malenia-waterfowl-practice.md

How to Practice Malenia's Waterfowl Dance

This document describes how to hack Malenia's AI to make her spam Waterfowl Dance over and over again while dealing you no damage, so that Elden Ring players can practice dodging this notorious attack without needing to restart the fight and push her to 65% damage every single time. It took me many days of diligent searching to uncover this information, so I want to write it out all in one place to help future sickos in their quest for Malenia practice.

1. Have Elden Ring on PC. Unfortunately, this will not work on other platforms.
2. Download the latest release of the Elden Ring Practice Tool from this page, and extract it anywhere you like.
3. Open %APPDATA%\EldenRing in Explorer.
   1. You should see a directory with a bunch of numbers in here--that's your Elden Ring save file.
   2. Copy and paste it with " (Backup)" after the name. This is a clean backup that will never have any cheats or hacks applied.
4. Open Elden Ring, and from the main menu go to System > Network and set "Launch Setting" to "Start Offline". This ensures that you're never connected to the network while you're hacking your game, so you don't get banned from the servers. Close Elden Ring once you've done this.
5. Open your Elden Ring steam app directory in Explorer. This is probably something like C:\Program Files\%USERNAME%\Steam\steamapps\common\ELDEN RING\Game.
   1. Create a text file in this directory named steam_appid.txt with the contents 1245620. This causes the game to avoid opening Easy Anti Cheat, which would otherwise prevent hacks from working.
   2. Run eldenring.exe from this directory. Do not run it from Steam.
6. Once Elden Ring is running again, go to System > Graphics and set "Screen Mode" to "Windowed". Practice Tool currently freezes the game when it's fullscreened.
7. Run jdsd_er_practice_tool.exe from whichever directory you extracted it to.
8. Load up your save file in Elden Ring.
9. Press 2 ("No Death"). This will prevent you from dying.
10. Go fight Malenia, and get her into range for a Waterfowl Dance.
11. Once she starts performing the dance, press Home ("Action Freeze"). This will lock her AI into doing only Waterfowl Dance over and over again.

Once you're finished and you want to un-hack your game, follow these steps:

1. Close Elden Ring.
2. Open the Elden Ring steam app directory again, and rename steam_appid.txt to steam_appid (disabled).txt.
3. Open your save file directory again, add " (Hacked)" to the end of your current save directory and remove " (Backup)" from the end of the old one.

You'll be good to go from there!