Elden Ring has a weird Steam Deck bug, but a fix is incoming

As Elden Ring‘s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC rolls out to players worldwide, Steam Deck fans have discovered a glitch that makes the game impossible to play. The glitch seemed to arrive alongside update 1.12 and will seriously halt your game if you leave your Tarnished alone for too long.

Steam Deck users noticed an issue that made the game unresponsive to any inputs. FromSoftware took to Twitter/X to confirm that this occurs if you leave the game running but leave your Steam Deck inactive for more than 5 minutes. The developer is working on hotfix for the glitch, but it’s not here yet. To avoid the issue happening to you, it’s important to keep your Tarnished moving.

Don’t stop moving in Elden Ring if you’re playing on Steam Deck because there’s no beating the inactivity glitch boss

Elden Ring‘s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is one of the most highly-anticipated releases of 2024. Some might be playing right now and, in the middle of their runs, need to put the Steam Deck down and go take care of something. However, doing this without batting a button or joystick every few minutes like an impatient cat will cause the game to lock you out entirely at the moment.

FromSoftware is working on an update, but hasn’t announced when it will be able to release a patch to fix this issue. Thankfully, this error popped up on the day that Shadow of the Erdtree was released, so the developer was likely waiting for error reports. Not all errors are created equal, though. Some take a few hours to be patched, while others can take much longer.

Since the release of the latest patch, I’ve seen a couple of reports of errors in Elden Ring on social media. They aren’t common enough that it looks like everyone is affected, but quite a few players have launched the game and have been waiting until the DLC goes live, only to be met with an error screen and an inability to load their perfectly placed Tarnished.

If you’re playing the game on Steam Deck, the safest way to do so is to just keep moving. Don’t leave your game for longer than 5 minutes, or you’ll likely need to reboot. Mercifully, Elden Ring runs well on Valve’s handheld device, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem for loading screens.

My best advice for you is to just be mindful of when you’re taking breaks, and for how long. If you plan on putting the Steam Deck down before the hotfix is out, maybe make sure you’ve saved and quit. We’ll update the piece as soon as FromSoft has a fix online.