Seed result
Seed 028: Crater, Gladius
Six or fewer distinct field bosses are recorded here, which is thin next to most seeds. That says something about how much there is to detour for, not about how hard the run will be. Each one that is present is named below, with what the fight involves.
Gladius, Beast of Night
This run ends against Gladius, the Tricephalos expedition. The damage types below are what the map view shows on the status card, written out here so you can plan a loadout before opening the map.
- Weak to
- Holy, Pierce
- Resists
- Fire
- Immune to
- Madness
These are read from the game itself and listed in order of importance rather than converted from negation percentages. Those percentages use a sign convention that gets inverted often enough in published tables to produce pages claiming a Nightlord resists the exact thing it is weak to.
This is the expedition the game makes you clear first, so most players meet it before they understand any of the systems around it. Holy is the play, and the whole fight is built around splitting focus fire across the three heads.
This one has an Everdark Sovereign form: the same fight with an extra phase, a much larger health pool, and the opening moved to what was the second phase. Beat the standard version first and you get access to it.
Record details
- Special event
- Night Horde — Day 2Improves the charging speed of Ultimate Art gauge.
- Churches
- 4
- Township
- Present in this seedA small settlement built around a merchant. He looks like the ones scattered across the map, but his stock is deeper. He sells a Stonesword Key to each player, so a squad that stops here leaves with one apiece. Nowhere else in the game is a key certain, and squads running Evergaols route through a Township for that reason alone. He is also the only merchant who sells talismans, and the only one who sells a +2 smithing stone, which is as far as an ordinary smithing table can take a weapon. Buying it can save the squad a run through a Tunnel, the mine that otherwise guarantees that stone. Bring runes.
- Stonesword Keys
- 4 to open every EvergaolThis map holds 4 Evergaols, and opening one is the only thing a Stonesword Key does in the game. What is sealed behind each one stays hidden until the key goes in, which is the part the seed settles ahead of time. The Township in this seed sells a key to each player, the only guaranteed source in the game, and the rest have to be found on the map.
Night Horde — Day 2
The day is fixed by the seed and it is written above. The minute is not: the same seed can fire the same event at different times, so treat this as something to be ready for rather than something to set a clock against.
A blue mist appears, and approaching it spawns a group of enemies to clear. What spawns is not decided by the seed, so this page will not tell you what to expect. Reports vary run to run, and any list claiming a fixed composition is describing one run rather than the event itself.
Only one event can happen per expedition, and which ones are possible depends on the Nightlord. So this is the event for this run, with nothing else queued behind it.
Bosses in this seed
The castle, the night bosses and the bosses placed around the map are fixed for seed 028: open it again and the same bosses are waiting in the same places. A field boss marker points at the ground it holds rather than the exact step it stands on, so expect to find it moving around nearby. Knowing which ones you are walking into decides what damage type to build and which detours are worth the time.
Castle, held by Crucible Knights
This is the Limveld Castle, the fixed structure near the centre of the map, and the pattern behind it never changes: a guard faction, one chest, one boss in the basement and one boss on the rooftop. What the seed decides is which of the three factions is holding it and which bosses are inside. Noklateo is the one Shifting Earth that removes it. The Great Hollow has castles of its own, but they are built to a different plan and hold a different spread of enemies, so nothing described here applies to them.
Crucible Knights are the draw most squads hope for. They hit harder and take more punishment than Banished Knights, but the runes and the rarity of what they drop make clearing this castle one of the best trades of time for value in the game. They are also a long-standing Elden Ring enemy, so players who know the base game tend to get through them without much trouble.
The chest holds a talisman, and the path to it does not open until the basement boss is dead. That there is a talisman in it is fixed. Which talisman is not: it is rolled when the chest opens, so the same seed can hand you any talisman in the game, which is why nothing on this page names it. It pays out as a Dormant Power, so in a trio all three players get one.
Neither castle boss is unique to the castle. Both are stronger versions of bosses that also appear as field bosses, with more health, more damage and bigger rewards. Killing the basement one opens the path to the chest, and with it a shortcut that lets you cross the castle from the inside. The rooftop one is the reason to make the climb: every boss carries a small chance of dropping a legendary, and this one carries a higher chance than normal. It is a chance and not a guarantee. The only guaranteed legendary comes from the Crater event, which converts an item you are already carrying rather than leaving it to a drop.
Black Knife Assassin
BasementThe feint is what gets people: she leaps in with a counterclockwise slash that is not real, then follows with the clockwise one that is. Most physical damage lands, pierce least of all. Let her come to you rather than chasing.
Death Rite Bird
RooftopMost of its attacks are slow enough to read, but it leaps and flies to reposition constantly, so a fair part of the fight is spent chasing it. Back off for the ghostflame.
Night bosses
Bell Bearing Hunter
Night 1Pierce roughly doubles on it and lightning lands well, while standard, slash and strike are all resisted. It is aggressive at close and mid range but the attacks are slow, and it can be parried, though a stance break costs two parries rather than one.
Morgott
Night 2Long combos with delayed wind-ups, which is what breaks people's dodge and parry timing, and parrying is expensive at three per stance break. He throws spectral daggers, rains spectral swords across a wide area, and erupts into flame at close range. Slash is the answer.
Field bosses (5)
Tree Sentinel
Field bossHeavily armored and mounted, with a halberd that reaches further than you want it to, and a horse that hits you as well. It takes full damage from lightning and shrugs off fire and holy.
Leonine Misbegotten
Field bossA greatsword swung with more strength than technique, fast and heavy, but the bigger attacks leave openings wide enough that patience beats trading. Watch the stomp, which rolls straight into a spin and a half with the blade out. Slash and fire both work.
Erdtree Avatar
Field bossIt deals Holy damage and resists Holy, so a holy loadout is the wrong answer twice over; fire does roughly double. A headless stump with a huge staff, slow and easy to read, but the leaping body slam sends out a shockwave when it lands.
Elder Lion
Field bossA chained beast with a sword fused into one arm. It is faster than something that size should be and its hits can break a guard, but the big swings leave room to answer.
Ulcerated Tree Spirit
Field bossThe whole fight is learning which of its movements actually have a hitbox. It flops and twists constantly and most of that is harmless, which makes the real attacks easy to miss.
This result is based on the dataset for game version 1.03.2. If a game update changes a layout, use the Bug Report button in the footer and include the seed ID. See the methodology page for provenance, update practices, and known limitations.
