Playing Elden Ring co-op is the optimal way to play for many players, but as usual, the system in place is a bit more complicated than you might be used to if you’re not someone who tends to jump into From Software’s games. The path to playing multiplayer in Elden Ring takes a few steps, but once you’ve got the process down, you’ll be able to quickly join or invite friends and newfound allies alike. Here’s all you need to know about how to play Elden Ring in co-op.

Elden Ring: How to play co-op

When you arrive in The Lands Between, you’ll default to playing games in solo mode, but you can easily change this using an item you’ll start the game with once you get past the tutorial.

The first thing you’ll want to do is check your network settings under the game’s system options menu. You’ll see options for cross-region play, voice, chat, and more. Set these to your preferences, including possibly turning co-op off entirely by selecting your launch setting to offline. But since you’re here, you’re more likely looking to play in co-op, so here’s what you need to know.

In the game’s menu–I hesitate to call it a pause menu since you can’t actually pause Elden Ring–you’ll see three strange items when you click on multiplayer: Finger Severer, Tarnished Furled Finger, and Small Gold Effigy. Each of these has specific purposes relating to multiplayer.

Tarnished Furled Finger: Leaves a gold summoning sign to play cooperative multiplayer. You can only place one summoning sign, so when you place a new old, your previous gold summon sign will be removed. In other players’ worlds, they may see your gold summon sign, and should they interact with it, they will join your game.

Small Gold Effigy: Sends a cooperative summon sign to several nearby summoning pools (activated pools only). In essence, this tells the game that you’d like to join a multiplayer session, and it may mean you’re pulled into another player’s world at any point once you’ve activated this.

Finger Severer: Allows you to disband a co-op session with your ally, sending them out of your multiplayer session and returning you both to solo play.

If you’d like to invite a specific player, you can set up a multiplayer password and you’ll only be matched with other players using the same password. This works basically like a game invite, allowing you and other specific players to play together while keeping other randomized players from joining or taking you in as their co-op partner.

You can also create up to five group passwords that allow you to filter out the messages, summoning signs, bloodstains, phantoms, and other multiplayer elements from anyone not using your group passwords. This is useful because a lot of player messages can be deceiving or even absurd, so using a group password will help ensure you’re only receiving environmental messages from players whom you trust.