The Definitive Ranking Of FromSoftware Farming Locations I Like

To play a modern FromSoft game is to experience many forms of pleasurable discomfort, but the one talked about with the least affection is grinding. Because these games allow you to ameliorate your deficiencies via leveling, repeating the same tedious loop over and over is an essential part of the experience.

Eventually, once you have played a loop enough, the space imprints on you. Some places are trusted friends; others are nasty and ruthless. Each space gets hammered into your psyche via repetition, and phrases like “Mohgwyn Palace Cliff” or “Bloodborne Lecture Hall” become a Proustian madeline. If you are like me, you have ranked them capriciously in your head. These are my favorites in most of the modern FromSoft games, starting with Demon’s Souls and ranked in order of how much I enjoy each of them.

Thank you to Souls Speedrunner Karl Germ for additions when I reached out. You can see Karl beat Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition last year in 34 minutes and one second here:

Honorable Mention – The Dark Souls brightness dupe glitch 

I didn’t want to include duplication glitches because that feels more like cheating than farming, although the distinction between the two even in this list is murky at best. This one is noteworthy due to it being useful in glitched speedruns. It can be used even in console versions of Dark Souls, and involves displaying 999 arrows from a vendor, rearranging your items so a large soul appears at the top. You then go into your system settings and then press both enter and right bumper so that the brightness slider and the item you selected are layered over each other. You then press B, followed by down and right on the d-pad. You then go right to defaults and click enter again. If you did everything correctly, you can use whatever item you selected 999 times, which means that you will have infinite souls. Much respect to this method, but I prefer to grind.

#28 Dark Souls 2 – Infinite ghost ditch 

Though nowhere near as good as the Giant Lord memory farm, the Undead Ditch in the Undead Crypt in Dark Souls 2 is reliable and infinitely repeatable. It first requires you to make your way through the level carefully, unlocking a platform that leads to a quick shortcut to the Undead Ditch bonfire you started at. From the bonfire, return over the shortcut bridge you just raised and take one of two possible routes. If you go right, you enter a really ugly room with a bunch of disgusting headstones, a few ornate headstones, and dirt in it. Wait for an undead prisoner to spawn on your right, drag his ass across the room, and ring a bell. 

Ringing the bell will start spawning Leydia Pyromancers from the ornate headstones in the room. These big scary ghost magicians throw fire at you. The advantage here is that they will be spawned endlessly, so if you hang back near the door you can just fry them with magic endlessly. The downside is that if you are using melee attacks it’s possible to destroy the headstones permanently, which messes up half of the farm. 

The other potential route you can take from the bridge is to the left. You’ll instead go into a big cavernous space. Under the stairs is another bell and another undead prisoner. Even if the prisoner dies, you can just ring the bell yourself to spawn enemies at will. 

I have spent a good chunk of time in this area the last time I played Dark Souls II. It’s reliable and gets the job done, and it gets points for being a modest farm right before a boss. But it loses points because it’s scary down there and you are mostly farming in a claustrophobic dirt hole with ghosts.

#27 Dark Souls/Dark Souls 3 – The Hellkite Drake/Lothric Wyvern kills a bunch of guys with fire

These two places are low tier souls farms, but they’re both useful early in the game if you are a newbie and running into a wall. Both involve getting a huge-ass dragon defending a castle breathing fire and killing a bunch of dudes for you. 

The first is in Dark Souls with the Hellkite Drake. You unlock the bonfire directly under him, run up a ladder, peek your head out, then run back inside. Because there are a bunch of guys outside on the bridge, the drake will vaporize them, giving you their souls. After it does that, drop down and repeat the process. Eventually you may want to kill this guy because he drops a Drake Sword that’s conditionally useful early on but scales badly relative to other weapons. If you don't, it can be a meditative farm that’s useful for beginners. It's also useful for securing the Crest of Artorias, which I will mention later..

A similar farm exists in Dark Souls 3, and the main tutorial video for it has like 400k views on YouTube. That video was read by me a decade ago and included in a tips article Patrick Klepick did for Kotaku. There are multiple ways to do it, and some are more optimized than what I initially suggested, but you basically run to where the Lothric Wyvern is, poke him with an arrow, and watch him vaporize a bunch of guys on both sides of the ramparts. No matter which path you take, the same basic principle applies.

I have a fondness for this one for personal and slightly nostalgic reasons. It felt like I was contributing something early on in the release of the game, even if superior methods were found almost instantly. I also find that the loop of having a dragon eternally vaporizing the same bunch of guys has an enjoyable mental texture, even if the utility of both is limited and far better farming methods exist.

