I was shocked when I opened up my boyfriend’s Elden Ring inventory. Baffled and terrified, even. It was fully stocked in a way that only the cheese section of your fridge should be—there were multiples of the same armor sets, a despicable buildup of consumables and common items like herba and melted mushrooms, and a likely illegal stockpile of golden runes.
Me, I don’t have this problem: I’m a happy item user. But my boyfriend’s dirty bedroom of an inventory made me realize that not all Elden Ring players are so blessed. I began to worry for them—all those poor players forced to roam the Lands Between with thousands of pounds of clutter weighing down their Tarnished backs.
It doesn’t have to be this way. No matter if you’re still working on your first playthrough or relishing the sweet taste of new game plus, you deserve to Marie Kondo your virtual life and actually enjoy all the useful items Elden Ring has to offer. Whether you just want to get rid of everything, you’re afraid to use items because you “might need them later,” or you just never knew where to start with Elden Ring’s massive assortment of stuff, don’t worry. We got you. You’re safe now.
Get Crafty
Alongside all the other detritus, you’ve probably been accumulating cookbooks throughout your pillaging, like some barbaric Julia Child. You’re sick. These cookbooks determine what items you’re able to craft, assuming you’ve purchased yourself a crafting kit from the Church of Elleh’s nomadic merchant, Kalé.
Finding out what you can craft is easy—just click on the item crafting section of your menu. Everything you know how to craft can be found there on the left side, with the description of the items, a list of all the ingredients you need to make them, and how many of those ingredients you already have in your inventory on the right.
From here, click on the item you’d like to make, choose how many you want, and craft to your inner child’s content. This is a quick way to get rid of the million heads of cave moss you’ve picked up, and a good option for the Elden Ring player who wants to downsize but can’t stand the sight of an empty inventory. Turn stuff into other stuff! Genius.
Confront Your Fear Of Consumables
Okay, so you decided to craft 15 slabs of rot grease and never use them. Fuck.
I understand that it’s easy to forget about consumables, malign them as “easy mode,” or believe in the depths of your soul that, one day, you might need to feed your horse Torrent 30 health-restoring sweet raisins in a row. Though nothing is impossible, since you’ve never needed to gorge Torrent on raisins in the past, you probably won’t need to in the future.
As for forgetfulness or “easy mode,” Elden Ring’s designers placed these items in the game as part of its full experience. Remember that they’re there not just to help you, but to teach you lore, interact with the landscape, and immerse yourself fully into the game. I recommend you take a look at the descriptions for your ready-to-eat consumables, which you can find in the “Tools” part of your inventory, equip the ones that might be helpful (all the boluses, for example, are tailor-made for areas and enemies that cause negative status buildup), and experiment with the ones that don’t look helpful at first glance. You should munch on the rune-multiplying gold pickled fowl foot right before you’re about to score a lot of runes, for example.
Upgrade Materials Are There To Be Used
Upgrade those weapons, baby! Get loose and upgrade weapons, ashes, and, if nothing else, your all-important sacred healing flasks. As attached as you might be to your first upgraded greatsword or spirit summon, after you get settled on those early favorites, try upgrading other weapons that look cool to you to experiment with new movesets and special skills. You never really know your favorite until you use it for a good, honest kill.
I offer just one mild note of caution. In each game cycle you can find, at most, 13 total ancient dragon smithing stones, which max out regular weapons to +25, and a measly eight somber ancient dragon smithing stones, which max out special weapons to +10. So if you have these precious, final upgrade materials, be very deliberate in choosing what weapons you’d like to raise to maximum strength. If a piece of gear isn’t worth that final upgrade, it’s not a big deal to just keep it at +24 for standard / +9 for specials.
Every Little Bit Counts
Activate the great runes that intrigue you and equip them (then use your pile of rune arcs to activate them as needed), cycle through your crystal tears to test different effects of your flask of wondrous physick, experiment with ashes of war because why not, and please, just use those hundreds of golden runes you’re constantly finding to level up. (Good chance to finally upgrade that vigor!)
Last week, I finally had enough of my boyfriend’s crowded inventory and instructed him to crush every single rune he had in storage. In the end, he netted over 400,000 runes. That was too many runes, and was not okay.
He needed the cleanse, but perhaps that was a bit extreme. While actually using those stored runes is smart, I do recommend you keep a few on hand for those times where you need just a speck more to gain or level or buy a hot, new set of underwear.
Wait, here we are at the end of this article, you want a cleaned-out inventory, but even after we just talked through all this stuff, you’re still not using your hundreds upon hundreds of extraneous thingamabobs? Look, this is my final offer: Sell them. You can also sell every single item you don’t have a use for or that you just have unnecessary multiples of. Merchants stationed throughout Elden Ring, including Smithing Master Hewg in the Round Table Hold, will be happy to take them off your hands and give you a few runes in return.
You good now? Good.
Now that that’s all done, don’t you feel a lot lighter?
