Fall Damage — Dark Souls Dissected №4

This guide is a text version of the video from Illusory wall:

• Dark Souls Dissected #4 - Fall Damage

What is "Fall Damage"?

Now fall damage sounds pretty self-explanatory:
it's the damage you take after a fall,
but there are some quirks to it, and I'll try to get them all covered.

The first thing you should know about fall damage is that it's based on a percentage of your max health.

This means that any fall that is survivable is always survivable, as long as you have full health.



So it doesn't matter if you haven't leveled up vitality at all, you should be able to survive some pretty high falls just the same. So what determines if a fall actually hurts you or kills you?

Well, as it turns out, a fall from 5 units of height or higher is when you start to take damage.

There's no way to know what these latent values are from just playing the game, so here's a way to visualize it.

The player character is currently floating 1 unit of height above the ground
Now they're floating 5 units of height above the ground, the highest we can fall without taking damage
Now a fall from 20 units or higher is what's guaranteed to kill you. A good way to visualize this is to stand on the rooftop of the Parish Church. Standing atop one of these pillars will put you exactly 20 units of height above the ground below.

The edge of the rooftop is slightly lower than the top of the column, meaning this fall should be survivable. But they put in a killbox anyways, to make sure that we die regardless of fall damage.

But if we disable the killbox, we can see that this fall should be survivable, as far as fall damage is concerned.

Equip Load

So we should also talk about Equip Load.

Equip load does affect the amount of damage you take from a fall.
The more you weigh, the more damage you take.

Now remember that I said that any survivable fall is always survivable with full health.

So if adding more weight to your character doesn't set you over the edge and kill you, you might be wondering what's going on here.

Well, it's pretty simple.

A character at the maximum weight penalty will lose something like 99.9% of their health if they fall from the highest fall possible.

In other words, it'll take you down to exactly 1 HP if you could align such a fall perfectly.



So the fall damage mechanic is built around allowing heavy characters to just barely survive the highest falls.

Contrast this to a character with zero weight.

A zero weight character only takes 70% of the damage that the heaviest player will take, meaning the same fall will leave us with 30% of our HP intact.



Note that when I'm talking about your weight, I'm talking about equip load and not equip burden. So this has nothing to do with whether or not you're fast rolling or fat rolling.

These are static values that are independent of your stats.

The maximum weight penalty begins at 89.7 equip load.



But up until then, it scales more or less smoothly in between, so there aren't really different tiers of weight damage.

If you put on just a little bit more weight, you'll take a little bit more damage from the same fall, up until you cap at 89.7.

It should be noted that weight doesn't affect the aforementioned breakpoints of fall damage and death.

Those still occur at 5 units and 20 units of height respectively, independent of your weight.

Also, stats like Dexterity don't diminish the fall damage you take in any way, so this actually makes this a little bit unlike other games in the series.

Killbox

Let's move on to killboxes.

Killboxes are areas where the player will die when they pass through them.

They've been popular since the advent of 3D gaming for a couple reasons.
The first is that they make having deadly pitfalls easy and convenient.

If the player quickly dies while falling into a pit, they don't have to worry about fleshing out the map to include a bottom to the pit.



They don't have to worry about staging more elaborate camera angles, and so forth.

The second reason is to prevent out-of-bounds exploration.

No matter how hard a developer tries, it can be incredibly difficult to account for every glitch and weird, obscure mechanic that allows the player to find some way to escape the map.

Even big-budget games fall prey to this all the time.

Remember in Halo 2, being able to jump on top of another player in co-op and then jumping off of them to get places you can't normally reach.

So it's not uncommon for developers to sometimes blanket the seams of maps with killboxes to prevent the player from messing around in the game in unintended ways.

Now, to bring this back to Dark Souls, sometimes this creates some pretty unfortunate killboxes. Remembering the killbox from the church rooftop, that's an example of a good killbox.



Though the fall should be survivable by the game's own fall damage mechanics, it's so close to the cutoff that no player would ever notice this or feel cheated by it.

Now if you compare this to some of the killboxes in Blighttown, I think this speaks for itself.



One quick detail about Dark Souls killboxes is that it actually has two different kinds.

There's one killbox where it kills you immediately when passing through it,
and another that waits until you hit the ground below

Lastly, if you fall out of bounds without encountering a killbox, you'll keep falling forever into the void.

Or you would, had the developers not designed around this as well.

Of course, fall damage is out of the question because you'll never hit the ground, and killboxes are obviously out of the question because you didn't hit one.

So that leaves us with a third and final way that Dark Souls can kill you by falling, and that is falling for too long. If you fall for 30 seconds, you'll automatically die.

The You Died text will appear on the screen without even including an animation for the player's death.



This is why some of the earlier cheat engine scripts that «enabled flying» didn't work so well.

They would put the character into a falling animation while flying, so if you flew for too long, you would die.

So now that we've covered all the ways that Dark Souls can hurt you and kill you by falling, I should mention that there's a variety of glitches that allow you to survive falls that you shouldn't normally be able to.

📝 Other Dark Souls guides

• №1+2 — Sin, Covenant Betrayals & Absolution
  
• №3 — Vagrant Mechanics
  
• №4 — Fall Damage
  
• №5 — Spawning Quelana
  
• №6 — Q&A: Dead Snakes in Sen's Fortress
  
• №7 — More than Meets the Eye: Hidden Designs
  
• №8 — Humanity Drop
  
• №9 — Lordran's Layout Explained
  
• №10 — Out of Bounds Exploration
  
• №11 — Miracle Resonance
  
• №12 — The Secret of Gwyndolin's Hallway (and other cutscene trickery)
  
• №13 — Poise Mechanics (and glitches!)
  
• №14 — Object Health and Defense (some breakable stuff)
  
• №15 — Vagrant Lore
  
• №16 — Gravelording Explained & Reviewed