#26 Nightreign – Flame Chariot camp

Flame Chariots in Elden Ring are nasty fire-breathing vehicles shaped like the giant head of an ugly guy made out of oxidized green metal. Traditionally there are two ways to take these out. You can either spin behind them and backstab the guy operating the machine, or you find a way to drop on top of one to stab them on top of the head. That second way is faster, but unless you find a cliff or outcropping it’s harder to pull off reliably.

However, because Nightreign is a much faster game than Elden Ring and has a lot more verticality and aggressive jumping, the second way of killing the Flame Chariot is not just faster but also more reliable.“The wall kick mechanic in Nightreign makes it very easy to one shot the Flame Chariots to get early runes (or two shot them if you play as Recluse and don’t have a melee weapon like I did way too much early on),” Karl Germ told me. “Exploding zombies also give a good amount of runes for early levels, especially with a golden fowl foot.”

#25 Demon’s Souls – Shrine Of Storms manta rays

Demon’s Souls is replete with farming locations, and one of the best farming locations is in the Shrine of Storms. This is a sick-looking rainy area with a semi-gimmicky boss and weapon combo. If you’ve not played the game, a huge component of it is the Storm Ruler, a bigass sword that lets you slash a tornado into the air in this specific zone. The sword is used to beat the Storm King, a boss that looks like a big manta ray. You’re mostly not using this weapon in another context, but you can use it to kill all the baby manta rays known as Storm Beasts in the area repeatedly and farm souls in the endgame. 

Once you optimize for maximizing souls and making sure you aren’t ganked by strangers by going offline, it’s a thoroughly soothing farming location. Not a lot of stress. It’s really relaxing and has a good yield. It’s the Souls equivalent of fishing. In the Demon’s Souls remake, you are pelted by rain and you’re swatting flying monster fish out of the sky. The calming mood and low difficulty make it a wonderfully placid place to turn your brain off and listen to some jazz or a podcast, although by the time you hit the farm you might be overpowered after farming reapers. You can also kill the Storm Beast using magic, but where’s the fun in that?

#24 Demon’s Souls – Ritual Path Reaper farm

Like the Storm Beast farm, this Demon’s Souls farm is also in the Shrine of Storms. You get fewer souls but it’s earlier, before fighting the Old Hero, and individual runs are much faster. You start off at the Ritual Path archstone and run forward, jumping down between two staircases. You then turn around and run down a hallway. In the room ahead of you and down below, you will see a Reaper that sucks to fight one-on-one. Luckily if you take these things at range they will collapse like a bag of laundry and net you a tidy amount of souls. You’re going to take a bow and flaming arrow to this guy’s head and he’s going to die. 

The route itself is deeply efficient, and though you need arrows to kill the Reaper, the tunnel features a vendor known as Graverobber Blige that sells them. This makes the entire farm self-contained. If you ever manage to run out of arrows, just dump some of the souls you’ve been farming directly into ammo and continue as planned. 

#23 Dark Souls – The baby skeleton humanity nursery in Tomb of the Giants (also rats)

Humanity is both a consumable and a concept in Dark Souls. Most bosses drop it, it’s used for summoning other players, and if you want to attack a boss full strength you need to use it. Aside from bosses, rats drop it, which I like to think is a compliment to rats as creatures. Everyone knows that one sewer farm because it’s reliable and early on. But there’s a way funnier enemy that drops humanity, which is Skeleton Babies. They are literally tiny skeletons that spawn endlessly and rapidly in one specific part of Tomb of the Giants, right before Gravelord Nito. It is unclear if they are the children of skeletons or the reanimated skeletons of babies, and I am unsure which is more unethical to harvest.

The babies drop Humanity at around a two percent drop rate, although that can be boosted by raising item discovery with the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring and the fact that these little fellas respawn at machine gun fire pace. Unlike other enemies, there is an endless supply of them, so you can just spend hours stomping Skeleton Babies back into the grave. Poor guys. They net you about 4000 souls a minute just due to how many you kill in the aggregate. The sheer absurdity of the area raises it in my esteem as an all timer, although like other farms on this list it’s kinda spooky down there.

#22 Dark Souls - Farming the Black Knight Halberd in Deep Root Basin

A speedrunner favorite, the Black Knight Halberd can be gotten very quickly and can carry you through the entire game. “Knight in Dark Root Basin,” Karl told me via DM. “If you know what you’re doing you can get there within five minutes of starting the game, pop a couple Humanity for good measure and try and get that ~24% chance to get an immediate OP weapon.” 

