Elden Ring Players in Disbelief Over New Stats: “People Actually Die to These?”

Elden Ring players routinely get different stats and infographics from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware to share some insights into preferred spells, incantations, weapons, and fights against bosses. That’s nothing new, but the latest stat drop has something in it that’s caught players off guard. The stats in question pertain to Elden Ring‘s very successful Shadow of the Erdtree DLC and reveal that the one of the goofiest enemies in the expansion that people memed about has, actually, managed to defeat quite a few players.

The infographic from Bandai Namco that’s been the talk of the Elden Ring community this week again ranks the most used spells and incantations from Shadow of the Erdtree, but above those rankings is a graphic showing the infamous Spirit Eel itself. These creatures are the slender, blue, worm-like beings that protrude out of the ground with tiny little arms and three holes on their head that loosely resemble a shocked face. They’re seen throughout the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC and are often just hanging out and minding their own business, unless you mess with them, of course.

And apparently, close to 300,000 Elden Ring players have picked fights with these Spirit Eels and lost. The official number is 289,116 deaths by the spindly hands of the Spirit Eels, according to Bandai Namco’s graphic shown below, though since that number had to have been cut off at some point for the results to be tallied, we’re probably actually a bit closer to 300,000 at this point.

Now, granted, there are some Spirit Eel variants that are fussy from the start and will attack you just if you get close to them. Those are recognizable since they’re red with anger, so they’re easily avoidable. Hitting one of the blue ones aggros them and turns them into the more violent, red state that some default to. Even if you do get into a scuffle with them on accident, you can quite literally just walk away from them since they’re completely immobile and don’t even offer enough Runes to make fighting them worthwhile. Some players, it seems, just wanted to pick on them regardless and apparently paid the price in doing so.

“Didn’t even know you can die from these nerds lol,” said one Elden Ring player who speaks for most of us when the stats made their way into the Elden Ring subreddit to be discussed.

Others shared similar incredulous comments wondering how people died to these Spirit Eels. Granted, that number’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things if you consider how high the death counts must be for enemies like Promised Consort Radahn, but the fact that only the Spirit Eel was highlighted in this graphic shows that someone over at FromSoftware also thinks this is very funny, or at least knew players would appreciate it. The full graphic includes only the Spirit Eel and nothing else related to player deaths, so consider this graphic a PSA for not bothering the Spirit Eels and becoming a statistic.