Vagrant Story
How a mysterious creature led to the unpicking of Dark Souls’ inner workings
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While exploring the Undead Burg less than a week after Dark Souls’ launch, Patrick Todd found something weird – a docile creature that resembled a semi-hatched egg with insect legs. It stood there as if waiting to be slain, white tendrils atop its head lilting like seagrass. Though Todd had passed that exact location many times, he’d never spotted a creature there before.
“I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?’” he recalls of that first Vagrant encounter. “It was just such a weird, baffling moment. I didn’t fully appreciate Vagrants until later on. It just stood out as a rare event. Their design is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, you might call it ‘cute Lovecraft-ian’. The Good variety looks like an egg with legs. There’s a really rare event in Final Fantasy II that involves seeing a rare monster in a certain cave. So it initially just stood out as, oh, this is Dark Souls’ version of a rare-creature type thing.”
For many players the story might end there. A brief stab of curiosity, perhaps even an audible ‘huh!’ before returning to the more pressing task of how to dispatch the zone’s Black Knight and eke out another centimetre of forward progress. Anybody with sufficient determination can develop the combat skills necessary to complete Dark Souls. But Todd doesn’t just want to conquer the game, he wants to comprehend it. His curiosity demands a more thorough investigation.
If at any point in your journey with Dark Souls, you’ve done a Google search to figure out how some unexplained mechanic in the game functions, you’ve almost certainly been steered to a wiki article constructed, at least in part, from the findings of a sage named ‘illusorywall’, Todd’s online handle. The name is fitting. Gameplay mechanics that seem impenetrable to most players have a way of magically dissolving once Todd starts chipping away at them.
“I’m not somebody who does hard challenge runs,” he says. “I have done Dark Souls without levelling up – a ‘OneBro’ run or whatever it’s called. But that’s pretty much it. Figuring out the mechanics is my own personal version of the challenge run. A good example in Dark Souls would be the mechanic where you immediately get soft humanity [the unexplained numeral situated next to one’s health bar] for killing a bunch of enemies before the boss is dead. The system for that wasn’t figured out so I started doing playthroughs where I guessed that it wasn’t random and maybe they were using a hidden point system of some kind.
“I’m not a hacker. I can’t just look at the code and figure out what’s going on. So I did a run of the game where, without killing any enemies at all aside from the Asylum Demon, I would kill only one specific enemy type over and over. So it would be doing weird things like running to the Undead Parish without killing anything and then just killing a certain Balder Knight over and over until I get that point of humanity. Then I can say, oh, okay, it took X amount of that to get the point of humanity. I’d do lots of silly things like that.”
The tolerance for repetition required by Dark Souls’ dieand-retry path to mastery selects for a certain obsessiveness in the type of player the game attracts. Yet Todd’s case proves that the trial-and-error loop of discovery can extend well beyond perfecting the crucial timing of when to roll clear of a demon’s mallet. If anything, the lengths to which he has gone to reverse-engineer previously opaque mechanics for the benefit of the wider community make his version of play appear uncannily like laboratory research.
Todd refers to this process as “testing”. It’s his unique way of expressing his love for Dark Souls, and he’s spent hundreds of hours at it. This pattern of brute-force repetition, winnowing of possibilities and careful documentation may not be sexy, but it delivers results. The mystery of how and why Vagrants travel around the multiverse of Dark Souls’ player network quickly became his white whale.
“The way Dark Souls is unclear with the game’s lore, it also takes the same approach with its mechanics. Because there’s a lot of stuff that FromSoftware doesn’t really explain. Even major systems like sin in Dark Souls, they do a really bad job of explaining a major mechanic like that. Then also really small things like: why do you get humanity when you kill a bunch of random enemies sometimes? Why do you automatically get that? So they have all these weird layers to their mechanics they don’t like to explain and it gives you a puzzle to pick away at. That extra layer of Vagrants relying on online mechanics is really what gnawed at me.”
The Dark Souls subreddit abounded with players reporting their own Vagrant sightings, curious as to why they’d received such a visitation. Vagrants came in two
types: 1) Good Vagrants like the one Todd had spotted in the Undead Burg, and 2) Evil Vagrants with crab-like pincers who attack players with a flurry of projectiles. Such sightings remain rare. Many players bemoaned the fact that they had yet to encounter a Vagrant despite logging hundreds of hours in Lordran. What was going on?
“By this point I’d already had some success figuring out other mechanics in Dark Souls,” Todd says. “I was the first person to get and organise very detailed and accurate levelrange calculations in the game [for PvP and co-op play]. So having done some of that, I’d had a taste of ‘no one else knows this yet and I can be the one to unleash it on the community’. So I was like, yeah I’m going to do this. Maybe I’ll never get every little detail of Vagrants figured out but I’ll just figure out what I can… I never doubted it. I was like, I’m going to do this no matter what.”
