Someone's already completed a solo Elden Ring Nightreign run at level 1 and, as is tradition, the power of status effects pulled through

Elden Ring Nightreign is crushingly hard even with a couple of buddies to take on the Nightlords with—let alone solo. Having sunk almost two dozen hours into this misery simulator myself, the sheer cliff of difficulty you run into as a lone rider—with no mates around to revive you—is a challenge in itself.

So, naturally, some dodge-roll prodigy has swept in and put us all to shame by completing a solo run of the Nightlord boss Fulghor without levelling up a single time. A big, beautiful, statistically improbable sign that we all need to stop griping and git gud.

YouTuber and Twitch streamer Youwy's gauntlet is a sight to behold—and even more impressive when you consider how Nightreign works. See, in your usual Souls game, level 1 runs are made possible by the fact you can beeline for the best low-level gear and cobble together something that's stats-agnostic.

Every run in Nightreign is randomised, though, so you'll have no such choosiness here. As per 'onebro' runs of Elden Ring, though, status effects are king, and there are some starting relics that let you carry this tradition forward into Nightreign.

Youwy uses the Executor with its high Arcane starting stat and default katana, along with the Night of Miasma and the Night of the Wise relics to give himself a starting weapon with poison, bleed, and frost buildup. Turns out, you don't need to rely on RNG if you simply make a beeline for some smithing stones.

It also turns out that you can upgrade your base weapon a lot quicker if you're not spending souls to level—there's an absolute nail-biting moment where, after a sketchy run in the mines, Youwy has to leg it to a merchant in the health-sapping rain. He launches into the air, lands with a sliver of health, clutches with the Executor ultimate's full heal, and just barely purchases enough smithing stones to upgrade his weapon before keeling over.

Reflecting on the run, Youwy notes that while the Executor's ability to stack three status effects on his starting weapon is clutch for this sort of thing, the rest of his kit is only situationally useful—pulling out the deflection sword for bosses and tough enemies he's unable to stagger, and using his ult for crowd-clearing. The Tenacity passive, on the other hand, is "just useless". I don't like that he's talking about my curse-stricken boy like that, but he's right, especially for a run where one hit means death, anyway.

Anyway, it's a remarkable achievement—especially considering Youwy got this in under the wire, with the changes to solo coming in an imminent patch, which would make this feat a whole lot easier. That's some dedication to masochism, right there.