THE War Dead Catacombs in Elden Ring is a place in Caelid with a very nasty boss at the end: the spirit of the putrid tree.
This area of Elden Ring can be quite easy to pass through as several enemies have decided to fight each other. You can engage in epic battles, but if you’re looking for loot and want to stay alive, it’s probably best to let them duke it out.
Once you finally achieve them, we’ll be here to show you how to defeat the putrid tree spirit in Elden Ring.
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War-Dead Catacombs location in Elden Ring
You can reach the War-Dead Catacombs in Elden Ring after defeating Starscourge Radahn, as they are in the large region he uses as his boss arena – the Wailing Dunes. Explore the area after your victory and you will find the entrance to the catacombs to the north:
Explore the War Dead Catacombs in Elden Ring
Activate the “War Dead Catacombs” grace site and follow the northwest corridor down the stairs. You will encounter a fight between the ghosts of some Redmane Knights and Lesser Cleanrot Knights, but you are not required to intervene. At least not yet.
These guys will fight for quite a while and even continue the fight in the Scarlet Rot Pool below. The treasure chest in the lower area provides us with the Witchcraft spell “Falling stars”the corpse 1x Golden Rune (6). If you want, you can help the soldiers, because the knights are a much tougher enemy.
At the same time, it’s a good place to farm runes, as the stream of enemies isn’t going to stop anytime soon. You can literally stand still and collect runes without doing anything. Someone always dies here. The corpse in the center of the room also bears 3x magic grease to collect, and next to it we find 1x Funeral Glovewort (6).
The west corridor leads to the boss door, which is currently still blocked. At the end of the stairs on the left you can choose another 1x Funeral Glovewort (6).
How to access the lever that opens the boss door? Go back and look left. You will see a small window-shaped passage with a statue behind it.
Jump through there and you will reach a room with several ghosts. It doesn’t matter whether you want to eliminate them or not. Go up the steps, jump through the next window to the west, kill the knight behind it and you will end up in front of the lever. This opens the boss’s entrance.
But before we tackle the boss, there is still a lot to see in the catacombs. For example, in the room with the ghosts there is another room to the south, in which a knight spirit Lesser Cleanrot will appear. He keeps the Ashes of Soldier Radahn.
Go down next to the statue, kill the two imps and you will find 1x Ghost Glovewort (4) on the eastern wall. The passage to the south leads directly to an object – 1x chicken foot marinated in silver.
We have now seen almost everything the catacombs have to offer. It’s time to face the boss.
How to defeat the Putrid Tree Spirit in Elden Ring
This boss is a nastier variant of the Sorrowed Tree Spirit from the Fringefolk Hero’s Tomb.
The Rotten Tree Spirit behaves essentially the same way, but it’s much more dangerous this time. The problem is his physical strength. It’s not uncommon for a single hit to drain more than half of your health bar.
Summons are very important in this fight to distract the Tree Spirit, at least for a short time. With luck, you will also be able to push him into a corner
The worst thing about the Rotten Tree Spirit is that it will infect you with scarlet rot, which is why Preserving boluses is vital to this fight. Otherwise, follow the same tactics to defeat the Ulcerated Tree Spirit: use summons and do your best to break its position in order to land a critical blow.
The rewards for beating this boss are 67,200 runes, Spirit Ashes of the Redmane Knight Oghaand one Gold Seed.
That’s all for the moment! If you’re looking for more help with an Elden Ring boss, check out our pages showing you how to beat Godrick the Clerk and how to beat Mohg the Omen. We also have pages showing you how to beat Mohg Lord of Blood and Morgott the Omen King.