You’re going to book it to a specific cliff and try to make the knight face the direction of that cliff. Black Knights are immensely strong mobs, and while you can’t kill them with pure backstab damage yet, you can backstab them off the cliff and to their death. Because the chance of getting the item is not 100% this technically qualifies as a farm. Even conceptually, the image of a naked weakling player nudging an ominous knight that hits like an F150 off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote is a beautiful mental image.

#21 Dark Souls – Phalanx 

Phalanx is a nasty little creature that only appears in a snowy courtyard in the Painted World of Ariamis. If you have never played Dark Souls, this section is quite literally a nested painting that you enter, created by using the First Flame and the Dark Soul as pigments. It was constructed as a sanctuary for the half-dragon known as Crossbreed Priscilla. 

The Phalanx you are hunting are slime guys with shields and spears that look suspiciously like the first real boss of Demon’s Souls that shares the same name. You can run in and slam through the slime warriors with a heavy weapon, or if you have fire magic just totally vaporize them endlessly with an AOE, running back and forth and netting yourself a lot of souls. Ariamis is one of my favorite locations in Dark Souls, which makes it a thoroughly enjoyable farming location. The courtyard itself also gets bonus points for being fairly close to Crossbreed Priscilla, which is not a hard fight but I just think she looks super neat.

#20 Lies of P – the Lobster Inn

Look, this is my list and I can put any FromSoft game on here including Lies of P which, despite being made by a different company in a different country, is the only Soulslike good and specific enough to be a proper FromSoftware game.

There’s a whole bunch of good places to farm Ergo (the souls of the game) in Lies of P, but the one I’ve personally spent the most time in is the three guys in The Lobster Inn. Starting from the Malum District stargazer (Lies of P’s version of a bonfire) you run into the inn, preferably with a fire weapon. There's three freaky carcasses inside you want to focus on, notably an easily stabbable maw carcass and two more normal carcass enemies. Don’t bother going upstairs; it isn’t worth the grind. Just run back to the Stargazer, rinse, and repeat. It nets a consistent amount of Ergo that will float you through the trickiest part of the game, and it’s right before a semi-irritating boss. It’s also right next to a vendor that you’ll go back to fairly frequently, so its utility extends beyond. Much love to the Lobster Inn and much love to Lies of P. 

You Know What Ruled? Lies of P - Aftermath

With Lies of P: Overture’s announcement, it’s time to appreciate one of the best surprises of 2023, a game that lived up to its influences.

AftermathChris Person

#19 Dark Souls 2 – Kill The Rotten five times

This one farm is specifically used by speedrunners attempting to beat Dark Souls 2 glitchlessly without beating all the bosses. There is a choke point called the Shrine of Winter that prevents you from going to the absolute last part of the game. There are two specific ways to get past this shrine: defeat four specific bosses or gain one million souls. There used to be a geometry glitch that let you bypass the shrine entirely, but FromSoft patched that out. 

The Rotten is a nasty boss at the bottom of Black Gulch, a gross but small swamp area. He’s a bunch of dead dudes lashed together with chains to form a really big dude holding a cleaver. You light the bonfire right before him and defeat him as normal, but when you eventually come back you have to bring a bunch of an item called a Bonfire Aesthetic. Bonfire Aesthetics are items that radically change an area. If you throw one into a bonfire it functionally raises the area surrounding that bonfire a level in New Game Plus. This means enemies are harder, drop more souls, and if you use it prior to a boss, that boss will respawn. By killing The Rotten five times overall and using his boss souls repeatedly, you can massively level yourself up while also skipping several bosses altogether. There’s little rational reason to do this if you are normal, but it’s immensely useful if you are trying to do one specific type of Dark Souls 2 speedrun.

#18 Sekiro – Ashina Outskirts – Stairwell late game

FromSoftware’s environmental storytelling in Sekiro is significantly different from many other FromSoftware games. The basic geography of the world changes a lot over the game, with new enemies replacing old ones, the world transforming as the plot progresses and the balance of power politically shifting. You will often return to a place only for the context to radically change as events overtake it.