The obvious first step was to take an inventory of what information was already in circulation. Todd consulted the game’s manual to see what he could learn. The official Vagrant description, frustratingly concise, did little to illuminate the underlying online mechanics behind such ‘drift items’: If you drop a certain item or lose a large amount of humanity, those items and humanity move to another player’s world and form Vagrant enemies.” The official game guide included a list of spawn locations but remained equally terse in describing the underlying mechanics. Unofficial channels such as the game’s subreddit and wikis offered a litany of enthusiastic guesswork.
“[The process] just started out as: what can I verify as true and what looks like just speculation or false? I remember there was one thing on the wiki that said: ‘If an item is left for 24 hours it might create a Vagrant.’ And that set off all these sceptical red flags for me. Like, how could anybody have figured that out? There’s no one who let the game run for a full day and figured that out. So
I kind of knew as I was reading it that this was speculation, this isn’t correct.
“Most of the edits to the wiki seemed well-intentioned but some people were just bad at saying ‘I think this is how it works’ versus ‘this is fact’. I think some people were eager to put down an answer but those answers typically didn’t hold up.”
Todd needed a hypothesis he could test. If losing a large amount of soft humanity upon death spawns an Evil Vagrant, as noted in the manual, perhaps he could flood the network with so many Vagrants that a friend playing online in the same area of the game world might eventually receive one.
Having no idea what precise tally of soft humanity qualified as ‘large’, he began his troubleshooting at the upper extreme by acquiring the PlayStation 3 save file of a character pre-loaded with 99 soft humanity. Each cycle of testing required him to load up that character, commit suicide by running off the edge of the nearest precipice, delete the profile, then reload the original save file in order to repeat the process.
“It was just a crazy, time-consuming process,” Todd says, chuckling at the tedium of that crucible, “but I had a lot of fun. I’d listen to podcasts while doing it or I’d talk to a friend online while I’m doing it and it was just sort of a zone-out type thing… All of that added up, I definitely spent longer than a typical playthrough of the game – easily – testing Vagrants. That’s the kind of crazy part. I would just go home [after work] and chip away at it for a couple hours. And I did this for months... 100 hours is honestly a conservative estimate.”
He tried to scale up the tests by enlisting other Souls fans to duplicate his process, thereby losing even more humanity and hopefully spawning even more Evil Vagrants, but found himself stymied by forum guidelines.
“I tried to do a few group-effort things. One of them I posted on Reddit but you’re not really supposed to encourage the use of cheat engines on the Dark Souls subreddit so the post ended up getting removed. They were kind of like, ‘Yeah, we know you’re trying to do good for the community but you can’t really talk about hacking and giving yourself 99 humanity or whatever on this forum.’ Oops!”
The early brute-force attempts to spawn Evil Vagrants and transmit them to a friend proved unsuccessful. But something unexpected transpired in the course of that testing. After killing himself repeatedly for hours on end, dropping endless stockpiles of humanity, he found that eventually an Evil Vagrant would appear in his own game.
“I was very confused by that. The person I was trying to send them to didn’t even get one. And then I got one. And I sort of had to wrap my brain around that for a little bit and I thought to myself, ‘Well maybe if I send them out to a bunch of other players online and they don’t kill the Vagrant maybe they’re going to send them back out to somebody else if they lose it.’ And that’s what actually turned out to be true.”
Having confirmed the method by which unkilled Vagrants drift between player worlds across the network and finding a bit of success spawning Evil Vagrants, Todd shifted his sights to the riddle of how to spawn Good Vagrants, a process that felt much less straightforward than losing a stockpile of humanity upon death.
He continued to eavesdrop on the discussions players were having online and paid special attention when somebody would report a curious interaction in their game. He had heard several accounts of people finding a random item bag in their game that, when opened, contained a useless item such as Rubbish. A buzzkill akin to finding a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking. Crucially these item bags had not been dropped by a co-op partner or invading player.
“[THE PROCESS] JUST STARTED OUT AS ‘WHAT CAN I VERIFY AS TRUE’?”
“I had the idea in the back of my head, maybe this has something to do with Vagrants,” Todd says, “but I can’t think of a way to test it. I’m totally stuck. I have no idea what’s going on.”
During such periods of mental block, Todd would continue to monitor the online conversation while stewing on the Vagrant problem. Eventually he stumbled upon a post in the Fextralife forum by a player reporting what appeared to be a glitch related to dropped items. The player in question had dropped a plethora of items in Darkroot Garden and, for whatever reason, proceeded to run to Firelink Shrine and back. Upon his return to Darkroot Garden some of the item bags he’d left behind had vanished while others remained.
