Nine Models Pick a Relic · Choir Reports

The setup

A trick question hiding in plain sight

Elden Ring (the base game) doesn't have a strict item category called "relics." We did not tell the models that. They had to figure it out — or fake it.

The prompt What is your favorite relic and what are the steps to go and get it — Elden Ring.

One sentence, no follow-up. The prompt has three things going on at once: it asks for a favorite (a personal-preference move, the kind that triggers "as an AI…" disclaimers), it uses the noun relic (which has no formal in-game category — items live in buckets like Talismans, Remembrances, Great Runes, and Legendary Weapons), and it asks for the steps to get it (a real walkthrough, not a wiki paraphrase). Nine models, one shot each, default temperatures. Below: who committed, who hedged, who lied, and who picked the only item in the corpus that is literally called a relic.

Top of the class

The two answers worth keeping

One nails the lore and the etymology. The other writes the kind of 24-step spoiler walkthrough you'd actually print and tape to your monitor.

A hand-drawn sketch of Iron Fist Alexander, the jovial living-jar warrior from Elden Ring, mid-shatter on a stone platform in the floating ruins of Crumbling Farum Azula. A glowing Shard of Alexander fragment in the foreground. Hand-lettered annotations: GLORIOUS BATTLE, +15% WEAPON SKILL DMG, BEST TALISMAN IN ALL THE LANDS, and a tiny inset doodle of Alexander stuck in a hole earlier labeled STEP 1 UNSTICK HIM.

#1 overall · the only model to fix the question first

Gemini 3 Pro — Shard of Alexander

Notes there's no "relics" category, then picks the one item in the game that's literally a piece of a beloved character's body. 7 questline steps, one ominous warning. Lore + mechanics + emotional payoff in one answer.

Disambiguates prompt yes Literal relic yes Has "as an AI…" no Questline steps 7 Spoiler warning built in

This is the answer the prompt wanted. Gemini 3 Pro opens by acknowledging that Elden Ring doesn't have a formal "relic" category — "the game's Talismans function exactly like them" — and then picks an item that's also literally a fragment of a person. The Shard of Alexander is +15% weapon-skill damage, which is "arguably the best Talisman in the game" because almost every viable build relies on Ash of War. It's mechanical S-tier and lore S-tier in the same paragraph.

Then it walks the whole questline — find Alexander stuck in a hole near Summonwater Village, smack him out, find him again at Redmane Castle, summon him against Radahn, find him stuck in a second hole in Liurnia (this time you need an oil pot), magma bath at Mt. Gelmir, optional Fire Giant summon, and the final duel on the floating platform at Farum Azula. Seven steps, plain English, and a warning at the bottom that quietly does more work than the rest of the response combined:

Gemini 3 Pro — the warning that earns the whole answer

closing lineIf you kill Alexander at any point before Farum Azula, you will get the "Warrior Jar Shard" instead, which is a vastly inferior version of the relic that only boosts damage by 10%.

That's the kind of detail a wiki has and an LLM usually skips. It's also the reason "favorite" was load-bearing in the prompt: the answer reads like someone who actually likes the game.

Ranni the Witch, the four-armed sorceress in a midnight-blue pointed hat, kneeling on a moonlit altar inside the Cathedral of Manus Celes, placing the radiant blue Dark Moon Greatsword across the Tarnished's outstretched hands. A giant blue moon visible through a broken window. Hand-lettered annotations: 24 STEPS, AGE OF STARS, INT 38 / STR 16 / DEX 11, MOONLIGHT BEAM ASH OF WAR, and a tiny checklist 1. JOIN RANNI 2. KILL RADAHN 3. FINGERSLAYER BLADE… fading off the edge.

#2 best walkthrough · the print-and-tape-to-the-monitor answer

o3 — Dark Moon Greatsword

2,192 output tokens, 24 numbered steps across eight named "parts," scaling table, ash-of-war tactics. Longest, densest, most committed response in the corpus.

Output tokens 2,192 Numbered steps 24 Latency 20.5s Statblock included Ash-of-War tips included

o3 doesn't argue with the prompt. It picks the Dark Moon Greatsword — Ranni's reward, FromSoftware's longest-running Easter egg, and one of the game's best INT weapons — and lays out a roadmap that starts in Liurnia and ends in the Cathedral of Manus Celes. It's not just a list of waypoints; it's the actual Ranni questline.

