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Dark Souls is built on a world that refuses to rearrange itself for you. The bonfire you found yesterday is where you left it, the lizard that bolted was in that one barrel and will not be waiting somewhere more convenient, and the door that would not open is still waiting for the same object it wanted the first time. None of it moves while you are away. What changes between one trip and the next is what you are carrying when you arrive somewhere, and how much of it you still have when you get back.
That is the shape our Dark Souls guides take between them. Some of them are addresses, a fixed list of where a thing sits and what it wants from you. The rest are about the trip home and what you do with the haul. Read them in the order below and you will be doing the two things this game actually asks of you: finding fixed points, and deciding what to spend.
What You Walk In Carrying
Before any of that, you pick a character and a weight class. Our class tips and builds guide lays out the ten starting classes with a full stat line for each, and the numbers are more revealing than the descriptions. Starting Soul Level runs from 1 for the Pyromancer to 6 for the Deprived, so the class that starts lowest is also the one our writers recommend to a newcomer. The Knight opens with the highest Vitality at 14, the Deprived arrives with a flat 11 in everything and no clothes, and the Thief brings the Master Key, which opens a set of basic locks and the shortcuts sitting behind them.
Weight decides how that character moves. The equipment guide sets out the roll thresholds you will be living under from the first corridor onwards: below a quarter of your equip load you keep the fast roll, crossing a quarter drops you to a medium one, crossing half gives you the fat roll, and crossing the full bar takes rolling and running away from you entirely. Endurance buys headroom in a straight line, 50 at ten points and 139 at ninety-nine, and three rings buy more of it, with Havel's Ring worth half again, the Ring of Favor and Protection a fifth, and the Mask of the Father a twentieth. Heavy plate has a second cost the bar does not show, since sets like Havel's, Smough's and the Stone Knight's cut stamina regeneration by more than a quarter once you are past the halfway mark.
The Places That Never Move
Every trip is measured from a bonfire, and our bonfire locations guide is the page to start with. Sitting down restores health, stamina, spell charges and your Estus Flask and burns off poison and toxic, at the price of standing every non-boss enemy back up. It is also where you spend souls on levels, where you slot spells into attunement, and where humanity gets burned to kindle the site for extra flasks. Buy Andre of Astora's three boxes, meaning the Weapon Smithbox, the Armor Smithbox and the Repairbox, and the same fire doubles as a workbench with the Bottomless Box alongside it.
Warping between sites is not a starting convenience. It arrives with the Lordvessel, and nine bonfires accept it, among them Firelink Shrine, the Depths, Undead Parish, Anor Londo, The Duke's Archives, Crystal Cave, Tomb of the Giants, the Painted World of Ariamis and Sanctuary Oolacile. Until then the map is walked.
The other fixed points worth planning a route around are the ones that run from you. Our Crystal Lizard locations guide pins them across eleven areas, from a barrel before the Taurus Demon in the Undead Burg to the entry of the Chasm of the Abyss, and four of those stops hold more than one: the Crystal Cave has three, the Royal Cave another three, the Great Hollow four sightings scattered down its branches, and the Catacombs two in the same room below the bridge. They carry the Large Titanite your weapons will be hungry for long before the Giant Blacksmith is in reach to sell you any.
Doors, and the Object Each One Wants
Twenty-four keys are documented in our keys locations guide, and the useful way to read the list is by where each one comes from rather than which door it opens. Some are boss drops, so the Gaping Dragon hands over the Blighttown Key and the Capra Demon the Key to the Depths. Some are purchases, with the Undead Merchant asking 1,000 souls for the Residence Key that reaches Griggs of Vinheim, and Andre asking 20,000 for the Crest of Artorias that opens the Darkroot Garden door. Some are simply lying on a corpse, like the Basement Key in the room past the Armored Tusk.
