Elden Ring Nightreign may have lost its official support, but the modding scene refuses to let it die quietly. Modder Doneda has ported Dark Souls 2's Frozen Eleum Loyce and the Frigid Outskirts into ELDEN RING Nightreign as a fully playable standalone map, complete with a trailer on YouTube showing the whole thing in action.
Why Eleum Loyce fits Nightreign better than you'd expect
Here's the thing: this isn't just a novelty port for the sake of nostalgia. The geography of Eleum Loyce actually maps surprisingly well onto Nightreign's structure. The wide-open Frigid Outskirts and the walled city layout can credibly mimic Limveld's mini open-world format in a way that more linear FromSoftware zones simply couldn't pull off.
The smartest detail in Doneda's implementation is how the night-two circle closes in on the underground chaos arena, the same space where the Burnt Ivory King fight originally played out. That's not just a technical transplant, it's a genuine recontextualization of the zone's original design logic, repurposing the level's climactic endpoint as Nightreign's natural endgame pressure cooker.
Doneda isn't new to this kind of deep-cut FromSoftware archaeology either. They previously restored the remains of a cut Dark Souls 2 sewers map, so Eleum Loyce is very much in their wheelhouse.
What this means for Nightreign's modding scene
FromSoftware appears to have quietly wound down active development on Nightreign, with attention shifting toward The Duskbloods. That's left a small but motivated modding community to fill the gap, and the results have been genuinely interesting.
The mod drops into a broader wave of community-driven additions that have kept Nightreign alive past its official shelf life. Yui's Seamless Co-op adaptation opened the door for more relaxed six-player sessions, while TerraMag's Shadow of the Erdtree and Dark Souls 3 weapons mod added cross-game armaments that feel like something FromSoftware probably should have shipped themselves.
Doneda's map port is a different category of ambition entirely, though. Transplanting an entire DLC zone, geometry, flow, and all, into a different game's engine and progression structure is a serious technical lift. The fact that it works, and that it works well enough to have its own trailer, says something about how far Nightreign's modding tools have come.
The Lost Crowns connection
Eleum Loyce comes from Dark Souls 2's Crown of the Ivory King DLC, the third and final chapter of the Lost Crowns trilogy. The consensus at the time, and it hasn't shifted much since, was that the Lost Crowns represented a staggering quality jump over base Dark Souls 2. The DLCs played with scale, atmosphere, and boss design in ways the main game only occasionally managed.
Choosing Eleum Loyce specifically over something like Brume Tower (Crown of the Old Iron King) was the right call for this project. Brume Tower is a twisting vertical maze, brilliant in its own way, but completely incompatible with Nightreign's sprawling outdoor format. Eleum Loyce's combination of open snowfields and a fortified city gives players actual room to move, which is exactly what Nightreign's loop demands.
Pro tip: if you want to get the most out of the Eleum Loyce map, brush up on your Elden Ring quest strategies before jumping in. The mod drops you into a familiar-but-foreign space where knowing your character's toolkit inside and out makes a real difference.
Doneda has signaled plans to build more modded maps for Nightreign, and you can follow their work directly on YouTube or support the project through Ko-fi. With FromSoftware focused elsewhere, the modders are running the table now, and honestly, the results are worth paying attention to.
