Behind the Fort of Reprimand, up a ladder past the Lesser Omenkiller, sits a chest that once held four Smithing Stone [8]. Since patch 1.17, it holds an Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone instead. That swap is one of 111 loot changes, and the patch notes name none of them.
FromSoftware covered every one of those changes with a single line, and it was easy to skim past. Patch 1.17 went live on August 27, 2026, one day ahead of the Tarnished Pack, and most of the attention went to shields, parries and the two new starting classes. The loot line sat at the top of the balance section, saying almost nothing.
One Sentence in the Patch Notes
Here’s the whole official explanation, in our words. Some items you pick up in the Realm of Shadow, plus some rewards from beating certain strong enemies there, were upgraded to better versions or replaced with different treasures. A note underneath adds that anything you already collected stays the way it was.
That’s it. The note names no item, no location and no enemy. It doesn’t say how many pickups changed or what they became. If you wanted to know whether your next DLC run would be any different, the patch notes left you to find out yourself.
You need the update to play online, so anyone who does is already exploring with the new loot tables, whether they noticed or not.
Shadow of the Erdtree’s Smithing Stone Glut
To see why this change matters, go back to the DLC’s launch in 2024. You enter the Land of Shadow late in the game, usually with a solid stock of upgrade materials and the low tiers available to buy for pocket change. Then the DLC kept handing you more of exactly those low tiers. One corpse in the Ruined Forge Lava Intake carries seven Smithing Stone [2], which by that point in a playthrough is about as exciting as a handful of Rowa Raisins.
The complaint showed up in games coverage within weeks of release. The argument was that a map stuffed with common stones makes exploration feel less rewarding, and that the loot tables needed rebalancing.
Not everyone saw it as a problem. The DLC often drops stones in bundles of four, six or even eight, and for players who wanted to try every new weapon, the Smithscript throwables included, that generosity made experimenting cheap. Patch 1.17 doesn’t take the bundles away. It makes most of them several tiers more useful.
111 Pickups, Counted Twice
FromSoftware never published a number. The 111 first showed up in the changelog of Map for Goblins – 1.17 Fix, a Nexus mod that rebuilt the popular loot map on the 1.17 game data. We compared the game’s own loot tables from before and after the patch, and the count holds. Exactly 111 item pickups in the Land of Shadow changed.
The mod sums the changes up as stones and gloveworts moving up a tier. That undersells it. For 96 of the 111 pickups, the material stayed the same and got better, and most of them jumped well past one tier.
| What changed | Pickups |
|---|---|
| Same tier, bigger stack | 9 |
| One tier up | 17 |
| Two to four tiers up | 53 |
| Five or more tiers up | 17 |
Some of the jumps are almost comical. A corpse that used to give you six Smithing Stone [1] now gives three Smithing Stone [7], and a lone Somber Smithing Stone [1] turned into a Somber [9]. Gloveworts got the same treatment, which pays off if you’re leveling spirit ashes on the side.
The other 15 pickups are where it gets interesting. Eleven of them now hand you a consumable on top of the stones, and four hold materials the game only gives out a fixed number of times.
The Bonus Items
At those eleven spots, the original slot now holds a consumable, and the stones moved into a new slot right behind it, usually upgraded on the way. Open one of them and you walk away with both.
- Gravesite Plain: Heading east out of Prospect Town toward the Church of Benediction, you pass a few enemies camped below the pond. The corpse in their camp now carries Sacred Bloody Flesh. Fog Rift Fort has two bonus spots of its own. Messmerfire Grease lies on a ledge beyond the fort’s outer wall, and three Blessed Bone Shards wait in the chest you reach once the fort’s miniboss is down.
- Belurat, Tower Settlement: A corpse up on the roofs holds both Horn Tenders, silver and gold, plus a Somber Smithing Stone [7]. To get there, step out of a second-story door and work your way across the roofs.
- Ancient Ruins of Rauh: The other two Sacred Bloody Flesh spots are here. One corpse lies in the bloodfiend cave under the East Ruins, which you reach by riding the stone lift near Viaduct Minor Tower. The other sits in the mud just north of the Ancient Ruins Base grace, where a dog got to it first.
- Scadu Altus: South of Shadow Keep, walk past the big enemy camp and climb the hill on its east side. A tent up top hides 20 Perfumer’s Bolts. The Sunwarmth Stone comes with the Fort of Reprimand’s basement chest, which gets its own mention below.
- Abyssal Woods: Three bonus items, two of them close to the Abandoned Church. Tucked under a giant branch just south of the church door is Surging Frenzied Flame, the crafted stone that spews frenzied flame once you set it down. One Clarifying Cured Meat lies against a small tree toward the forest’s western edge, west of the church’s grace, and the second is farther north, in the ravine above the Abyssal Woods grace.