With this in mind, one of the best ratios of XP and Sen is returning to the stairwell where you fight the Chained Ogre initially, but at the end of the game. In the intervening time since killing the Ogre, opposing soldiers have laid siege to the castle. From the Outskirts Wall - Stairway Idol, you rappel up to the tower and take out a watchman. You then drop down, taking out the soldier at the base of the tower. Keep going through the door and take out the third near the gate. From there, you will see two more enemies climbing the stairs, one with a big flamethrower canon and another guy. Take out the flamethrower guy first, and there’s a 50-50 chance the second guy will spot you. You can either Ichimonji him in the forehead, hit him with an axe, or just go to town on him with regular attacks. When you are done, Spider-Man back up to the Sculptor’s Idol and reset. When you get it all done, it’s the most efficient farm in the game for both Sen and XP.

The endgame stairs will net you more money than you know what to do with and fulminated mercury, which is otherwise a gargantuan pain in the ass to farm but required if you want to max out your prosthetic tools. It’s also a little nostalgic because you very probably know this spawn point intimately from dying to the Chained Ogre like a hundred times when you first played the game. The two enemies climbing the stairs can also be backstabbed and puppeted using the Golden Vortex to assist you with fighting Shigekichi of the Red Guard in the courtyard on top. 

The downside of this farm is that it’s so late in the game that you’re mainly using it to finish upgrading your tools and round your skill tree out, but if you are trying to kill the Demon of Hatred you are gonna need it.  Overall, it’s easy, soothing, and lucrative. It is not, however, the best farm in the game for XP. I have done the math. That comes later.

#17 Sekiro – The one soldier and the three little tiny guys by the tree 

This farm is located after you beat the horseback rider Gyoubu Masataka Oniwa, one of the most beloved characters in any FromSoft game, because he shouts “My name... is Gyoubu Masataka Oniwa! As I breathe, you will not pass the castle gate!” This is every Sekiro player’s activation phrase.

The loop that follows becomes the go-to farming location for a really long time, because it’s simple and gives you a metric ton of upgrade materials. You start at the gate, run in, kill the guy in front of the second gate, then grapple your way to the top and into the courtyard to the right. You’re then confronted by three tiny little guys with black hats, one near a tree by himself and two next to each other. You’re able to backstab two of them but not the third one.

If you’ve never fought these little guys, they are two feet tall and have big straw hats that your sword just slides off. They have one of the sickest grab animations in the entire game, where they grab the back of Wolf’s head and kick him in the back with both feet while wearing geta. It hurts every time I see them do that. 

However, you can use your axe tool to just split the third guy’s hat in half pretty consistently, exposing his soft, misshapen head. That last kill takes a second to get down correctly, but once you have the momentum down it’s tremendously satisfying like cracking an egg. Once you are done, you jump over the wall down back to the Sculptor’s Idol to reset it. This is honest to god a load bearing farm location in Sekiro: no razzle dazzle or tricks, just real solid and it does what it says on the box. It’s also quite pastoral to look at, with the light of the afternoon on the battlefield.

#16 Dark Souls 3 – Anor Londo Stairs for Proof of Concord Kept

In Dark Souls 3, the Anor Londo stairs have these two guys on them. They’re Silver Knights, enemies that look strikingly similar to the Black Knights you farm halberds off of in Dark Souls. In addition to the two on the stairs, there’s a third around the corner with red eyes, and I’ve seen people attack or not attack the third guy depending on their mood. Apparently you can fire an arrow at him to get him to run off a cliff, which is not really effective, just really funny. Anor Londo isn’t an XP farm but a farm for a specific item you need to advance a covenant — The Proof of Concord Kept. These drop at around a three to four percent drop rate. 

I have a real soft spot for this one because it’s a challenging farm that teaches you the specific momentum of their attacks and you can easily fuck it up after hours. Or you can use magic like Crystal Soul Spear to microwave these guys every time, which is also funny and much more efficient. It’s also one of the most gorgeous locations in the game, a majestic stairwell draped in moonlight at night. Classico. 

Anyway, this is still one of the funniest clips in From’s entire history:

#15 Dark Souls 3 - The Archdragon Peak endless guy farm/Ascended Winged Knights

Archdragon Peak is one of two endgame farms in Dark Souls 3, and what makes it tremendously useful is that one specific enemy keeps spawning over and over again because he’s being summoned by a wizard. This is the second “guy being summoned infinitely by magic only to die moments later” farm in this list, although I am sure I’m missing one. 

Start from the Dragon-kin Mausoleum Bonfire. You can just equip a big ass hammer, stand behind where he spawns, and hit that little freak whack-a-mole style in perpetuity. Archdragon Peak is kinda annoying to get to, but it’s worthwhile either way, and the convenience factor here really does set it apart.

