An Elden Ring YouTuber just found an unused Ruined Forge dungeon in Shadow of the Erdtree’s DLC files. The dungeon looks fully complete, with enemies, objects, jumping puzzles, and an interactive Forge—everything but loot.
Ruined Forges are a new dungeon type added in Shadow of the Erdtree. They’re ancient, lava-filled passages lined with crumbling columns and rusted metal. There are three Ruined Forges scattered across Elden Ring’s DLC map, but it turns out a fourth one has been lurking in the game files the whole time.
Dark Souls modder Grimrukh discovered the unused Forge dungeon in Elden Ring‘s files, and then YouTuber SekiroDubi loaded up the map to investigate. The video, published on July 2, shows the whole unused Forge from start to finish, and it’s fascinating to see the dungeon for the first time.
It looks dissimilar to the DLC’s other Forge dungeons and lacks the giant diagonal pipe in the middle. Instead, it’s structured more like a mine from the base game, with several rocky cave sections leading downward. It’s almost entirely linear with no branching paths, unlike most other dungeons in Elden Ring and its DLC. The most interesting part is that the dungeon contains two jumping puzzles where you have to jump over broken pillars and rubble to cross lava pools.
At the end of the dungeon, there’s an interactive Forge—like the ones you find in the other three Ruined Forges. But, unsurprisingly, interacting with it does nothing.
SekiroDubi explains in the video that there’s no information about where the dungeon would appear in the overworld. We don’t know anything other than what we can infer from the footage, but it’s fun to speculate. It’s likely the dungeon was cut because FromSoftware didn’t need it; I think the most likely scenario is that there aren’t enough Smithscript Weapons to populate a fourth Ruined Forge dungeon. This one is the smallest and most straightforward of them all, so it makes sense it didn’t make the cut.
Still, it’s always interesting to see unused content, and FromSoftware is notorious for leaving unused maps and doodads in the files. There’s probably more beneath the surface we still don’t know about.
