Elden Ring’s Erdtree is its most notable landmark. Visible from almost any point in the Lands Between (at least, in the overworld), it towers over every area in the game, even the lofty Mountaintops of the Giants to the map’s far north. It is, to put it mildly, very big. But how big is ‘big’, exactly?
Well, FromSoftware YouTube specialist Zullie the Witch took it upon themselves to find out. In a video titled ‘How big is the Erdtree?’ Zullie attempted to measure Elden Ring’s giant golden glowstick while explaining their methodology:
“At the base, we could measure from where it meets the ground,” Zullie explains, “but the trunk continues for hundreds of metres below that.” Looking at the top of the tree, Zullie notes that “The trunk also abruptly cuts off at the peak of the tree, but it’s naturally crowned by many branches that extend farther up.”
Taking all this into account, Zullie measures the tree from its base beneath the overworld to the tip of its tallest branch, concluding that the Erdtree model’s total height is approximately 5,048 metres tall (or 16,562 feet). This is taller than the highest mountain in the Alps, Mont Blanc, which has an elevation of 4,808 m, or 15,773 ft.
This is only if you include the entire model, however. As Zullie points out, trees “aren’t usually measured from the roots”. If you measure the Erdtree from the point it emerges from ground, then its height is a slightly less impressive 4,452 m, or 14,606 ft. That’s still taller than a lot of big mountains, including Japan’s Mount Fuji. It’s also five-times taller than the largest man-made structure on Earth, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
But how does the Erdtree stack up to other videogame tallbois? Well, it is but a sapling compared to the Citadel in Half-Life 2, which, after nine years of arguments and research, was concluded to be 8,773 m tall, which is close to the height of Mount Everest. There is still some debate about that measurement, however, so perhaps Elden Ring’s Erdtree might win out in this height-based bunfight yet.