Bloodborne modder restores the old Cleric Beast shortcut

News by Sherif Saed Contributor

Published on July 27, 2021

Bloodborne's mysterious shortcut door is now usable.

One of the earliest mysteries in Bloodborne has been the small locked door behind the Cleric Beast, which is accessible after defeating it. There is no way to interact with the door in the final build of the game, but the alpha version had a prompt that indicated it's a shortcut to a different area, you just needed to open it from the other side.

Shortly after the release of the game, fans put two and two together and figured out that the door was meant to lead from the Great Bridge (Central Yharnam) to the Cathedral Ward, only that this is no longer possible in the launch version of Bloodborne.

Soulsborne mysteries and secrets hunter Lance McDonald later demonstrated that FromSoftware removed this shortcut between alpha and launch, making it act more like an image of a door without the function of one. This was likely done to improve load times or asset streaming, as the two areas it would have connected are vast in their own right and could have caused unnecessary strain.

And that was the end of the story, until today. Garden of Eyes, another modder of FromSoftware games, has devised a clever solution to restore the shortcut - and therefore the door - to the way things were in the game's alpha. As you can see in their video below, the shortcut has been restored to its former glory, now once again connecting Central Yharnam to the Cathedral Ward.

The modder moved the chest on one side slightly, and added a fog door to prevent anyone who hasn't defeated the Cleric Beast from unlocking the shortcut - which is probably how FromSoft would have wanted it to work. The final hurdle was removing the invisible wall the developer added to prevent players from glitching through it.

Garden of Eyes said that this mod, which also includes some fixes to prevent the game from crashing as a result of the tweak, will be released soon. If you have a modded PS4, you'll be able to use it to activate the shortcut in your game.