Elden Ring Cheats and Tips
Pick and choose your battles
Soulsborne games up until now usually pushed you into direct confrontation with enemies, but that’s not so much the case here. While it’s not always the case, there’s a lot of monsters and enemy goons in Elden Ring you can get past without having to fight them, such as the bandit camp at the base of the Stormgate. However, that’s not to say you shouldn’t fight them – there’s usually some motivation to confront enemies, usually a chest or item that players can make use of, or just the runes obtained by slaying them.
For this reason, consider the pros and cons of every confrontation, not just the challenge, but the risks – if you’ve got a lot of runes banked, you might want to slink past enemies or even head back towards a Site of Grace to spend them. The very first enemy of the game highlights this, a wandering boss called the Tree Sentinel who is very hard to beat, but very easy to avoid.
Stealth and scouting are useful approaches
Elden Ring does a lot more to give you options to survey its battlegrounds. Verticality and freedom of exploration are bigger deals when outside of dungeons, and this means you can circle an area, check out the enemies involved, get around them or use the environment to your advantage.
Of course, the other element is stealth. Again, while this idea did exist in previous FromSoftware games, it was usually fairly vestigial (with the exception of Sekiro). Now it’s much more viable with the environment design, so coming up behind enemies for a high-damage backstab is a good way to clear out opponents. Even if it does break into a full fight, you can clear out a lot of them in advance of that.
Always follow the golden trails to find useful areas and fast travel
The game mentions this early on, but it bears repeating: the ethereal golden trails that sometimes appear in the air are always worth following. They lead to Sites of Grace checkpoints that are often concealed or not obvious, so head to those – especially if you haven’t found one for a while. As you find more Sites of Grace you’ll build a robust network of fast-travel points to use, so always pursue these when they come up.
Focus on small objectives to get started
It’s easy to get a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities, paths and potential, so here’s the smartest approach: find a small, manageable task and put everything towards that for a little while. Whether it’s beating a certain enemy, levelling up a certain amount or mastering a particular weapon, conquer minor tasks to help yourself progress towards the bigger ones.
Remember where you’ve been and fast travel often
Because of Elden Ring’s non-linear world, it’s useful to remember where you’ve been before. For example, you’ll likely meet the merchant Kalé very early on in the game, but before you’ve got enough runes to buy anything off him. But considering there’s a Site of Grace right next to him, you can head back at any time to peruse his wears and buy items, some of which are borderline essential. Sites of Grace actually have labels on the map screen that mark points of interest and important NPCs near them, so you can check to see what’s around them and might be worth revisiting.