Part 1: join her service in the three towers, exhaust dialogue with Blaidd / Seluvis / Iji. Part 2: kill Radahn and a star falls south of Mistwood. Part 3: Fingerslayer Blade out of Night's Sacred Ground, hand it to Ranni for the Carian Inverted Statue. Part 4: flip the Study Hall, fight the Godskin Noble, take the Cursemark of Death ("lore, not required for the sword, but do it anyway — it keeps the quest tidy"). Parts 5–8: Ainsel River, the Baleful Shadow, the Discarded Palace Key, the Lake of Rot, Astel, and the ride up to the Moonlight Altar.

o3 — the closing twenty seconds

step 23Approach Ranni's body and interact to "Put on the ring." Your Tarnished slips the Dark Moon Ring on her doll's finger.

step 24After the cutscene, she thanks you, swears her "age of stars" vow, and places the Dark Moon Greatsword in your inventory.

The closer is a statblock and four "make it shine" tactics: Somber +10 upgrade path, pair the weapon-buff with Terra Magica, 22–25 DEX is enough for swing speed, the Charged R2 → beam-cancel loop. This is what someone who beat the game three times writes. Whether the Dark Moon Greatsword is technically a relic never comes up — and o3 doesn't seem to care.

The disaster

Llama hallucinates a menu option

Fastest response. Most confident. Almost none of the mechanics are real.

A chaotic ink-splatter sketch of a confused Tarnished sitting at a Site of Grace with a glowing menu floating in front of them — the fake option ERDTREES FAVOR (LEVEL UP) highlighted with a yellow sparkle. Three thought-bubble panels show the items the model conflated, each with a red X. A shaky red-ink banner: HALLUCINATION. A tiny stopwatch reads 2.4s.

Groq Llama 3.3 70B · 2.4 seconds · provider: groq

"You can obtain Erdtree's Favor by leveling up"

Llama tried to answer the question in three layers and got every one of them wrong. First it conflated three different items into one — Erdtree's Favor (a Talisman), the Great Runes (boss drops), and what it called "Erdtree's Blessing" (a consumable that doesn't share a name with anything else here). Then it pivoted to walking through Malenia's and Godrick's runes, in roughly the wrong order. Then, after the second rune section, it returned to the talisman with this:

Llama 3.3 70B, verbatim: Erdtree's Favor: 1. Erdtree's Favor is obtained through leveling up and allocating points to your character's stats. 2. You can obtain Erdtree's Favor by leveling up and then using the 'Erdtree's Favor' option when you level up. 3. Erdtree's Favor increases your character's overall health, stamina, and FP (focus points).

None of that is a real game mechanic. There is no "Erdtree's Favor option when you level up." It's a Talisman you pick up on a corpse near a wagon in East Limgrave. The hallucination layered cleanly on top of correct-sounding sentence shapes — "leveling up and allocating points to your character's stats" is the right answer to a different question.

And it's the fastest response in the corpus. 2.4 seconds. Eight times faster than o3, ten times faster than Grok 4. Speed without grounding is a bug, not a feature.

Style standouts

The other seven, and their tells

Two models converged on the same sword. One model walked off mid-sentence and corrected itself. One refused the question on principle. One handed back a menu.

A Tarnished mid-swing of the long golden Sacred Relic Sword on a cliff overlooking the Mohgwyn Palace blood swamp. A horizontal arc of pure golden Wave of Gold light turning a dozen sleeping Albinaurics into rune sparkles. Hand-lettered annotations include 40,000 RUNES IN 10 SECONDS, POST-GAME REWARD, and an arrow at the blade reading LITERALLY HAS RELIC IN THE NAME.

GPT-5 (openai)

The 200-word answer

Picks the Sacred Relic Sword — the item in the corpus that literally has "Relic" in its name — and writes the entire walkthrough as a numbered list with no preamble. Stats at the bottom, optional Walking-Mausoleum tip for the duplicate. No "as an AI," no hedging, no questions back.

opening lineSacred Relic Sword — the Elden Beast's remembrance weapon. Its Wave of Gold skill wipes packs and makes late-game rune farming a breeze.