A few of them open a place rather than a door on the route you were already walking. The Peculiar Doll, waiting in your old cell back at the Undead Asylum, is what the painting in Anor Londo checks before it lets you into the Painted World of Ariamis. The Broken Pendant, dropped by a respawning Crystal Golem outside The Duke's Archives, reopens the portal where Dusk was rescued and takes you into Artorias of the Abyss. The Key to the Seal, handed over by Ingward once you have the Lordvessel, drains New Londo Ruins. One key opens a person instead of a place: the Mystery Key lets Knight Lautrec of Carim out of his cell in the Undead Parish, which is a decision rather than a favour.
The Fights Standing In Front Of Things
Twenty-two encounters are written up in our boss strategy guide, listed alphabetically from the Asylum Demon to the Taurus Demon, and a good many of them come down to one piece of positioning rather than a damage race. You start the very first fight standing above the boss, which is a free hit before it has noticed you. The Stray Demon that replaces it later has the same moveset plus a fire slam, and bleeds badly enough that a Bandit's Knife shortens the whole thing. Dark Sun Gwyndolin wants the Hawk Ring, a strong bow and around thirty-five arrows before you set foot in the room. Great Grey Wolf Sif will not let you land two hits in a row and can run half an hour. Ornstein and Smough is the fight where humanity turns into a second sword arm, since the summon sign for Solaire of Astora is sitting above the stairs.
Getting Home With The Haul
Dying is not the punishment; the walk back is. You reappear hollow at the last bonfire you touched, and every soul and every humanity you were holding stays behind as a bloodstain on the spot where you fell. Reach it and you get all of it back; die on the way and it may be gone for good, which is why the bonfires guide suggests dragging whatever killed you back towards the fire rather than fighting it where it stands.
Humanity is the resource that decides how much of the game is even open to you. It turns up on bodies, it is paid out for being summoned into someone else's boss fight or for invading and winning, and it can be farmed offline off the rats in the Depths, on a loop that also produces green titanite from the slimes and curse eyes from the frogs. Killing the human NPCs scattered around works too and is permanent in the worst way, since the shop, the spells or the service that person provided never comes back. Being human matters beyond summoning as well, since our merchants guide warns that hollows get a colder welcome at the stalls, which makes the shopping run a human-form errand.
What the haul is worth is set out in the souls half of our souls and boss soul weapons guide, which prices the ordinary pickups from 200 up to 20,000 and then prices the bosses themselves, so you can see exactly what you are giving up by turning one into a weapon instead of eating it.
Spending It
Four systems take payment, and our Dark Souls upgrades, spells and covenants guide sorts them by the thing each one checks for before it will begin: a free attunement slot, a stat line, the right colour of ore, or the token a covenant collects. It is the page to read before a shopping trip, because souls on their own are not enough at any of those four counters.
The people who take that payment have fixed posts too, and our blacksmiths and teachers guide gives each one a location, a shop table and a drop list. Four smiths handle the metalwork, and they are not interchangeable: Andre sits below the church between the Undead Parish and the Darkroot Garden and is the only smith who can push a weapon onto the standard, raw, divine or occult route, the Giant Blacksmith in Anor Londo owns the crystal and lightning work and sells ore and arrows by the stack, Rickert of Vinheim needs an enchanted ember before he will enchant anything, and Vamos is a skeleton at the bottom of the Catacombs who is easy to get killed by accident. Five teachers are listed alongside them, four with spell tables of their own to set against our magic guide, and several have to be freed from a cell or a barrel before they will set up at Firelink Shrine.
If you would rather spend your evening on other players than on the shops, the covenants, soapstones and invasion items in our multiplayer and PvP guide are the other half of the economy, and much of what they ask for in return arrives through other players rather than off the map.
Away From The Game Itself
One page here is not a guide at all. Our news piece on Dark Souls franchise sales traces how a series nobody expected to travel ended up selling the way it did, from 2.3 million copies of the original by April 2013 to a combined 27 million lifetime sales for the franchise by May 2020, with Dark Souls 3 out in front on more than ten million. It explains, in numbers rather than lore, why the game you are about to be killed by has as many guides written about it as it does.