Eldegarde can feel confusing at first, not because it’s complicated, but because it doesn’t hold your hand. The game throws you into a system-heavy world where choices matter, gear can disappear, and combat punishes bad habits fast. That’s also why it’s fun. If you understand the basics early, you save yourself hours of frustration and a lot of unnecessary deaths.
This guide walks through the game the same way most players experience it: starting confused, slowly figuring things out, and then realizing why the systems work the way they do.
Class and Game Mode
After picking your house name, the first real decision is your class. The honest truth is that every class and weapon is viable. There isn’t a “wrong” pick here. If something looks cool or feels right, that’s enough of a reason to choose it.
You’ll also choose between PvE and PvP maps, but don’t overthink this either. Both modes are connected. You can move between them whenever you want. PvE maps are calmer, full of players doing quests, farming materials, and learning mechanics. PvP maps are riskier but offer higher drop chances for better loot.
No matter where you go, death has consequences. When you die, you lose everything you brought into that raid and everything you found during it—except what’s stored in your soul pouch and tool belt. That sounds brutal, but gear in Eldegarde is surprisingly easy to replace.
Early on, the game even helps you out. Every death gives you a fresh set of basic gray gear, plus potions and bandages. This makes zero-to-hero runs completely viable. You’re never locked out of progression just because you died.
The City
The city is where Eldegarde starts to make sense. This is where you buy, craft, refine, and prepare for raids.
The Armorsmith is the most important vendor early on. You can buy basic gear here or craft your own. Crafting is tied to your class, so when you open the crafting tab, it automatically shows items relevant to what you’re playing.
When you look at a crafted item, the materials list tells you exactly what you need. That’s where refining comes in.
The Lodge
Your lodge is basically your backbone. Almost everything feeds into it.
Raw materials like scraps, ore, and wood are useless until refined. Leather scraps go into the tanner, copper ore into the forge, and so on. Higher-tier crafts may require extra items like charcoal, frog oil, or fine thread, but these aren’t rare—you can buy them infinitely from vendors.
The research tab lets you upgrade stations. Higher levels let you refine or craft more items at once, up to three. This sounds minor until you’re mass-crafting and suddenly realize how much time it saves.
The most important station early on is the cooking pot.
Cooking Pot
Food buffs apply for an entire raid and are insanely strong. Stamina food, health food, damage food—these all directly affect how well you survive fights.
The higher your cooking pot level, the more food buffs you can stack at once. You can see how many adventures the buff lasts before you need to reload it.
If you care about leveling faster, upgrading your bed helps with XP speed. Storage chests expand your bank space. The crafting bench lets you make class-specific tools and extra storage chests.
There’s also transmutation, which lets you convert lower-tier refined materials into higher-tier ones once you’ve learned the recipes from raids. This becomes important later when progression slows down.
Quests
Before heading out, always check your quests.
The Chronicle is your main questline and gives a lot of rewards over time. The quest board offers side quests that give steady XP for both you and your vendors.
Weekly quests reset once per week and are worth doing when available. Campaign quests are especially useful because they give hard-to-find materials needed to upgrade your lodge, saving you from grinding the open world endlessly.
You can also unlock class-specific quests from the store if you want cosmetics tied to your class.
Traits, Skills, and Builds
Every time you level up, check the Traits and Adventurer tabs. You get one trait point per level up to level 20. Some traits cost two points, some cost one, but by level 20 you’ll have everything unlocked anyway.
This means you don’t need to stress about perfect builds early. Experiment. Unlock what feels useful right now.
The Skills tab shows your weapon inputs and lets you select three skill combinations. There are multiple viable playstyles for every class. Try different setups until something clicks.
Combat Basics
Eldegarde is a skill-first, gear-second game. Gear helps, but understanding combat matters far more.
Dodging uses stamina. Every class has 100 stamina, but dodge costs vary. If you spam dodges and hit zero stamina, you’ll glow orange and lose the ability to sprint or escape. That usually means death.
Stamina food can push your stamina above 100, which can literally give you an extra dodge. This is why cooking matters.
Sheathing your weapon lets you sprint and regenerate stamina. There’s also a small animation cancel trick where you start sheathing and then dodge, instantly completing the sheath. It’s not mandatory, but it helps once you’re comfortable.
Attack Colors and Crowd Control
Blue attacks are unstoppable. They won’t stagger you unless hit by a red attack.
Red attacks are unblockable and cancel blue attacks.
If you see a bubble, that also counts as unstoppable.
When a player turns yellow after being hit too many times, they’ve entered a brief unstoppable state to prevent infinite stun-locking.
Crowd control types matter:
- Stun (yellow swirl): doesn’t break on damage.
- Incapacitation (purple swirl): breaks on damage.
- Root (red swirl on feet): can’t move but can still attack.
- Snare (yellow swirl on feet): movement speed reduced.
Jump attacks are useful, but getting hit mid-air without protection often leads to knockdowns, which can be punished hard.