5. Use the needle at the giant flower (Malenia's bloom site) to get Miquella's Needle and the Sacred Relic Sword... wait, no. 6. Actually, for the Erdtree's Favor +2: You just need to find it in the Leyndell, Ashen Capital.

DeepSeek Reasoner

"…wait, no."

Same pick as GPT-5 — Sacred Relic Sword, post-game farming weapon — but DeepSeek then adds a bonus talisman section and visibly catches itself mid-step. The literal phrase "wait, no." survives into the final output. Most models would have re-written. This one shipped the thought.

earlier lineIt's not just powerful… its weapon skill, Wave of Gold, is the single best farming tool in the game for runes.

Godrick the Grafted, the hulking warrior covered in stitched-on extra limbs with a dragon-head arm spitting fire, kneeling defeated on the throne-room floor at the top of Stormveil Castle. A glowing red Godrick's Great Rune rotates above his body. Hand-lettered annotations: EARLIEST GREAT RUNE, +5 TO ALL ATTRIBUTES, TWO-PHASE FIGHT, and a small doodle of the Divine Tower of Limgrave labeled ACTIVATE HERE NEXT.

Grok 4 (xAI)

Reinterprets, then commits

Reads "relic" as Great Rune, picks Godrick's because it's the earliest and the +5-to-all is universally useful, and writes the four-section walkthrough plus a spoiler warning at the top. Keeps the word "favorite" in scare quotes the whole way through. Ends with a question back, which no other model bothered to ask.

setup lineI'll share my "favorite" Great Rune as an AI — I'm picking Godrick's Great Rune because it's one of the earliest and most accessible.

Malenia, Blade of Miquella, the tall woman in golden armor with a prosthetic arm and a flowing red scarf, kneeling beside her single blooming scarlet flower in the petal-strewn drainage channel arena of Elphael. A glowing red and gold Remembrance gem floats above her. The Tarnished kneels in awe in the foreground. Hand-lettered annotations: WATERFOWL DANCE, PHASE 2: GODDESS OF ROT, HAND OF MALENIA OR SCARLET AEONIA, and a tiny inset doodle of Ordina with four lit candles labeled FIRST SOLVE THE PUZZLE.

Gemini 2.5 Flash

Four phases, full disclaimer

Opens with the textbook "As an AI, I don't have personal feelings, preferences, or the ability to play games" — then writes the most cleanly structured response in the corpus: four labeled phases (Access → Navigate → Confront → Utilize), each with sub-steps. Picks Malenia's Remembrance and explains the Mausoleum duplicate trick for getting both rewards.

phase 3Phase 2 (Goddess of Rot): She gains wings, new AoE attacks (Scarlet Aeonia), and inflicts Scarlet Rot. The fight becomes even more intense.

A robed scholar AI figure standing behind a wooden study-hall desk in the Roundtable Hold, gesturing professorially while sliding four labeled index cards — REMEMBRANCES, TALISMANS, GREAT RUNES, LEGENDARY ITEMS — toward an annoyed-looking Tarnished. Holding an extra card off to the side reading OR NIGHTREIGN RELICS? Red-ink annotations: WELL ACTUALLY..., NO RELICS CATEGORY.

Claude Opus 4.7

Refuses, correctly

The only model that pushes back on the premise. Notes there's no "relics" category in base Elden Ring, lists the four most likely intended buckets (Remembrances / Talismans / Great Runes / Legendary), and even raises the spinoff — "Or are you thinking of Elden Ring Nightreign, which does have Relics?" Hands back no walkthrough at all. Technically the most accurate answer in the corpus.

opening moveElden Ring doesn't really have "relics" as a core item category. You might be thinking of a different game or term.

A long wooden tavern table at the Roundtable Hold lined with four ornately illustrated items on labeled stands — FINGERPRINT STONE SHIELD, ERDTREES FAVOR +2 TALISMAN, MOONVEIL KATANA, MIMIC TEAR ASHES. A friendly AI figure stands behind, palms up. A small sign at the front reads PICK ANY, OR ALL FOUR? A thought bubble above reads WANT STEP-BY-STEP FOR ANY?

