I’m easily annoyed and occasionally petty, and I think I have a new hero: an Elden Ring player who spent literally hours hiding in a bush just to mess with an AFK farmer who pissed him off.
AFK farming in Elden Ring works like this: Players use Torrent the Goat Horse to get to places that cannot be reached on foot and then use the Taunter’s Tongue item to summon other players into the game, supposedly to PvP combat. But since Torrent is not available in multiplayer, guest fighters cannot reach the farmer. When they finally give up and disconnect, the farmer gets some runes for “victory”, even if they are taken out of the game or out of the room entirely.
Some players are able to reverse farm AFK farmers, but Teasnarker took it a step further. After raiding an AFK farmer “five times in a row” as they called it, they decided that something needed to be done to stop the shenanigans. The farmer was out of reach and couldn’t be dealt with directly, so Teasnarker took a different approach.
“After four useless hacks, I’ve had enough,” they wrote on Reddit. “I decided that this host would not receive a single rune more from me. So when the hunters appeared, I fled and placed the mimic’s veil in a bush. And I hid there. The bush enveloped me and protected me.”
And then they refused to leave.
Mimic’s Veil in Elden Ring is a multiplayer item that allows players to mimic nearby objects, not unlike the Typhon Mimics in Prey. It’s an important piece of the puzzle here, because it means invaders (in this particular case, Teasnarker) can hide much more effectively from hunters – other Elden Ring players who are summoned to help the “victim” during a raid. AFK farmers gain nothing when the hunters give up and leave: it is only when the invader is dealt with, one way or another, that the runes are “earned”. By refusing to leave, Teasnarker was ensuring that the AFK farmer was wasting his time.
The obvious downside to this strategy is that it requires the attacker to stay logged in to deny the farmer their illicit runes, but this is apparently not an issue for Teansnarker, who claimed to have been in the game for three hours when he posted about it.
“Since then, I have seen entire generations of hunters and raiders come and go, and through it all, I have remained in the bush,” they wrote. “The bush is my home now. I’m not leaving. You can’t make me leave.”
As a nice bonus, Teasnarker is even earning some runes for his troubles – “AFK farming the AFK farmer” as they say.
“Every time a hunter is killed or disconnects, I get runes and a curled finger,” they said. “And the host will come back with fewer runes than he expected, because one of his invader slots is being permanently occupied by me, crouching in my bush.
“I like it here. There are rocks and leaves and sometimes an insect flies to keep me company. If you raid an AFK farmer and you have some time on your hands, I recommend doing this, but you have to pick a bush. This one is mine. .”
It’s possible that this story of an invader and his bush is apocryphal – Teasnarker even hinted at it, saying in an update that people who question his claim of being in that bush even at this very moment “probably had fun telling other kids all the there was Santa Claus” — but even if it is, I don’t care. It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it’s absolutely the kind of job AFK farmers deserve. I don’t do a lot of Elden Ring multiplayer, but if I find myself an AFK farmer, you better believe I’m going to find a bush – and then I’m going to leave for a while.