It’s also worth mentioning the Ascended Winged Knights in the Grand Archives. They have the best overall yield, I don’t enjoy them conceptually as much as Archdragon Peak whack-a-mole. The Knights are a good farm but just not conceptually as funny as perpetually turning the same Knight into knight-flavored ground jelly without moving much.

#14 Armored Core 6 – Attacking the dam over and over and over again

To be honest I don’t spend a lot of time farming in Armored Core 6, which is a testament to the design of the game. FromSoftware did a lot of things to make the game less grindy and tedious than their other titles, and it’s one of the main reasons I think of it so fondly. There’s a lot of forward momentum and you can just get by with what you have. 

The possible exception here is early on, where extra COAM can help a lot. Doing Chapter 1, Mission 6, Attack The Dam Complex over and over again is a soothing and simple way to build your mech up. It takes two minutes overall, there’s really no trick to it, and it helps you through the one part of the game where you might need some creds. Just a nice little farm in one of From’s best and most interesting games.

#13 Armored Core 6 – Killing the Dafeng Student Pilot a bunch of times until you are sad

OK, there’s one possibly better farm, which is the one just before Attack the Dam Complex, called “Destroy The Tester AC” mission. It is a super tragic mission that involves murdering a Dafeng Student Pilot in cold blood. When you kill him he will say “I... just... I just wanted a callsign of my own."  Killing him also nets you 95,000 COAM each time for not a lot of work, and you can expedite the process by building your AC out for speed specifically to kill this kid. Doing it once makes you feel like a monster, but doing it five million times in a row to get infinite COAM feels like art, somehow. At one point he shouts, “I can’t die to a merc who only kills for credits!” Bad news friend, you can and you will.

#12 Bloodborne - Pig farming

The boars in Bloodborne are gross as hell and giant. They will stomp you to death easily. They appear in multiple locations but are easy to destabilize and yield a shitload of blood echoes. If you do manage to destabilize them they are easy to get a visceral attack on them and kill them. Because of how their model is arranged, however, the animation looks like you are killing them by shoving your fist in their ass. I can’t say that’s a good thing, but it’s definitely memorable in a game full of memorable events and creatures.

#11 Elden Ring – The big dumbass Elden Ring boulder(s)

There’s this one big boulder that spawns out of thin air in the northern end of Caelid and instantly tries to murder you. The big stone appears just west of Lenne’s Rise in Elden Ring. It’s noteworthy because it just a big fuck-off rock that appears like magic and then rolls away and nets you some Runes, so if you keep running back that way you can complete the process without having to actually engage in combat. The runs themselves are quick and easy, although you need to make sure you hug the cliff to get the runes. 

Most people only know the first boulder, but there’s actually a second boulder down the way so you can really juice your runs by going further out and warping back. It gets points because you don’t ever have to get your hands dirty and for being really funny. You can just book it here the second you get your mount, and it’s even faster if you warp to the Bestial Sanctum. You can do it constantly without getting off Torrent to fight. It’s a great way to just go from fairly low level to higher fast, but I find it kinda tedious and I prefer killing tiny freaks nearby that you can kill on horseback, so that one wins out. Shoutout to the big rock. Well, rocks.

#10 Elden Ring – Those vulgar freaks in northern Caelid

This list is full of nasty little freaks that you have to kill a whole bunch, and this farm is no exception. This farm is actually directly next to the north of the previous farm. The Vulgar Militia near the Bestial Sanctum are a relaxing and reliable farm once you kit up correctly. Starting at the Farum Greatbridge site of grace, you hop on Torrent with Carian Greatsword equipped and something you can cast it with. Carian Greatsword is a giant magic sword spell that you can swing around that has gargantuan range, and it also works while riding. Just go through and demolish these guys with your big magic sword and warp back to the site of grace when you are done. The Vulgar Militiamen are nasty little imps that will ruin you early on if you attempt to engage them directly. I despise these little knee-stabbing bastards with my life because they are tiny as hell and harder to see, and so harvesting them like elfin livestock is an emotionally rich experience. Be prepared to have five million evil little elf outfits in your inventory when you are done, although the helmet they drop is a great piece to style with because it’s just a big long cone-shaped helmet covered in rags.

You can attack them physically if you don’t invest in magic, or you could just play magical horse polo with their skulls. Like the tiny guy farm in Sekiro, the strength of its farm is its utility early even to mid game. You can combine this with killing Elder Dragon Greyoll, a dragon on death’s door that is easy to finish off and that nets you 50,000 runes. I don’t consider Greyoll a farm per se because you can only do it once, but it goes hand in hand with the two other farms in the area.

