Elden Ring Nightreign has four different Shifting Earth events for players to experience as they defeat more and more Nightlords. The second of these is The Mountaintops, which swaps Fire Giants for Ice Dragons who deal an abominable amount of Frostbite damage. What if there was a convenient way to counter that, though?
Those who successfully reach the top of The Mountaintops will receive a reward for their efforts, but the area is also home to plenty of bosses and foes where you can quickly farm runes. To help you with exploring the area, here’s how The Mountaintops work in Nightreign.
Elden Ring Nightreign Mountaintops event explained
The Mountaintops is one of four Shifting Earth events that will transform a portion of Limveld in Nightreign, and is typically unlocked after defeating your third or fourth Nightlord. In this instance, the north-western corner of Limveld becomes a huge, snowy mountain coated in dragons, trolls, and demi-humans for you to climb.
The Mountaintops event, once active, will last for between three and five Expeditions, and can be skipped by resting in the bed in the Hold’s Waiting Room. That said, we do not recommend skipping these events, as once they disappear, it’s not yet known if or when they will reappear unless playing with a new player. We imagine they’ll reappear randomly, but cannot yet confirm this.
To check if The Mountaintops or any other Shifting Earth event is active, open your Expeditions menu and look at the right-hand side of the screen to see any active events or objectives. To guarantee that you spawn The Mountaintops event, you should also make sure that the player with the event is the one hosting the lobby.
On top of that, Shifting Earth events are incredibly tough, large areas that should be tackled on Day 2 of an Expedition, and given just how much there is to do here, you should ideally dedicate the entirety of Day 2 to exploring it. Fortunately, the Night’s Tide will close in on Shifting Earth events on Day 2, giving players ample opportunity to discover all of the area’s secrets.
What to do in the Mountaintops in Nightreign
The Mountaintops is quite similar to The Crater in Nightreign. This time, however, rather than carefully climbing downwards and defeating enemies along the way, you’ll be climbing upwards and making your way to the red quest marker (on your map) at the top of The Mountaintops instead.
This means running around the bottom of cliffs, using Spiritstreams and carefully walking across chains – much like The Mountaintops of the Giants – to get there. Some things to note, however:
- There will be Freezing Dragons along this route that deal ridiculous damage. Ignore them and come back to them later after receiving the area reward.
- Kill any minor enemies along the way. Trolls and Demi-Human Swordmasters will always drop Dormant Powers that provide an anti-Frostbite or anti-Dragon effect; stack these as much as you can.
If you run past any Freezing Dragons along the way and kill all other minor foes you run into, you’ll not only wind up with plenty of Runes, but some anti-Frost and anti-Dragon passive effects too. These will come in use shortly.
At the very top of The Mountaintops, there’ll be a Site of Grace and a glowing blue crystal to the left of it (pictured below). Interact with the legendary item below the crystal to receive a huge amount of Frostbite resistance and a boost to attack power whenever Frostbite is nearby; this is the reward for the area, and will make fighting those Freezing Dragons we’ve run past much easier.
If you jump off the opposite side of the platform you grabbed the reward from, you’ll run into an Ice Dragon up ahead to kill, and will find his Frostbite a lot less problematic to deal with now. That’s pretty much all there is to The Mountaintops, and all in all, the area reward is very situational.
With that in mind, though, there is one scenario in which you should definitely get The Mountaintops reward, and that’s when queuing into Nightlord, Fissure in the Fog. So much so, that if you or a teammate have The Mountaintops event active, you should actively queue into the Fissure in the Fog right to really make the most of the reward and make the Nightlord fight much easier (this is especially given that we do not know how to retrigger these Shifting Earth events once they’re gone).
SPOILERS AHEAD
The reason why you should complete The Mountaintops and face the Fissure in the Fog Nightlord is because this is a dragon boss that deals a disgusting amount of Frostbite. As a result, collecting The Mountaintop’s various anti-Dragon and anti-Frostbite buffs – and its final reward – before going into the fight will make it significantly more manageable.
For more on Nightreign, take a look at some of the other Shifting Earth events in the game and how they work, such as the Rotted Woods and Noklateo, the Shrouded City.