Dark Souls 3 Gameplay Walkthrough 100 Percent Completion

Getting Every Achievement, Ending, and Secret in Dark Souls 3

Most people think 100% completion in Dark Souls 3 means beating the game twice. It doesn't. The actual work involves tracking down achievements that require specific builds, optional boss fights, multiple playthroughs, and a few things most guides completely forget to mention until it's too late. I spent about 85 hours doing this on my second attempt, having learned from my first run where I wasted roughly 12 hours on a path that turned out to be unnecessary. The baseline requirement is finishing the main storyline at least once. That gives you access to a New Game Plus where certain items and NPCs change. You'll need to reach NG+2 at minimum to unlock the second ending route. The true full completion means obtaining every achievement, which breaks down into several categories: story completions, boss kills, NPC questlines, weapon collections, and spell/merestone grinding. The first thing nobody tells you about this is that the "Complete All Quests" achievement doesn't just mean talking to NPCs. It means completing them to their actual conclusions. Let me give you a practical example. Rosaria's Bloodlust questline requires you to give her a Dark Soul twice — once after defeating Yhorm the Giant, and again after defeating Soul of Cinder. Then you have to let her kill Eygon. If you kill Eygon first or leave him alive past that point, the entire quest breaks and you miss the achievement. I learned this the hard way on my first run when I accidentally killed him before reading Rosaria's journal entry, and had to restart a playthrough from NG+2 to fix it.

Here's the counter-intuitive part that trips people up. Most of the optional bosses in the base game do NOT count toward any 100% completion milestone. The Ossuary Dragon in Irithyll, the Crystal Sage and the Dragonslayers in Anor Londo, the Smough and Ornstein rematch in Sen's Fortress — none of these are required for achievements. The only truly optional bosses that matter for full completion are the four Lordran bosses you need for the ending, plus Slave Knight Gael for the true ending. Everything else is cosmetic if your goal is purely 100% achievement hunting. The DLCs are where the real time sink lives. The Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City each have their own achievement trees. You need to beat the final bosses, collect certain items, and in Ariandel's case, complete a whole side quest involving Sister Friede's backstory that has an extremely easy failure state. If you attack the first giant in the Snow Valley without caution, the NPC becomes hostile and you cannot complete her quest in that playthrough. I missed that on my first attempt because the game never warns you. That added about six hours to my total playtime when I went back to fix it. Now let me talk about the grind portions, because they're unavoidable. The "Collect All Miracles" and "Collect All Sorceries" and "Collect All Incantations" achievements require 100+ merestones. You can get them from various NPCs, but several are sold by Lady Yuria and the Undead Merchant. The most reliable method I found was farming the Crestfallen Merchant in High Wall of Lothric after he respawns in NG+2, which gives roughly 15-20 stones per death. It took me about three to four hours of methodical farming to hit the threshold, but once you know the spawn location it becomes mechanical and boring rather than frustrating.

For weapon collections, you need every Ash of War upgrade, which means finding every weapon variant in the game. Some are in extremely obscure locations. The Black Knights' halberd is dropped by a single enemy that spawns behind a false wall in Cathedral of the Deep, accessible only after defeating the Watchdog of the Forest. The Black Knight halberd is also behind a false wall, but you need the Master Key or permission from Friede to access some of these areas. Without the Master Key, you need to be careful about which NPCs you kill because it locks you out of certain merchants. The achievement count across both base game and DLC comes to 49. Here's the practical breakdown of what you're actually committing to. Main story (both endings): approximately 30-35 hours including NG+ and NG+2 runs. All NPC questlines: 5-8 hours if you know the order, 15+ if you figure it out blind. Boss rush requirements: 10-12 hours to find and defeat every named boss. Merchandise and item collection for the magic achievements: 4-6 hours of farming. DLC content: 12-18 hours depending on skill level. Total realistic estimate is 60-80 hours for a competent player. First-timers who don't know the optimal routing should budget 90-100 hours. One thing that makes 100% Dark Souls 3 Gameplay Walkthrough 100 Percent Completion genuinely difficult rather than just tedious is the build requirement for certain quests. Some NPC interactions only trigger if your attribute levels meet specific thresholds. For example, the NPC Who Holds Back the Tide requires you to have at least 10 Intelligence or Faith to talk to her effectively. If you're running a pure melee build, certain dialogue options and quest resolutions are locked. The workaround I used was making a second character specifically forNG+2 with a splashed build, then using the covenant ring or just accepting that some quests will be inaccessible on a single character run.

Here's another detail most walkthroughs skip. The achievement for collecting all covenants has a hidden trap. You need to join and complete the requirements for every covenant, but the Gravelord Servant covenant requires you to invade and poison three other players' worlds. In practice, this means playing online or waiting for invasions. If you're offline or in an area with no multiplayer traffic, this achievement can sit incomplete for days. I solved this by playing during peak hours in a region with active matchmaking and waiting roughly 45 minutes total across multiple sessions for the invasions to land. The Ringed City DLC has the most demanding achievement set. The "Ringed City" achievement itself requires beating the Soul of Cinder on any difficulty, but there are additional requirements tied to the executioner's boomerang and the old hunter weapon that only appear under specific conditions. You need to have defeated Ornstein and Smough in the original Anor Londo before progressing far enough in the DLC, because the game checks those flags. If you skip either of those bosses thinking they don't matter, you can lock yourself out of an achievement. I discovered this after completing about 70% of the DLC and having to go back through earlier areas in NG+ to trigger missing flag conditions. The most efficient completion strategy is to plan your first playthrough as a build that can handle both sorcery and miracle routes. A strength/dexterity build with some spell splashing covers more bases than a dedicated caster because you still get most NPC interactions while having access to covenant spells from the start. Alternatively, just make two characters from the beginning — one for story/content and one purely for the covenant and magic achievements. The dual-character approach actually saves time because you avoid the attrition of trying to maintain both combat viability and quest accessibility on a single save file.

For the second ending specifically, you need the Elderic's Firelink talisman and the Ringed City's End item, both of which are only available in NG+2 or higher. This means you're committed to at least two full playthroughs minimum. There is no shortcut around this requirement. The game gates these items deliberately to separate the regular ending from the true ending. If you're going to do this, I'd recommend tracking your progress through the official PlayStation Trophy tracker or Steam achievement list rather than a third-party guide. The in-game systems update in real time and will show you exactly which requirements are still outstanding. Third-party wikis sometimes have outdated information, particularly regarding DLC achievements that received patches after initial release. The Ariandel DLC achievements were restructured in a patch that changed how Sister Friede's quest triggers, and following an older guide will get you stuck at that exact step.