Frostbite can be extremely deadly in Elden Ring. If you’re not prepared, frostbite can kill you faster than poison or blood loss even. Thankfully, this guide will show you exactly what you need to do in order to be prepared for it.
What stat mitigates frostbite?
Before we get into all the crafty-craft stuff, I want to point out that one stat will improve your frostbite defense: Robustness. The higher your Robustness stat, the less damage frostbite will do.
Of course, building up your Robustness is a long game. If you want something more immediate, you’ll want consumables that give your frost defense an instant boost.
How do you cure frostbite buildup?
If you want to instantly mitigate your currently accumulating frostbite, you’ll need Thawfrost Boluses, which work pretty much the same as Stanching Boluses (which cure blood loss) and Neutralizing Boluses (which cure poison).
There are plenty of places to find or buy Thawfrost Boluses in the Lands Between, but I’m not going to get into that here (Fextralife has a pretty good list already). For me, scavenging the world for Thawfrost Boluses is a waste of time when you can craft them yourself.
But first, of course, you need the recipe.
Where can you find the recipe for Thawfrost Boluses?
Before you can craft Thawfrost Boluses, you need to acquire the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [16]. This cookbook can be purchased from a Nomadic Merchant in the underground Ainsel River area. Just getting to this guy is a bit of work, so let me walk you through that process.
First, you need to find the Ainsel River Well, which is located on the eastern edge of Liurnia of the Lakes, north of the Study Hall.
This area is guarded by a giant, but you should be able to run past it without having to kill it. It does hit pretty hard, though, so be careful. Also, its halberd can clip through the wall, so if you need to wait for the elevator to come back up from the bottom, you’ll want to wait on the opposite side of the room from the door. I promise you, this giant knocked me into the well before while I was waiting for the elevator, even though I thought I was safe.
Now take the elevator down.
If this is your first time in the area, you won’t have a map yet, and it can be really easy to get turned around down here. I could write a detailed description of how to get through this section, but I think it’s just easier to show you. So here’s a video of the full path from the elevator to the merchant:
Once you reach him, you can buy the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [16] for 2,500 runes. While you’re here, you might as well buy the Pefumer’s Cookbook [4] for 3,000, if you can spare the runes.
How do you craft Thawfrost Boluses?
Once you purchase the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [16], you can now craft as many Thawfrost Boluses as you want (so long as you have the ingredients on hand). The ingredients are:
- 1 Herba
- 1 Cave Moss
- 1 Crab Eggs
So here’s where you can find all this stuff:
Herba
Herba always seems like it’s everywhere, but when you need it most, it’s super hard to find for some reason. Thankfully, I noted some locations while writing my previous guides. Herba is pale green glowing plant that looks like this:
You can find Herba near the Church of Elleh, in the locations marked on the map below:
There’s a better location though. If you follow the road north of Stormhill Shack, you’ll find one to the west of the road, and two more under the bridge (also west of the road). The exact locations are shown on the map below.
Cave Moss
Cave Moss also glows green, and it looks like this:
As the name implies, it can be found inside caves. A couple good locations for it are Coastal Cave and Murkwater Cave, shown on the map below.
These are just two locations, but you can find it in pretty much any cave in the game. It’s not rare.
Crab Eggs
Lastly, you’ll need some Crab Eggs, which drop from the large crabs that you can find in most bodies of water. The easiest spot to farm these, in my opinion, is in Agheel Lake in the southern part of Limgrave.
I like to start at the Agheel Lake South Site of Grace, then make my way north to the lake. There’s one crab that you’ll see right away, and if you move just a little bit further to the north, two more should pop out of the water and attack you. Once you’ve dealt with them, fast travel back to the Site of Grace and do the whole thing over again.
Note that there are smaller crabs here too, but it’s the giant ones that you’re looking for, because those are the ones that drop the Crab Eggs.
Oh, and while you’re here, you can also kill dragonflies to get more of those Great Dragonfly Heads (for your Neutralizing Boluses).
And that’s pretty much everything you need to know about crafting your own Thawfrost Boluses in Elden Ring. Hope this helps!
