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Elden Ring Useful Tips and Tricks for Beginners

This is a collection of useful tips and info I’ve found while playing the game. I’m making this from the phone so the formatting/details won’t be perfect right off the bat but the information is there. I’ll work on making it more orderly and and fleshing it out to be more detailed over time. If you have anything you think should be added, please let me know.

Basic Tips

1. Leave Messages that are funny or helpful in various locations and appraise messages that are helpful or that you like. You get an item in the first room that allows you to place messages by opening your menu and going to ‘Messages.’ When a Message is appraised, good or bad, the writer of the Message gets a free heal so your Message being appraised could be the difference between winning or losing a battle.

2. Messages are more likely to be appraised if they already have a high number of appraisals so save the ones that seem to be gaining traction by going to Messages and clicking the “Protect” button(Y/Triangle).

3. You can pass time at any Sight of Grace. Note that some things only appear at certain times of day and may not appear if you pass time at the Grace right next to them. So re-explore areas at different times to find more stuff or solve problems you may be having.

4. There is Respeccing in the game after a certain point so if you don’t like your build, but don’t want to start over, just push through and you’ll be able to try different builds later.

5. The first merchant you should meet has an item that unlocks crafting. Crafting allows you to make items that you have the recipe for and you can acquire more recipes from Crafting Books. Crafting Books can be bought from merchants or found throughout the world.

6. Don’t be afraid to use items that look common, there are tons of Crafting Books in the game and you can make more.

7. Bring a useable bow and arrows in your inventory at all times if you can’t use magic. They might come in handy even if you don’t use them all the time.

8. Rune Arcs activate whatever Great Rune you have equipped. You can’t equip Great Runes until you activate them at certain locations. The locations to Activate them are on the same general map area as where you get them. Once you do equip them, the Rune Arc will activate them until your next death, making it a very useful item for exploring/bossing. Hint: The Great Rune you are most likely to get first can be activated immediately after getting it provided you go to the correct location while other may or may not be ready to activate depending on what you’ve done so far.

9. There are 2 types of Spirit Ashes. Normal and Special. As a general rule, Special Spirit Ashes are much stronger than Normal Spirit Ashes. A good way to approximate their strength is by checking their FP cost, but this isn’t universal as different builds and different bosses may have different needs.

10. Remembrances are items dropped by specific bosses. They can be used to gain a ton of extra souls however this is usually a wasteful use of them. When you get your first Remembrance, you will gain access to an NPC that will allow you to trade your Remembrance for special items, spells, and equipment that can’t be acquired elsewhere.

11. There are giant stone turtle things with buildings on their back known as Walking Mausoleums. You can enter them by breaking all the skulls on 2 of their legs. They will stop moving forever and you can enter the building. Inside the building you can activate the center to create a duplicate of any Remembrance(Boss Soul) you’ve earned so far. This allows you to get both Remembrance rewards for that item in a single playthrough.

12. Cater your build to your playstyle rather than catering your playstyle to your build. What do you usually like to do? The game will be much more enjoyable if you use this method. However, no matter your build, putting points into Vigor is not a bad idea as it governs how much health you have. You can always respec later for big damage.

13. Activate lifts then get off them to send them back when you’re leaving a Grace. That way, if you die, you won’t have to wait for the lift.

14. If you are using a controller, pressing and holding the ‘down’ arrow will transition your items back to the start of the list.

15. You can also free up the amount of items you scroll through by putting them in your Pouch instead. To do this, open your menu and go over to the Pouch on the right. Here you can put 4 items that you can access at anytime outside the menu by holding down Y/Triangle and clicking the d-pad in the direction you want. I recommend putting your Horse, Spirit Ashes, Flask of Wondrous Physick, and a Lantern. I recommend these because you can more easily remember to do this outside of battle rather than trying to hold down and click a button in the middle of a fight.

16. Don’t be a murder hobo(unless you just really want to). Killing NPCs will lock you out of questlines that give amazing rewards when completed. You never know how useful an NPC will be and you’ll get very little besides temporary personal satisfaction for killing them.

17. There are more Golden Seeds in the game than you can possibly use. The max amount of Flasks is 14 and even though they go up in cost to upgrade each time, you will still have more than enough Golden Seeds for everything.

Exploring Tips

1. Illusory Walls DO exist in Elden Ring. In fact, Illusory Floors do as well. You can open the walls by dodge-rolling into them but the floors are much easier to find using attacks. Most but not all Illusory Walls are in Crypts while most Illusionary Floors are in Ruins on the surface.

2. In Order to make the map show color and display areas, you need to find map items. These can be found by looking at the brown spots on your map and finding a little pillar symbol drawn on the map. At those pillars are the map pieces.

3. If you ever see a statue of an old hunched man on a cliff holding his hand out, interact with it. A blue light will shine out from his hand and show you where a nearby Crypt is. There is one old man statue for every Crypt and if you can’t interact with the statue, it means you’ve done the Crypt.

