Getting All Elden Ring Achievements Won't Kill You, But It Will Waste Your Weekend
There are 42 achievements in Elden Ring, and finishing them all takes roughly 80 to 120 hours depending on how much you chase every last rune collectible. Most people clear the main ones on their first run through and then struggle with the ones that require specific endings or co-op. If you want a single reference that covers every achievement with step-by-step methods, there are several community-maintained versions online. The most useful ones map each trophy to specific boss locations, required item drops, and whether the achievement is missable. Bookmark whichever one you land on because you will need to check back when you hit a blocker. Start with the ones that carry no real risk. Defeating the first few demigods gives you the bulk of your points quickly. The Shardbearer achievements unlock as you take down Margit, Rennala, Radahn, and the others. These don't require any special planning, just standard progression. You will also pick up basic exploration trophies along the way—finding sites of grace, opening treasure chests, and so on. Nothing clever about these.
One thing people consistently mess up is the Rune Arc usage trophies. There are separate achievements for using five and then twenty-five Rune Arcs. If you play through casually, you might not register how many you've actually consumed. Keep a loose note on a piece of paper or in a notepad app. I once realized halfway through my second playthrough that I had barely touched five out of my thirty Rune Arcs because I was hoarding them for "the right moment." There is no right moment. Use them when you need the stat boost and move on.
The Missable Trap
Some achievements vanish the moment you progress too far. The biggest one involves reaching a certain ending. Once you trigger the True Ending sequence, you can no longer access the other ending paths without starting fresh. This is where the actual planning matters. I wasted an evening on my second playthrough because I assumed I could simply reload a save from before the final boss to switch endings. You can't. The game locks certain story flags permanently once you trigger the ending cutscene. I ended up doing a full third run just to secure the alternate ending achievement. If you care about collecting all of them, finish one full playthrough for the main achievements, then start a New Game Plus and deliberately steer toward the other endings.
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The Co-op Requirement
A few trophies require cooperative play. Defeating certain bosses with a summoned phantom counts toward these. The issue isn't finding a co-op partner—it's timing your summons correctly. Some bosses will desummon your helper if you progress too far into their arena without engaging them. Call the spirit ash before you cross the threshold, not after. There is also a specific achievement tied to helping another player defeat a boss. This triggers when you invade someone else's world and assist them. The trap here is that if you assist and the host dies, the achievement does not unlock. I lost a window on this one because the host I was helping died to a stray arrow from a distant enemy NPC while we were still farming the boss. Wait for the area to clear, then join.
The Completionist Edge Case
Running the full achievement list also requires collecting every Ash of War and Spirit Ash. People hit a wall here because certain items drop from specific enemies in specific locations, and farming them efficiently is harder than it looks. The Spiritflame Ash of War, for example, drops from a single enemy type in a restricted area of the Altus Plateau. If you skip that zone, you are stuck. My workaround was tagging every missed collectible in a spreadsheet and revisiting only those areas in a New Game Plus cycle. The enemy placement resets but the item pools remain, so you can farm without grinding through content you already own. This usually cuts the collectible chase from two full weeks of backtracking down to a single focused weekend.
The Real Bottleneck
The hardest achievement to chase is the one that requires you to reach the highest summit in the game. Getting there means navigating a route that is easy to miss if you are not following a map. The shortcut through the Mountaintops of the Giants is particularly easy to overlook, and without it you are walking an extra thirty minutes of dangerous terrain. I learned this after wasting forty-five minutes fighting regular enemies on the long route while a well-timed jump shortcut bypassed the entire encounter chain. Another counter-intuitive detail: the achievement tracker in-game does not always reflect offline progress until you connect to the internet. If you play solo for hours and then try to sync, some trophies will appear to have reset or failed to register. Log into your account at least once every few sessions to keep the progress visible.
When the Guide Stops Helping
No achievement guide covers everything because FromSoftware occasionally shifts tiebreakers between patches. A boss trigger condition that worked in the first month of launch changed slightly after a balance update. Always cross-reference the dates on any guide you use. If it was published more than six months after launch, verify the steps against recent community posts to make sure nothing was patched out. Some achievements are effectively impossible to get on a single character if you ignore them during normal play. There is no retroactive fix. The game does not allow you to earn missed trophies on a finished save. Plan your runs with endings and co-op requirements in mind before you commit to the first one.
