Elden Ring fan spends 500 hours making a low-poly version of FromSoftware's biggest map ever because "I thought it would be cool" – and it definitely is

Elden Ring low poly map
(Image credit: Honzaap)

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:FromSoftware spent years making its biggest game world ever in Elden Ring's Lan🍃ds Between, and now one fan of this massive open-world RPG spent roughly 500 hours making a tinier, still-massive, low-poly version of it. And man, it is cool. 

Reddit user and Githౠub creator Honzaap shared their creation with the Elden Ring subreddit over the weekend, and it quickly caught fire among the community. Intrigued by the scale of this thing, flummoxed by their claim that it took 500 hours to make, and oddly nostalgic for a similar , I reached out to Honzaap to talk through this tiny giant. 

. Toggle the camera in the bottom right to get up close and personal. 

from

I was delighted to learn that I was right on the money: Honzaap says they were inspired by Chemelev's Tiny Elden Ring to begin with. "I just had to see what it would l🀅ook like with the whole map," they tell GamesRadar+."I will admit that Konstantin's model looks much better, I am not that great with low-poly style." 

"I thought it would be cool if I made this for the whole map," they add. "For positions, I used the in-game map combined with a top-down view map of the actual game,🌺 which I found on the website. They use it for a Geoguesser-like game of Elden Ring. I also used a program called DSMapStudio which lets me inspect the whole map in 3𒁃D." 

Where did those 500 hours go? Over the course of around five months, Honzaap says they spent "about 47♏0 hours" actually making the map model itself. "I also included the time I needed to set it up for display on a web page, since I can't just put the entire model there. The most time was spent on making models that can't be reused. Generally those were legacy dungeons, forts, castles etc. There are many things that I had to only make once and then I could reuse them, but placing hundreds of trees, rocks and other stuff takes a long time as well. The single most time-consuming area was the capital city Leyndell, which took about a week." 

As noted on Github, this project uses a few third-party assets for things like skeletons, wyverns, dragons, witches, and turtles, plus a few trees Honzaap says they forgot to mention. No generative tools were used. "The terrain was all hand-made by me, and this was probably the second-most time consu𓆉ming part," Honzaap says. 

"I worked 𝐆on it pretty much whenever I could," they continue. "Especially🦋 on weekends and at the start of summer break, since I am still in university. I usually watched videos or movies on the second monitor." Honzaap has shared somewhat similar creations before; I asked if this massive model served as a bit of practice for their Blender technique, and they said it was "definitely more" than that. "I have the controls of Blender pretty much burned into my brain now." 

The elaborate city of Leyndell was, unsurprisingly, among the most difficult areas to build. Crumbling Farum Azula, which you'll find floating in painstaking detail off to the east side of the map, and the crimson grotesqueries of Caelid are close behind. "Leyndell is huge and complex, so it was difficult to even know where to sꦇtart," Honzaap explains. "Azula is the most unique out of the locations so my usual methods didn't really work. Caelid has so much stuff and is also kinda bumpy, which mad✃e it hard to make." 

They're most proud of their low-poly Raya Lucaria Academy, partly because "I think the low-poly style suits it well." I'm partial to Farum Azula myself, but the detailed stairs an🦹d buttresses on Miquella's Haligtree, carved into a hidden side of the recreation, are also something to see.

2 years later, Elden Ring players dig out their 'I beat Radahn before the nerf' stickers as early runs show FromSoftware really took a bat to Shadow of the Erdtree's final boss. 

Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been ﷽a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.