4. The Tombstone Symbol that sometimes appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen means that you can Summon your Spirit Ashes, helpful PvE companions that are found throughout the game.

5. If you see the Tombstone Symbol, it usually means that there is a boss nearby or a very large group of enemies. Once the boss or the enemies are defeated, the spirit will disappear.

6. The light blue circles on the map always have bosses there but if you lose to the bosses there, you can safely and easily collect your souls and leave the boss to come back later.

7. Fall Damage has very little margin for error. Usually you will either live or die with a very small margin where you just take damage. Rainbow Stones can be used to see if the fall will kill you or not. Just walk to the edge and toss out a Rainbow Stone. As long as it doesn’t shatter, you’re safe provided you land exactly where it landed.

8. There are large circles of wind around the map. If you are on your horse, you can jump high into the air but they can also be used to fall on. No matter the height, as long as you are on your horse and you land on or in the general area of one of these circles, you won’t take any damage.

9. Don’t dodge roll through swampy areas containing poison, rot, etc… It will get on your clothes and continue applying even after you leave the area. If you have to dodge through, then take off your clothes or use “Soap” when you get out to stop the effect.

10. There are little blue portals in various places around the map, be careful when you enter because you don’t know where they’ll lead but definitely chance it when you can because they usually have great rewards that you can’t access without taking the portal.

11. Be wary opening chests and if you open a chest and encounter smoke, dodge away from it immediately. I highly, highly recommend not allowing them to teleport you unless you are overpowered, or intentionally want to access the late game areas early. If you get teleported by this method, you will be unable to teleport back to your previous locations until you manually escape the deathtrap you’ve been teleported to.

12. Some Bosses only appear at night, so try exploring every overworld area at night if you want to find them.

13. Don’t be afraid to use Stonesword Keys on Imp Statues. The statues hold nice rewards and you will find lots of keys, just be sure to always buy all the keys from any merchant you meet.

14. Oftentimes, running through an area to the next Grace then back-tracking is easier than trying to push through the enemies one at a time.

15. Activate lifts from the bottom then get off of them to see if there is a secret path beneath. Some lifts let you drop down below them and others will have doorways to enter at the bottom when the lift reaches the top.

16. Lifts sometimes have other secrets. When riding a lift, look around for anything to jump onto partway up/down. You can find secret paths and items and really, at least half of lifts have at least one.

17. There’s a lantern you can buy to attach on your waist instead of carrying torch. This will lower your equipped weight and allow you to use both weapon slots and still have light.

18. When exploring a cave, you can use the rainbow stone to mark a particular area especially if the place is huge and there’s many entrances or holes, and there are several places like this. Take note that these will disappear on death so you may need quite a few.

Combat Tips

1. Fight Dragons on Horseback, it’s much easier.

2. Your horse can be killed, but it can be resurrected as long as you have a health flask left.

3. If you’re having trouble learning to dodge boss attacks, it’s okay to use shields, just don’t become reliant on them.

4. Troubles with dodging may be caused by your Equip Load. Equip Load varies based on what you’re wearing and will either be Light, Medium, Heavy, or Overweight. The different Loads also have different speeds and I-Frames(invincibility). Light is fast with lots of I-Frames, Medium is normal with some I-Frames, Heavy is slow with very little I-Frames, and Overweight just stumbles and has no I-Frames. What type you are is based on the percentage of your Equip Load being used and is from 0-30%, 30-70%, 70-100%, and 100%+ respectively. If you want to dodge, I recommend being no higher than Medium and go Light if you can. If you’re Heavy or above, it will likely be necessary to use a shield.

5. Bleed Damage is incredibly strong against most bosses/enemies. If you feel like you’re having a lot of trouble, try using a weapon with Bleed Damage or applying the item Bleed Grease to the weapon you normally use.

6. Ashes of War allow you to change weapon skills on normal weapons. They can be applied and taken off at will so don’t be afraid to test them out. This is also how you change your weapon type which allows you to increase it’s damage further than normally possible.

7. Strength is the only stat that you don’t actually need to meet the full requirements to use. If you 2-hand a weapon, your strength with the weapon is increased by 50%. So if a weapon needs 18 Strength, then you need 12 strength to use it when 2-handing. Note that if you plan to 2-hand on a horse, you have to be 2-handing the weapon when you get on for it to work properly. So if you see a weapon that needs multiple stat requirements to wield, focus on the non-strength requirement first to use the weapon as early as possible.

8. If you encounter an enemy that is Hardened(causes your weapon to bounce off when you attack) try 2-handing your weapon. It will keep it from bouncing off. Better yet, use a striking weapon like a hammer or maul to deal increased damage and stagger them.

9. Getting on and off your hose has i-frames. So if you’re worried about getting hit and want to dodge roll while on the horse, just jump off of it instead by pressing on the left stick.

Written by Athrek

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