None of these are rare, but Sacred Bloody Flesh is a nice gift for bleed builds, and a free Sunwarmth Stone saves you a crafting run.
Download the Full List
Want to plan your own revisit? Download all 111 changes as an Excel file, with directions to every spot and what each pickup held before and after the patch. Every column can be filtered, so you can pull up just the spots for one item.
Four Pickups Worth Going Back For
These four now hold materials you can’t buy, which makes them the real prizes of the patch. Two of them are the rarest upgrade stones in the game.
Fort of Reprimand: Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone
This chest is on the back route into the fort. Head west of the gaol and ride the spiritspring over to the fort, where you’ll find the Behind the Fort of Reprimand site of grace. Follow the rampart, deal with the Lesser Omenkiller, and climb the ladder up the tower next to it. The chest at the top used to hold four Smithing Stone [8]. Now it holds a single Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone.
On paper that looks like a downgrade from four stones to one. In practice it’s the better deal by a mile. Once you have the right bell bearings, every regular stone from [1] to [8] is for sale. Ancient Dragon stones are the final step from +24 to +25, and apart from one copy Gatekeeper Gostoc sells under specific quest conditions, you have to find every one of them in the world.
Don’t leave the fort yet. Go back to the gallows and take the stairs down into the lower level, where a chest used to give you eight Smithing Stone [6]. Since the patch it pays out three Sunwarmth Stones and six Smithing Stone [7], which makes the Fort of Reprimand the best single stop on a revisit.
Ellac River: Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone
The second one sits in the Ellac River, on the route down toward the Cerulean Coast. Follow the river past Ellac River Cave until it drops over a second waterfall. Down at its base, tucked behind a row of stone columns, a giant lobster sits next to the corpse. Before 1.17 that corpse gave you a Somber Smithing Stone [6]. It now gives a Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone, the material that takes a special weapon from +9 to +10.
While you’re there, keep heading south. The Ghostflame Dragon on the Cerulean Coast drops another Somber Ancient Dragon stone.
Two Great Gloveworts
The other two upgrades are for summoners. Great Gloveworts take regular and renowned spirit ashes to their final level, and like Ancient Dragon stones, no merchant sells them.
- Great Grave Glovewort: in the Abyssal Woods, southwest of the Divided Falls grace. A big tree stands on a rise above the path the Winter-Lanterns walk, and the corpse lies at its base. Before the patch it gave you a Somber Smithing Stone [7].
- Great Ghost Glovewort: in the Darklight Catacombs, in the room the giant bigmouth imp claims as its own. Check the corpse along the east wall, which used to carry a Ghost Glovewort [4].
The New Totals
No other pickups with these four materials changed, so each count goes up by exactly one:
| Material | DLC before 1.17 | DLC after 1.17 |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone | 8 | 9 |
| Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone | 6 | 7 |
| Great Grave Glovewort | 6 | 7 |
| Great Ghost Glovewort | 3 | 4 |
Across a full playthrough, that brings Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones to 22 and the Somber version to 15.
Who Actually Gets the New Loot
The catch is in that note about collected items. If you opened the fort chest before August 27, you have four Smithing Stone [8] in your inventory, and they stay that way. Nothing gets converted after the fact, and the chest won’t refill.
So the players who come out ahead are the ones who haven’t looted the Land of Shadow yet. That covers a first trip into the DLC, a new character, and any New Game+ cycle, where the world’s pickups come back with the 1.17 contents.
Plenty of location guides, including some of the big wikis, still list the old contents for these spots. If a guide sends you to the fort for Smithing Stone [8] and you walk away with an Ancient Dragon stone, the guide is out of date, and you got the better end of it. Our own guide to Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones got both new locations added.
What We Still Don’t Know
Two months after the patch, we can name and place every changed pickup. All 111 changes sit on a corpse, a chest or a glowing item lying out in the world. Not one is tied to a boss or an enemy, and the table for regular enemy drops didn’t change at all. So the line about rewards from strong enemies doesn’t match anything we can find in the loot data, and we can’t tell you what it refers to.
If a Shadow Realm boss or strong enemy has dropped something unexpected for you since 1.17, tell us in the comments, and we’ll add confirmed finds to this article.
The loot tables weren’t the only thing we found in those game files. The patch notes say 24 shields got a better guard boost or less weight, and that a handful of weapons and spells hit harder, but they never say by how much. The files do, and they also hold at least one buff the notes don’t mention at all. We’re breaking it all down in an upcoming article on patch 1.17 by the numbers.
Leave a Reply