#9 Bloodborne - Central Yarnham blood vial farm

More than any other FromSoftware game, Bloodborne starts by running at you full force and kicking you in the crotch. There’s not a ton of places to go, it is brutal at the start for newbies, and you’re forced to just figure that shit out. The part that makes it rough is that blood vials are consumables that need to be farmed, and the economy is kinda tilted in a medium shitty way. Most new players are constantly getting turned inside out by the Cleric Beast and thus they need a solid way to farm blood echoes (Souls) and vials that is not far away. 

The easiest farm for here is just near the Central Yarnham Lantern. I have seen many variations on this farm, but you’re going to start by running down some stairs and killing the first guy you see. From here you usually go down and kill the big trolls under the bridge that want to bash your skull in with bricks. Brick Trolls is a great practice for learning parry timing in Bloodborne, which you will need to do because the parry window in the game is very tricky and slightly different from most other games. 

You can either choose to end there, or go into the building to the right and wipe out everyone in there including the weirdly elderly man in the wheel chair. Don’t feel bad about killing him because if you don’t he will shoot you in the head. The wheelchair guy is a useful farm for quicksilver bullets, which you will need because in Bloodborne you parry by shooting people with a gun. 

If you want to, you can also go up to the top of the building and kill the werewolves and Brick Troll at the top, but it really depends on what you’re trying to get out of this farm and how powerful you are at the time. While you won’t be using this farm after you take out the Cleric Beast and maybe Father Gascoigne, Yarnham is one of the coolest-looking locations FromSoftware has ever made, and it’s a fantastic place to learn the fundamentals of one of the greatest games of all time that also happens to have a super annoying approach to consumables.

#8 Sekiro – Interior Ministry Ninja in the narrow stone passage in Mibu Village

Once you hit Mibu Village in Sekiro you basically don’t need to worry about getting XP for a really long time because there’s this one random ninja that you can kill forever. The Interior Ministry Ninjas suck a whole lot to fight and are similar to the Lone Shadow Longswordsman mini-boss you fought earlier but turned into a regular guy. You start at the Mibu Village sculptor’s idol and go down and around to a narrow passage between the cliffs. You have to sneak up behind him and do a deathblow, but doing so requires that you hug the wall SUPER close. This can be easy to mess up, but once you get the timing right you net 784 xp and a decent chuck of change on your first run through. If you DO fuck it up it’s not worth fighting him because he’s moderately annoying to kill in a direct confrontation at this point and the idol to reset him is like right over there. 

This fight is an absolutely perfect mid-game farm: it’s super fast to repeat with a satisfying tempo, it’s mega lucrative, it helps you nail backstab timing, and I hate these guys so much. Getting to perpetually shove a katana into this dude’s back is super satisfying. 

#7 Sekiro — Anything involving Senpou Temple

Senpou Temple is a sick Shaolin style monastery in Sekiro where all the Buddhist priests are infested by disgusting centipedes that make them immortal. There’s three distinct ways I’ve seen people farm this section. You can farm the bottom by running around pissing off as many monks as you can and then climbing up a tree branch. Once enough monks are sufficiently pissed off at you, you activate the Golden Vortex, which is a golden fan tool that robs basically every enemy it hits. For lore reasons the fan causes monks specifically to be spirited away to the Hall of Illusions, so functionally they are killed although I like to think that they are simply hanging out with apsaras next to a placid lake and achieving enlightenment. You gather up these dudes, make them all vanish, and they leave their possessions, which makes sense given they are Buddhists. 

This is a pricy farm unless you cut yourself with the ceremonial tanto, a specific knife that gives you spirit emblems in exchange for health. It does have the added benefit of being the best place to farm Ako’s Sugar, a vital item that increases health and posture damage significantly for 30 seconds. If you make a specific choice in a quest in the game, you may miss the chance to purchase those later from a vendor, so this is unfortunately a useful farm to a lot of players in the endgame.  I love the Senpou temple farm a lot because the concept of grinding for materials while also sending a bunch of weird monks to the FromSoft equivalent of the Pure Land makes it an all timer, despite not being the most efficient farm.

The second farming method is to just start up at the top at the Main Hall Idol and then make your way down backstabbing a bunch of monks, wolves, lizards and weird spider guys. That’s a real meat and potatoes farm and doesn’t cost any emblems. 

