Clearing "Dark Souls 2" using only dung? This design has been completely exploited

They made a very typical “edge-of-system play” trade-off here: poison and status effects were numerically designed as low-frequency, high-payoff tools, but players turned them into a main weapon and literally beat Dark Souls II using dung. From a design perspective, this isn’t just messing around for fun, but a stress test that pushes the status system to its limits.

The protagonist of this stunt is YouTuber ymfah, and the constraints he set for himself are extremely hardcore: he uses only “dung” from the game as his damage source for the entire run. He even carefully laid out a route and tutorial, calculating the “ammo budget” of dung needed for each boss. From a systems design view, this is equivalent to the player putting themselves into an extreme build—actively abandoning the traditional weapon growth route and building an entire combat loop purely around triggering and maintaining poison.

Even more interesting, he even proposed the concept of “MPTK (Minimum Poops To Kill)”, turning the whole thing into a semi-academic strategy study. This approach is very similar to the “theoretical minimum-resource clear” tables that design teams use for internal balance testing, except this time the object of evaluation is an item that was supposed to be just throwaway junk. For boss fights, what originally mattered was reading moves, timing, and damage efficiency; he abstracted all that into a resource management game centered on poison thresholds and the margin for error in movement.

Mechanically, this works because dung can inflict sustained “toxic” status. Once a boss is poisoned, the player can kite and keep rolling to stall for time, letting the DOT slowly grind down the health bar. Technically, this is a typical “low risk, low tactile feedback but high forgiveness” damage model. For a numbers designer, items like this are usually designed as a Plan B to supplement your main playstyle, not as your primary DPS for the whole game. Players inverted that intention, translating high-risk melee into a safe but drawn-out poisoning tactic.

To make this playstyle viable, the character build is forced into a full reconstruction around poison-based combat: you need to prioritize high poison resistance, HP, and stamina regen, because during fights you must maintain a steady throwing frequency while also having enough stamina to keep rolling and repositioning. From a systems architecture perspective, this effectively pulls together attributes that originally lived in multiple subsystems—such as stamina, resistances, equip load, and throwing tempo—under a single unified goal. This is a textbook example of a “strong-constraint build” in practice.

The more critical part is the resource pipeline: most of your “dung” comes from killing rats, which creates a kind of alternative economic loop for the entire run. You have to farm mobs to stockpile enough ammo before challenging key bosses. In commercial terms, this sort of resource grind is usually used by service games to pad online engagement time, but in a single-player game it’s mostly just optional self-imposed suffering. In this challenge, however, the creator turns the farming phase into strategic resource management via extreme constraints, making what would normally be a boring numbers grind into a part of route planning.

To ensure the pure-dung route can actually reach the ending, he also makes heavy use of bonfire manipulation, wall clipping, and tricks like using dung to lure enemies to open doors. You can tell this is someone with a systematic understanding of level collision and AI behavior doing a teardown. These “cheese spots” are usually treated during development as bugs or edge-case tolerance, but in the hands of players they become tactical components. This shows that in terms of overall architecture, Dark Souls II’s level and AI systems leave enough exploitable seams, rather than being a completely sealed, assembly-line style design.

From the community’s perspective, challenges like “beat the game with only X,” “instrument-only runs,” and “speedruns” have already become a cultural tradition of the Souls series. They silently extend the content’s lifespan, letting a game already defined as a “hardcore action RPG” keep generating secondary discourse. For players who haven’t played Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, if you just want to experience the level and boss design, the normal playthrough is already “professional” and brutal enough. If you’re interested in extreme play, treating this dung-only run as a “system boundary documentation” will make it easier to see how much room FromSoftware actually left in the numbers and status systems.

From an overall design standpoint, this dung-only run is more like a mirror: it reflects a complete picture of Dark Souls II’s status effects, resource loops, and level exploits. You can call it players goofing around, or you can call it a grassroots-level systems QA. For people who do design and write code, these extreme cases are more valuable than any trailer, because they concretely reveal how structurally stable a mature system remains after it’s been “broken” by players.