Unfortunately missable key items
There’s a handful of items in the first few areas of the game that unlock game mechanics. If you’re not a big explorer / loot goblin, you might miss them.
- Flask of Crimson/Cerulean Tears: Healing potion
- Crafting Kit: Unlocks crafting
- Whetstone Knife: Unlocks customizing weapon skills and changing attribute scaling
- Torrent: Aka the horse. You also get access to leveling up in the same cutscene.
Remember to Exploration
Elden ring pretty much expects you to explore. If you run into a roadblock of enemies that are too tough for your level and skill, you should go explore other areas you haven’t been to.
If you’re not exploring, you wont discover the hundreds of weapons, spells and talismen which will allow you to customize your playstyle and get stronger. You’ll also find: upgrade materials, golden seeds, wonderous physic tears, ashes of war, and many other useful items.
I would recommend not looking up guides, as exploration is a big part of the game, but if you really have no clue where you should be going, this map area by level can be pretty useful (but spoils the progression path somewhat).
Spoilers full map
Quick Elden Ring Stats Breakdown
- Vigor: Health Points, usually good idea to keep leveling this to prevent one-shots.
- Mind: Magic Points.
- Endurance: Stamina Points and carry capacity.
- Tip: You can always do one attack/roll with just 1 point of stamina.
- Carry capacity below 30% gives you “light roll” which covers more distance.
- Carry below 70% gives you “medium/normal roll”.
- Carry below 100% gives you a penalty to iframes, roll recovery and stamina regen.
- Carry higher 100% makes you unable to roll and slow moving.
- Strength: Scaling stat for “big weapons”. When two handing a weapon, it will give you +50% strength stat.
- Dexterity: Scaling stat for “swift weapons”.
- Also increases spell casting speed, but its so minor its almost never worth it.
- Intelligence: Scaling for sorcery spells.
- Comes with more offensive magic
- Faith: Scaling for miracles/incantations spells.
- Faith comes with more buffs and has access to healing magic.
- Arcane: Scaling for arcane/occult spells.
- Access to Dragon magic
- Also increases status(e.g. bleed/poison) application rate.