Cum Dungeon

Need we say more? (OK, we’re gonna say a little more.)

On the latest Aftermath Hours, we’re joined by Tyler Colp of PC Gamer to discuss an extremely pressing business matter: Chris wrote almost 9,000 words about his favorite FromSoftware farming spots, and somehow, he still has more to say about them. Tyler, a fellow FromSoft sicko, happily indulges him.

We discuss all sorts of obscure nooks and crannies in games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, as well as larger topics like Sekiro’s (perhaps unearned) status as the studio’s dark horse. And of course, we spend plenty of time talking about Bloodborne’s legendary Cum Dungeon, a collaboratively discovered farming location whose arcane machinations might be even more interesting than its name.

You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that Chris can personally hire a team to finally port Bloodborne to PC.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Nathan: I'm so curious about the Cum Dungeon, especially given that when you published your piece, people were reposting it on social media just saying "Cum Dungeon!" There's clearly a legacy here.

Chris: OK so, there's Chalices. Chalices are these really weird… I guess you would call them bottle dungeons.

Tyler: They’re basically randomized dungeons, right? Like, mini-dungeons.

Chris: Depends. And this is where it gets complicated. So there’s Root Chalices, which people assumed were random, but they’re not. There’s 2,300 possible ones that are by all accounts not randomly generated. They made them beforehand because they don’t want to have to randomly generate one every single time. So you can actually repeat them.

This led to a sub-group that actively explored those called the Tomb Prospectors. So there’s a group that has a Google doc, and they’ve gone through all the possible permutations; you can just explore “This is what it does, here’s how it goes.” There’s one that if you just put this code in, which is, to be clear, “C-U—”

Nathan: Says in your piece that it’s “C-U-M-M-M-F-P-K.”

Chris: If you just put that in [the game], it will say, “?Place Name?” on the top, and that will be a dungeon you go into, and you walk in, and it gives you 86,000 Blood Echoes. And then you leave. That’s it.

[Players] didn’t know why it did that for a really long time. XTrinX, the person responsible for “cummmfpk,” left a comment on Reddit, like, a month ago, fortuitously, where they were like “I’m tired of people getting the Cum Dungeon wrong; here’s what it is.” Basically what they said was, they found it kinda randomly, and then they save edited to change the depth to make it more consistent—and the name is random. So the name is random, but it is a byproduct of community.

YouTuber Zullie The Witch figured out why the fuck it does that. So basically, there’s a Hunter that appears in the game, Tomb Prospector Olek. In this Chalice Dungeon, he will spawn on a bridge… under a blade that’s gonna kill him.

But, the thing is, normally if you are looking at him, he will just get knocked off. So why does it kill him every time? The answer is: optimization. Because he’s so far away, his hitbox and the hitbox of the blade will spawn, but his body will not. So basically what happens is, the idea of him and the harm box of the blade will just kill him each time, because his physical body is not manifested, so there’s nothing to knock off [the bridge]. It can’t load the animation.

So basically it just creates “The Pit And The Pendulum” every single time. He’ll just spawn. His soul will be killed by the soul of the blade, and then he’ll just disappear. You’re torturing this poor NPC every single time, and you never see him. It’s so beautiful.

But the fact that it is the byproduct of a community [makes it special]. It took them a while to figure out how it worked.

Tyler: Yeah, I remember when it was spreading around—when people were like “Oh my god, put this code in and you can easily farm a bunch of souls; it’s the only way you can do it.”

Chris: What’s really interesting is, it’s not. There’s actually quite a few dungeons. There’s a bunch of other ones, and it’s not novel in that regard. It’s just this weird [confluence of] the meme coupled with the community coupled with the detective work coupled with how weird the mechanic is. The fact that they had to tamper with it. Somebody was like “Well, technically it’s cheating because you can’t get that Chalice Dungeon organically.”

Tyler: But they let you put the codes in.

Chris: Right, and that’s the thing: If they allow it, is it cheating?