The third method starts from the same location but you run outside of the Main Hall, use the Golden Vortex on the two spear adepts in the straw hats to rob them and then run back inside because you really don’t wanna fight those guys directly. This is useful if you are attempting to seriously farm for materials to upgrade your prosthetic arm mid to late game, and if you use the Tanto you can make a shitload of money in the process.

Senpou Temple also contains the Demon Bell, which is a bell that makes all the enemies in the game harder but also makes them drop way better loot until you dispel the curse. You will almost certainly warp back here every time you seriously want to farm items in the game for any extended period of time. This alone makes Senpou Temple indispensable. 

#6 Sekiro  – The blue-robed Fencer in Ashina Castle for Divine Confetti, a humble farm that transforms into the best XP farming spot in the entire game.

An annoying element of Sekiro is that there are several bosses that functionally require a specific item to beat: Divine Confetti. Divine Confetti covers your sword in an ethereal purple flame. It technically increases damage to all enemies, but it mainly makes it easier to kill various ghosts and ghouls that you might encounter. With some of these haunted bosses like the Shichimen Warrior, this helps immensely to have but is not strictly needed. With others, like that freak Headless, it’s basically required. 

Headless is one of the worst mini-bosses that FromSoftware has ever designed. He’s an optional mini-boss who has a slowing aura. If you don’t take contact medicine or use the purple gourd he inflicts a terror status that kills you. Even if you use tools and proper items to defeat him, the timing on his attacks has an inhuman cadence to it, the slow effect makes it feels like you are fighting in mud, his teleporting grab attack is disgusting, and he appears five times including twice underwater. Even speedrunners hate this guy. Sekiro is one of my favorite games of all time, but seriously fuck these guys.

With that said, there’s a few places you can farm Divine Confetti early on, but the most noteworthy one is in Ashina Castle in the Upper Tower - Antechamber Idol. Up the stairs there’s a blue samurai just hanging out waiting to be stabbed in the back. You can also sneak into the room just behind him and stealthily kill two more fencers, and an old woman screams if she sees you. Doing this will net you a lot of Confetti as well as a respectable amount of XP. 

The really nice part about the Ashina Castle farm is that it improves as the plot moves forward. Eventually the hallway samurai gets replaced by an Interior Ministry Ninja which nets you way more Sen and XP. By the time you can buy Divine Confetti from a vendor in the endgame, it will transform into the best XP farming spot in the game as plot events replace the Fencer with another Interior Ministry Ninja.

The farm is simple. You run in, kill the Ninja, then run into the next room on to the bridge, and use a whistle while looking down. Due to recent plot events, a second Chained Ogre should have appeared along with a few Red Guards. Using the whistle while looking down will cause the chained ogre to break free, killing the two Red Guards. Due to how Sekiro is optimized as a game, you may have to look down to see him kill the guys as well. I did the math last weekend and if you optimize the whistle route it nets you about 9337 XP/min. Not only is that the best rate I’ve found in terms of pure XP, the idea of a farm that evolves over time is simply delightful to me.

Chris Person (@papapishu.bsky.social)

If you get the whistle timing down correctly it looks like this and nets about 3776 xp/21.5 seconds or 9337 xp/min vs. the stairs which is 3972 xp/35 seconds or 6809xp/min on the first play. It looks like this. Anyway that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Bluesky SocialChris Person

#5 Dark Souls 2 — Giant Lord Memory farm

In Dark Souls 2 if you go into The Place Unbeknownst bonfire you can enter into a Giant’s memory called the Memory of Jeigh. It’s directly outside the bonfire and involves touching a giant that also is shaped like a dead tree. The memory is a scene where there’s a big rampart under siege with several giants. It’s a very short run and at the end there is a boss called the Giant Lord. His movements are short and predictable and mostly amount to him stomping and flailing. Stab him in the ankles and you will net 75,000 souls as well as a Giant Lord’s Soul for an additional 25,000. 

What really elevates this boss is that he’s repeatable and easy. Like The Rotten, he can be respawned by using a Bonfire Aesthetic, and conveniently one of those spawns in every memory on the ramparts to the left. Each new level increases the amount of souls. Repeatedly farming this guy will net you more souls than you know what to do with and is tremendously quick and repeatable for most people. Conceptually, the idea of repeatedly killing a giant in a memory of another giant that looks like a tree to gain strength sounds like either magical realism or Hungarian folklore to me.