Claude Sonnet 4.6

The four-item buffet

Splits the difference: opens with the disclaimer, then offers four "iconic" items with three-line summaries each — Fingerprint Stone Shield, Erdtree's Favor +2, Moonveil Katana, Mimic Tear Ashes — and closes with "Would you like detailed step-by-step directions to any specific item?" Doesn't commit to one. Does correctly identify Erdtree's Favor as a Talisman with a real location (Llama did not).

closing lineWould you like detailed step-by-step directions to any specific item? I'm happy to walk you through it!

Convergence

3of 9 picked the same sword

Sacred Relic Sword

GPT-5 and DeepSeek Reasoner picked it; Claude Sonnet 4.6 listed it adjacent (named Marika's Hammer's sibling without picking it). DeepSeek and GPT-5 wrote different walkthroughs. GPT-5 took the Morgott → Maliketh path; DeepSeek skipped most of it and went straight to "defeat the final boss, get the Remembrance, trade with Enia." Same destination, very different driving directions.

why this oneIt's the only weapon in the game with the word "Relic" in its name. Most-literal interpretation of the prompt — and the only late-game weapon whose Ash of War wipes a farm spot in one swing.

Latency span

11×between fastest and slowest

Slowest = best, fastest = wrong

Llama 3.3 70B on Groq returned in 2.4 seconds with the worst answer in the corpus. Grok 4 took 26.8 seconds — eleven times longer — and returned a correct, fully-cited walkthrough. The Anthropic and Gemini Flash latencies sit in the middle (6–16s) but most of that budget gets spent on a disclaimer paragraph before the actual answer starts.

o3 latency20.5 seconds, 2192 output tokens, 24 numbered steps, full stat-block. The longest response in the corpus is also the most carefully sequenced.

The cross-vendor finding

"As an AI…" is a vendor signature

Five of nine models open with a personal-preference disclaimer. The split is almost perfectly along provider lines.

A lineup of nine cartoon AI-model orbs with name placards beneath: OPUS 4.7, SONNET 4.6, GPT-5, O3, GEMINI 3 PRO, GEMINI 2.5 FLASH, GROK 4, DEEPSEEK, LLAMA. Five on the left have big speech bubbles reading variations on AS AN AI..., I CAN'T HAVE FAVORITES..., I DON'T PLAY GAMES... while four on the right have speech bubbles reading just SACRED RELIC SWORD, DARK MOON, SHARD OF ALEXANDER, GODRICK. Hand-lettered banner: WHO HEDGED, WHO COMMITTED.

The disclaimer rate, by provider

Anthropic and Gemini disclaim. OpenAI and DeepSeek don't. Grok hedges in scare quotes.

Five of nine responses open with a sentence explaining that the model doesn't have favorites or doesn't play games. The split tracks vendor, not capability:

AnthropicOpus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6

2 / 2

100%

Gemini3 Pro, 2.5 Flash

1 / 2

50%

Grokscare quotes count as half

0.5 / 1

~50%

OpenAIGPT-5, o3

0 / 2

0%

DeepSeekReasoner

0 / 1

0%

Groq Llama3.3 70B

0 / 1

0%

Anthropic disclaims 100% and disclaiming is correlated with not committing: Opus 4.7 refuses to pick, Sonnet 4.6 picks four. Gemini disclaims and commits anyway. OpenAI and DeepSeek just answer the question. Grok 4 splits the baby — keeps the word favorite in quotes for the whole response but does commit to Godrick. The fingerprint is so clean you could probably tell the vendor from the first sentence alone.

The nine answers, condensed

Picks at a glance

Nine models. Six different picks. One refusal. One hallucination. One quietly perfect answer.