This report, when considered alongside the mysterious item bags other players had noticed showing up in their games, caused Todd to wonder if dropped items could propagate through the network, possibly spawning Good Vagrants in the process. At the very least it gave him the testable hypothesis he’d been looking for. Could he replicate this experiment and potentially build on it?
“So I did the same test where I kept dropping items and running back and forth to Firelink but one of the times
I came back I noticed that one of the item bags had Rubbish in it, which is not an item I had dropped… But when I got that save-edited file that had a character loaded up with 99 of every item I started thinking, wait a second, if I drop just one of a specific item over and over and in a very weird particular location of the map – like hide it under a barrel in a weird corner, or drop a gold coin over and over again – in the process of doing that and committing suicide 30 times, I’d come back and find a Rubbish waiting for me. I’m like, I know this is an item that can be sent across and [eventually spawn a Good Vagrant]. So I basically just went down the list of all the items in the game.”
Using this method Todd was able to confirm all but two of the consumable items that can pass between player worlds as drift items and, after enough hot-potato passes, spawn a Good Vagrant. The two drift items he missed confirming in those early tests were simply a casualty of bad luck. It’s impossible, after all, to prove a negative. Just because you’ve systematically dropped a particular item 60 times and unloaded that area without the confirmatory bag of Rubbish pinballing around the network and back to you doesn’t mean that it might not happen on the 61st attempt.
Todd was pleased with what he’d managed to learn about Vagrants up to that point, especially given the crudeness of the tools he had available to him in the game’s early days post-release. But then in December of 2014, players like him who were fascinated with the underlying mechanics of what makes Dark Souls tick received an unexpected holiday bonus.
“This is really funny and I can’t think of any other parallels of other major developers screwing up this bad,” Todd laughs. “But when Dark Souls on PC switched from Games For Windows Live to Steamworks, [FromSoftware] accidentally published to Steam the debug version! So everyone who downloaded the update was like, what the hell is this debug thing? I think it was only less than a day before they reversed that and published the proper version of the game. But because they put that out there, you couldn’t put it back in the box.”
Todd had purchased his PlayStation 3 only after a friend introduced him to Demon’s Souls, a truly killer app, and now the cycle repeated itself. Once the debug version of Dark Souls leaked, he went out and bought a laptop for the express purpose of experimenting with it.
“I used [the debug version] to retest a lot of things that I’d previously tested because now I had creator insight and I could see some numbers behind the scenes. It’s not quite at the level of hacking but I got to see all sorts of weird behindthe-scenes details of how the game works… I was not going to pass up the opportunity to dig into the game.”
One of the key origin stories of Dark Souls involves a young Hidetaka Miyazaki falling in love with the tradition of Tolkien-esque fantasy by marshalling what little English comprehension he possessed to work his way through the Fighting Fantasy series of interactive fiction. Todd’s experimentation with the debug version of Dark Souls mirrors that undertaking with the language difficulty reversed. In order to become fluent enough in Japanese to navigate the various debug menus, he began studying the language, beginning with the phonetic syllabary known as ‘katakana’ used to import loan words from other languages into Japanese.
“There are some [debug] menus that are in English. A parent folder will be in English but then there’s a bunch of Japanese. Again it goes back to troubleshooting, kind of playing around with something, seeing what happens if you change a value, but it’s a lot of guesswork. In some cases I’d send screenshots of the debug over to somebody who does speak Japanese and ask, ‘Hey, what menu is this?’ Apart from that I can’t read most of what’s in there.
“I’m doing a bit better now because I can read katakana. When I see Japanese characters in katakana, there’s a nine out of ten chance that I can figure out the word. So I don’t have to learn the entire language as long as I learn the alphabet that lets me [sound out words] and gets me a chunk of the way there.”
The debug proved especially helpful in clarifying the mysterious way in which player worlds connected to one another for the purpose of co-op and invasion mechanics, as well as the flow of drift items and Vagrants throughout the network. As Todd discovered after exploring the debug interface, instead of each player being connected to every other member of the network, the original Dark Souls used a node system in which you were only connected to 20 players at any given time, presumably filtered by experiencelevel proximity, map location and other relevant variables.
There was even a graphical overlay you could pull up onscreen that showed a representation of all the players currently connected to you, visualised as a cluster of bubbles. If those bubbles are filled, you know you’re connected to others. All of these connections for players in the live
environment existed within something called channel 7.
