Beginner’s Guide to Elden Ring – Easier Start with 12 Tips and Tricks

Unlocking Crafting and Creating Useful Aid Items

A new feature in Elden Ring is item crafting. With this, you can create various consumables that can help you in combat.

This is how you unlock item crafting: After the tutorial dungeon, you will most likely discover the site of grace at the Church of Elleh. There, you will find a merchant named Kalé.

The merchant sells you the necessary tool to permanently unlock crafting. This will cost you only 300 runes.

This is how item crafting works: At first, you can only craft a few items. However, you will find more and more notes with recipes at merchants and in the game world that unlock various recipes.

What items can be crafted? The range is quite extensive with an increasing number of recipes:

• Healing items that can remove poison status.
• Items with which you can equip your weapons with temporary buffs such as fire effects.
• Throw items like bombs or throwing knives.
• All kinds of arrows for your bows.

To craft these items, you can collect various crafting materials in the game world. These include plants, insects like butterflies, ghostly essences, herbs, animal bones, and many other varieties. Pick up everything you find as you go along.

Depending on the region, you will also find different items; dungeons usually have different materials than those found on the surface.

You Should Upgrade Weapons Early

This is why it’s worth it: If you feel at the beginning that you’re not dealing enough damage, you should upgrade your weapon as soon as possible.

By upgrading weapons, you gain more extra damage than if you increased your stats through level-ups and attributes.

This is how it works: This can be done at the Church of Elleh, where you will also find the aforementioned merchant.

Next to the merchant, you will find an anvil where you can upgrade your weapons. Additionally, there is an item that you need for that.

• For weapon upgrades, you need either smithing stones or darksmithing stones.
• They come in different grades.
• The anvil at the merchant allows you to upgrade your weapons up to +3.
• Later, you can significantly increase this at other smiths. Particularly handy: The hub of the game, the Roundtable Hold, houses a smith.

You will mostly find smithing items hidden in dungeons but also in the open world. With the right sound pearls, you can also buy these smithing stones (excluding the highest level) without limits.

Your Horse is More Than Just a Means of Transport

As Elden Ring is so huge, FromSoftware has also introduced a summoning steed called Stormwind into the game. You must first unlock it, but you can then use it for transportation in most parts of the game world.

This is how you unlock Stormwind: After you have been at the site of grace in the Church of Elleh, you have already taken the first step.

You need to rest at a total of three different sites of grace in the open world for a cutscene to start. In this cutscene, you will meet Melina, who will now give you the ring to summon Stormwind.

Here’s what you need to know about the horse: You can summon it at any time in most of the game world and you’ll move significantly faster.

However, Stormwind offers much more than just being a mere steed:

• The horse has a double jump, allowing you to reach places that you couldn’t access on foot.
• There are special points in the game world that will launch you into the air if you make a jump while on Stormwind’s back.
• You can easily climb steeper cliffs or even jump down without fall damage, as long as you hit the spots.

However, the most important feature of your horse is the combat. You can perform light and heavy charged attacks from Stormwind’s back. You move so quickly and can fight much more securely against larger, slower enemies.

Some enemies are easier to defeat on foot. So you must constantly try out whether new enemies should be fought on foot or better from your horse’s back.

How do I summon Stormwind? Once you have received the ring from Melina, you need to go to your inventory and select it. Then, summon the horse.

We recommend placing the ring in your quick bar, as the quick summon can save you in certain situations. To do this, go into your equipment and place the ring in one of the quick slots.

You Can Play Elden Ring with Friends or Summon Spirits

This is how the coop mode works: Players are “summoned” into your game world. This works through specific symbols that others can place on the ground in their worlds.

These symbols will then become visible in your game world. So you can explore dungeons and the open game world together in Elden Ring. However, you need several items that you find early in the game:

• The “small golden statue”: This allows you to place a golden symbol in the game world. This will then appear to random players, who can then summon you.
• The “Tainted’s Curved Finger” allows targeted cooperation with others. With this, you also lay down a symbol, but to be summoned, your coop partner needs another item.
• You can set a password with the Curved Finger to play specifically with friends.
• With the item “Curved Finger Remedy” and the corresponding password, you can make your friends’ symbols visible and summon them. However, this item is consumed in the process.

Additionally, you can sometimes summon story-relevant NPCs before boss fights if you shouldn’t have the internet or the servers are offline.

How many players can play together? You can summon a maximum of two players for assistance, meaning at most three of you can be on the move together.

If you want to tackle a dungeon with other players, you must first enter the instance and summon your friends there.

• If you are out in the open world with your coop partners, you cannot simply enter the next dungeon.
• You can freely explore the open world with other players. The coop mode only separates between dungeon and open world.
• If you defeat a boss, the coop partners will be sent back to their worlds.

Is progress shared? No, progress is limited to the host. Guests in a game world can hope for individual item drops like materials from enemies, but defeated bosses remain alive in the coop player’s world as long as the player has not defeated them themselves.

At least, for defeating enemies, you receive the same amount of XP as the host. Coop players do not lose this even if they die. Your horse is also unavailable in coop, so you are on foot. Additionally, there is also a PvP system that we’ve explained in our guide to the multiplayer of Elden Ring.

Furthermore, you can summon the ashes of certain enemies as spirits in Elden Ring. To unlock this feature, you need the Spirit Bell, which is easy to overlook at the beginning.

With the bell, you can summon one or more NPCs to help you in combat in certain dangerous areas. This, however, consumes varying amounts of FP. The spirit ashes for summoning can be found throughout the game world as hidden items, in chests, or as drops from certain enemies.