Elden Ring has a check mark feature that’s easily overlooked

Perfect for keeping track of random caves and catacombs as the world map unfurls

It’s easy to overlook so many little aspects of Elden Ring, and that feeling extends to something as simple as a check mark to remind yourself that you’ve done everything at any given Site of Grace. I’m 76 hours into the game and I had no idea about this trick.

Calling this checklist feature a “trick” is probably overkill, as it was hiding in plain sight all along, right there in the UI. But I bet that a bunch of us were too busy poring over the illustrated map to notice every morsel of contextual text at the bottom of the screen.

As pointed out by Reddit user Vascio, once you pull up the map in Elden Ring, you can toggle a list of every Site of Grace by region using the Triangle button on PS4/PS5 — I’m sure you’ve seen it! From there, you can scroll through the names as you please, but here’s the new-to-me part: while on this list, you can click in the right analog stick to add or remove a mark on individual Site of Grace locations. To be clear, this is separate from the map markers that let you stamp a sword or a skull or what have you directly on the map.

Here’s a screenshot I took with a mark on three locations right at the start of Elden Ring:

How’d I miss this? Well, without spoiling anything, the right analog stick click is used for something else entirely when you’re just looking at the world map without having the Site of Grace list pulled up. So, again, once you activate that location list (with the Triangle button), the right stick functionality changes to let you add or remove check marks.

Of course, you can use these marks however you want; that’s the beauty of it. Maybe there’s an important NPC nearby that you’ve got unfinished business with, for instance. If you would prefer to use marks as more of a to-do list, you can actually hit Triangle again to show just your Marked Sites of Grace — so that seems to be the intended approach.

And a bonus tip from pyrozew: with the list up, you can hit the Square button on PS4/PS5 to warp to the Roundtable Hold hub without needing to tab over to its name and select it.

In terms of map markers, I’ve been using the skull (next to zones with an optional boss that was too hard to slay at the time) and the sword stamp (for those little statues that require Stonesword Keys), among several others. With this discovery, though, I’ll definitely leave a check mark on any Site of Grace that feels “complete.” I’ll try not to overthink it.

It’s not the most comprehensive feature (so don’t throw away your proper-noun-filled notebook just yet), but it will do the job for many of us. It’s just less cluttered, you know?

The timing couldn’t be better, as I just entered that post-game period where I can trigger New Game+ at any moment, but I don’t want to switch until I’ve seen (more or less) everything. There are still tons of optional locations to just suss out, much less explore.

I’ll check ’em off as I go, which is a hell of a lot better than the eventual cross-reference-everything-with-the-wiki process I was starting to dread.