“I just changed channels and saw I’d lost all of my connections,” Todd explains. “Because I’d gone to a channel I wasn’t supposed to be in and nobody else was there. So then I had somebody else load up the debug and I said, ‘hey, go to channel 1 with me’, and I saw that we were connected. And there’s a visual indication for it and everything. So I could see that not only are we connected but we’re not connected to anyone else at all. So if I suicide and send this humanity, you’re the only person a Vagrant can possibly go to. Or if I drop an item, you’re the only person who can get that item bag.
“It worked flawlessly! It showed that there was no randomisation at all involved. As long as you met the specific criteria, it was guaranteed that they were going to get a Vagrant. So that really blew the doors wide open. Oh, there’s no doubt now, we know exactly what’s happening and why it’s happening.”
Todd noticed other interesting aspects of the Vagrant circulation process through his parsing of the debug menus related to networked play. For one thing, he noticed that there was a sort of queue related to the passing of drift item bags and Vagrants. When they left your game they didn’t immediately spawn in another player’s game but instead went into a queue that functioned almost like an inboxoutbox system. The player would receive it only after reloading the relevant area.
“I had noticed though that when we kept sending the same Vagrant back and forth to each other, a number was increasing on it. So it was not only sending the Vagrant back and forth, it was counting how many times it had been sent. We already knew that some Vagrants can look like the dark red phantom version and we never figured out why that was exactly. But then we saw in this debug version that exactly on pass number 20 the Evil Vagrant appeared as the red one… In the Vagrant debug menu there are a couple sliders and one was set to that number 20. So I just changed it to 1 and when I sent them an Evil Vagrant they got the redphantom version on the first pass!”
Todd learned additional facts about Vagrant mechanics that would have been impossible to discover using his early brute-force testing methods. Most surprising to him, the Vagrant queue had a built-in cooldown timer. Any time you killed a Vagrant or picked up a drift-item bag, an 80-minute timer would start ticking down. During that time you could neither send nor receive Vagrants or drift items until it expired.
“That would have cost me so much time in all of my early testing because all those times where I got an item bag back, I didn’t know when I picked it up that I was wasting the next hour and a half. The debug menu let us iron out these details.
“Also, prior to the debug I’d wanted to know how much humanity you had to lose in order to spawn a Vagrant and I tried doing those brute-force tests but it was never very clear. Maybe you get a Vagrant back but you created it hours ago and another player is just sending it to you now so you don’t know what you left on the network before. Testing can get very messy because of that. But [with the debug] it was very easy to go in and keep decreasing the humanity with a testing partner until you figure out: oh, all you need to do to spawn an Evil Vagrant is drop five humanity.”
Dark Souls invites us to all manner of roleplay. It turned this inquisitive bank teller from West Virginia into a scientific researcher, archivist, student of Japanese, even a YouTube content creator. In 2018 Todd launched a series called Dark Souls Dissected in which he explains the more obtuse mechanical aspects of Dark Souls. It’s difficult to think of anybody who’s done more to expand our understanding of the game’s clockwork interior, a realm that can be uniquely intimidating due to its technical nature.
“I’ve always been very analytical,” Todd says. “Another hobby of mine is I do a podcast about sound design in old videogames so I’m a huge nerd when it comes to questions like, why does the Nintendo or Sega Genesis sound the way it does and how can I peel back the layers on that? I like learning how things work. And I do like a lot of science-y things but it’s never been a career path or something I’ve worked towards. So this is definitely a random hobby for me.”
Given how much time Todd has devoted to teasing apart the mysteries of Dark Souls, what question would he want to put to Dark Souls’ creator Miyazaki if he suddenly received his own private audience?
“It all ties back to Vagrants for me,” he replies. “I’d still love to know what his team was thinking for the concept. Because I don’t know of another game that’s ever done anything similar. I can’t think of any examples of a game where someone else in another session loses something and it sends something to you. I’d love to know the backstory. Whose idea was it and how did they come up with it?
“My impression is that after the release of Demon’s Souls, they took the framework of co-op and PVP and messages and ghosts and for Dark Souls they [asked], what else can we do? And that’s when they came up with lots of weirder ideas like gravelording and Vagrants and stuff like that. So it’s probably part of that process but I’d still love to know more about that.”
A scientist’s work is never done, however. There’s always a follow-up question behind each solved mystery. And for Todd it always has something to do with mechanics.
“One of the main mysteries that I’d love to know the answer to, and it wouldn’t come from somebody at the top like Miyazaki because it has to do with the porting to the Dark Souls remaster, but I’d love to know what happened to Miracle Resonance. Because it’s not really working in Dark Souls Remastered. Through a bunch of testing we’ve determined that it’s way more rare than it should be. To the point that it’s kind of broken. Those little white rings you get when people cast miracles, they’re almost never showing up in the remaster. I saw one once on the PS4 so there’s something clearly wrong there and I’d love to know what happened.”