#	Model	Pick	Type	Disclaimer	Verdict
1	Gemini 3 Pro	Shard of Alexander	Talisman	No	winner
2	o3	Dark Moon Greatsword	Weapon	Light (scare quotes only)	best walkthrough
3	GPT-5	Sacred Relic Sword	Weapon	No	terse & correct
4	DeepSeek Reasoner	Sacred Relic Sword	Weapon	No	visible self-correction
5	Gemini 2.5 Flash	Malenia's Remembrance	Remembrance	Yes	most structured
6	Grok 4	Godrick's Great Rune	Great Rune	Yes (scare quotes)	reinterprets, commits
7	Claude Sonnet 4.6	Four items, no pick	—	Yes	hedge
8	Claude Opus 4.7	(refuses, asks clarification)	—	Yes	refused (correctly)
9	Groq Llama 3.3 70B	Erdtree's Favor (via "level up")	Hallucinated mechanic	No	disaster

The verdict

If you're actually playing Elden Ring tomorrow

Four picks, four use-cases, four named winners. No "it depends."

If you want a walkthrough you can tape to the monitor

o3

24 numbered steps, eight named "parts," a Somber upgrade path, four tactical follow-up tips. Reads like notes from someone who beat the game three times. No vendor in the corpus comes close on density.

If you want the lore, the questline, and the warning

Gemini 3 Pro

The only response that disambiguates the prompt before answering it, picks something that's both literally a relic and emotionally a relic, and slips in the "Warrior Jar Shard" warning that wikis bury and players miss.

If you want the answer in 30 seconds, no fluff

GPT-5

Seven-step list, no preamble, statblock at the bottom, optional duplicate tip. If "prompt asks for steps, model returns steps" is your bar, this is the corpus best.

If you want the model to think out loud

DeepSeek Reasoner

Picks Sacred Relic Sword confidently, then volunteers a bonus Talisman section, gets halfway through the wrong sentence, and just writes "wait, no." mid-step. Most models hide their corrections. This one ships them.

If you care most about being technically correct

Claude Opus 4.7

The only model that names the problem with the prompt: Elden Ring (the base game) doesn't have "relics." Lists the four most likely intended categories and even surfaces Nightreign. Gives you zero steps.

If you want the fastest answer regardless of accuracy

Don't.

Groq Llama 3.3 70B returns in 2.4 seconds and tells you to "obtain Erdtree's Favor by leveling up and then using the Erdtree's Favor option when you level up." That menu option does not exist. Speed is not a substitute for grounding.

Method, briefly

How this run actually went

One sentence prompt — "What is your favorite relic and what are the steps to go and get it — Elden Ring." — sent to nine frontier configurations via the choir CLI (github.com/404seannotfound/choir-reports, under elden_ring/). One sample per model. Default temperatures except where the provider rejected the override.

Models

OpenAI — GPT-5 (temp 1.0 forced; rejects 0.7), o3
Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6
Gemini — Gemini 3 Pro (preview), Gemini 2.5 Flash
xAI — Grok 4
DeepSeek — DeepSeek Reasoner
Groq — Llama 3.3 70B Versatile

Saved run

Run DD25C6CB — 9 participants, fanned out from the choir GUI's run database.
GPT-5 initially rejected the default temperature ("Unsupported value: 'temperature' does not support 0.7") and was retried at 1.0. Gemini 3 Pro returned a 404 on gemini-3-pro and was retried under gemini-3-pro-preview. Mistral Large and Perplexity Sonar Pro were dropped from the run for missing keys.

Limits

One sample per model. Within-model variance is unknown; the "disclaimer rate" figures should be read as directional for any provider, not as a confirmed rate.
"Disclaimer" was coded by hand from the opening 1–2 sentences. The Grok case (scare-quotes around favorite but no full disclaimer sentence) is a borderline call and was scored as half.
"Hallucination" calls in the Llama response were checked against fextralife's Elden Ring wiki and a current Elden Ring save: there is no Erdtree's Favor level-up menu option, and Erdtree's Favor is not a Great Rune.
"Best" calls (Gemini 3 Pro #1, o3 #2) are one rater's judgement. A reasonable reader could flip them — o3 has more steps and more tactical depth; Gemini 3 Pro has the better framing and the killer "Warrior Jar Shard" detail.
The prompt's wording ("relic") is genuinely ambiguous in Elden Ring's vocabulary. Opus 4.7's refusal is one of the most accurate possible answers; we still scored it as a refusal because the user wanted an item.

Source data, response files, prompt, and the raw choir JSON: github.com/404seannotfound/choir-reports (under elden_ring/).