FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games have a unifying theme of great power leading to great corruption and decay—fallen kingdoms, ruined kings, and whatever the hell is going on with the Gaping Dragon. It’s fitting, then, that an Elden Ring Nightreign player obtained similar godhood before their own hubristic fall.
As spotted (and translated) by Automaton, a player by the name of mintius managed to continually stack damage until they achieved godhood, then wretchedness—in that order.
Mintius did this via the Marais Executioner Sword, which holds the “Power of House Marais” passive effect. This increases your attack power upon defeating enemies and, apparently, doesn’t have a cap. This isn’t typically a problem, as Nightreign is a timed game, but FromSoftware apparently did not consider that a player might want to get all MMO about it and grind out Wormface’s infinitely-spawning legion of jerks.
Turns out, the monsters that Wormface summons count towards the Marais Executioner Sword’s stacking damage buff, as mintius explains: “I hunted Wormface mobs for about an hour with the Marais Executioner Sword to see what would happen. My attack power easily hit the visible damage cap at 9,999 after defeating 725 enemies.”
Best I can tell, by “visible damage cap”, mintius is referring to the damage on their equipment screen (seen in the screenshot above) as they mention hitting much, much harder than that. “The last damage value I saw for the Executioner Sword was 63,375. After defeating the 727th enemy, I was suddenly unable to deal any damage at all, and my character got killed.”
That’s likely because of a time-honoured coding goblin named integer overflow. Essentially, computers have a hard time counting upwards forever—you can make them think of a very large number, but you can’t make them think of infinity. When a game’s code counts, it does so via something called an ‘integer’, which is usually good enough, letting computers count into the billions.
However, if that number gets exceeded, the game then tends to panic. Or it just loops back around and traps you on a level select screen for two years. Integers can typically represent numbers far higher than 63,375—but I’d imagine there are some other coding shenanigans going on that caused Nightreign to panic and render mintius completely damageless.
As a matter of fact, since the overflow only seems to happen with that stacking damage buff, there are other avenues mintius is looking towards to get their Icarus-style damage fix. They tell Automaton their next test is to plunge onto a Flame Chariot from a great height, which should push their DPS even further. And thus, the cycle continues.
Read the full article here
