherish forever.
The Glitch Legacy Lives On
By now, you might wonder: has FromSoftware given up? After the 1.06 patch killed the Godfrey staircase skip and many speedrun favorites, you’d think they’d hunt down every last exploit. Yet here we are in 2026, and the AI deactivation glitch, the out-of-bounds tumbles, and the quit-reload sorcery endure. Some speculate these glitches are too deeply baked into the engine’s spaghetti code. Others whisper that Miyazaki secretly enjoys our suffering enough to leave these backdoors as a cruel joke. For me, they transform Elden Ring from a grueling trial into a sandbox of chaotic joy. Every time I boot up the game, I know I can either prove my worth with honest combat or, on a whim, break reality and make a legend fall without lifting a finger. The Lands Between may be decaying, but these glitches? They’re immortal.
So grab your Torrent, calibrate your hitstun timing, and join me. The bosses are waiting. And they’re more afraid of you than you’ve ever been of them.