Watch out, Shadow of the Erdtree players: Elden Ring is suffering a new bug on Steam Deck

Don’t go leaving the Lands Between unattended too long

After years of anticipation, Elden Ring’s first - and only - expansion Shadow of the Erdtree is finally out as of today. While there are plenty of intriguing secrets hiding in the new corner (it’s a big corner) of the Lands Between, Steam Deck players might stumble upon a not-so-welcome new discovery too, courtesy of a bug that can make your game unresponsive.

The issue stems from Elden Ring’s 1.12 patch, which was released yesterday in the lead-up to Shadow of the Erdtree’s launch. As well as adding support for the expansion itself and some general tweaks and balances, the latest update introduced some fresh haircuts, a handy new ‘Recent Items’ tab in your inventory and a fairly major change to the game’s final boss fight, which now lets you summon your trusty ghost horse Torrent.

Unfortunately, along with those lovely new features came an unexpected bug on the Steam Deck confirmed by Elden Ring’s official TwiXer account. The bug appears to affect the game as a whole - meaning it doesn’t matter whether you’re playing the base Elden Ring or Shadow of the Erdtree - and essentially leaves the game inoperable by refusing to accept inputs if the Steam Deck is left inactive for longer than five minutes while playing.

That doesn’t seem all that unlikely to happen if you’re, say, waiting on a summon before tackling a difficult boss or even if you just squat down at a site of grace while you go and make a cuppa. Elden Ring’s diligent auto-saving and the suggestion you’d have to be somewhere in the game where you’re not doing anything anyway means you’re perhaps unlikely to lose much progress unless you’re especially unfortunate (or you get invaded), but having to reboot the game if you leave it a few seconds too long is a faff regardless.

The good news is that FromSoftware are on it, confirming that they’re working on a hotfix to squish the irritating bug. The middling news is that they can’t confirm a time or date for when that fix will arrive just yet, so you’ll just need to tend to your Steam Deck a little more closely than usual in the meantime.

While certainly not a dealbreaker, the extra bit of grit is more noticeable given Elden Ring’s otherwise wonderfully smooth showing on the Deck, which James found to continue in Shadow of the Erdtree. There have been some reports of a separate error message flagging a warning of “Inappropriate activity detected” and blocking online play, too, though From are yet to confirm the cause or solution for that problem.