#4 Bloodborne – Lecture Hall (and by extension Sekiro – Palace Nobles) 

If you have ever had a rough time in academia, this is for you. The Lecture Hall in Bloodborne is full of Slime Scholars all attending a lecture, so you can roll up and just dump their books. It’s a pretty lucrative XP farm but it’s more enjoyable because you get to go to town on them. It kinda reminds me of this one post from this guy Dan I know about his friend going into a classroom and kicking his brother’s ass.

Because I don’t want to write two entries, I'm also including the Palace Nobles from Sekiro in here. They’re kinda similar to the Slime Scholars in the sense that they are weak, low to the ground, and wear robes, although instead of being academics they are Nara Period nobles playing flutes and instead of being slime based they are fish-based. Unlike the Slime Nobles they are actively more dangerous because they often have escorts and they play a flute can makes you elderly, but if you plan your attack you can make bank, because they drop an assload of Sen, in a way that’s debatably more consistent than even the monks in Senpou Temple. I will always approve of any farm that involves destroying a disgusting, slimy, and non-human academic.

#3 Elden Ring – Mohgwyn Palace Albinauric massacre (and also the dumbass bird)

Everyone who has done endgame farming in Elden Ring knows this one. It’s a cliff in Mohgwyn’s Palace where there’s a bunch of nicely lined-up Albinauric. Mogh is the lord of blood and his palace looks like if the Parthenon was on asteroids in space and gushed lakes of blood. It’s the coolest location in the game by any objective measure. Albinauric are a race of artificial people. The young ones are little bald guys that look like you put a gray alien in a wine press. Some of the ones in Mohgwyn Palace are called Sanguine Young Albinaurics and they’re red, probably on account of all the lakes of blood.

There’s a bunch of ways to murder these freaks, but the best is actually after you’ve beaten the game already and can use the Sacred Relic Sword to do a tidal wave attack that generally kills all of them. There’s also a related farm at the exact same location (Palace Approach Ledge-Road) where you walk two feet from the site of grace, shoot a single arrow at a giant evil Blistered Crow and it responds by jumping off a cliff and dying. The bird arrow farm is useful far earlier, but both methods are valid and hilarious.

This Albinauric farm is probably the one everyone subconsciously expects to get on the top of this kind of list and for good reason. It’s the most visually absurd looking one, it is in Elden Ring, and when you get it going it looks like you’re murdering a small village with a tidal wave. Where it loses points, however, is the fact that it's gotten way too late in the game (and often in the postgame due to the Relic Sword) to be useful for too long and only has conditional use in the DLC. It rips though; I’ve spent hours killing those little cartwheeling freaks. 

#2 Dark Souls – The one where you make those guys jump off a cliff in Darkroot Garden

I am being completely serious when I say this was a really tough call that I internally debated for a week, but I had to concede that my favorite was bested. In my heart, however, this one is the GOAT, the original, the farming route that has a little bit of everything: The Darkroot Garden farm when you make three guys jump off a cliff.

The farm requires accessing a bonfire hidden behind a breakable wall and buying the Crest Of Artorias. The Crest costs a lot of souls upfront but you get that investment back very rapidly. Here’s how it works: You start off by spawning in, running around, and pissing off the three enemies that are there, including one ghost. You then run back to the entrance and stand in the small space between the stairway and the cliff. Due to how the game paths enemies, they will attempt to jump down towards you but instead fall into a bottomless void. Occasionally they will stomp on your head like Mario briefly before falling to their death. This will net you 7,000 souls a run (more if you equip a ring) and takes about a minute.

This is my personal favorite farm of all time and a load bearing farming route when playing Dark Souls. It nets you a shitload of souls at a crucial point earlyish on and carries you through the game. It requires no combat, and you accomplish it by running around like a dickhead and causing enemies to do Looney Tunes shit. It is clever, immensely useful, and will never stop being funny to me. I know those woods better than some childhood schools I went to, and will remember them in my quiet, final dying hours. But unfortunately, there’s a better farm.

#1 Bloodborne – “Cummmfpk” Chalice AKA the Cum Dungeon

There’s an obtuse mechanic in Bloodborne called Chalices – optional dungeons in the game that are accessible from the Hunter’s Dream and spawned from cups. Though the dungeons themselves are different, they follow fixed patterns. Any Chalice Dungeon with the word “Root” appears, at least to the player, to be randomized and procedurally generated. These Root Chalice Dungeons can then be shared and accessed by other players by using a randomized code. In 2017, YouTuber Zulie The Witch discovered that these dungeons are not in fact randomly generated each time but fixed, though it is possible that they were randomly generated prior to the game’s release. Each Root Chalice has either 100 or 200 possible dungeons, yielding 2300 possible Root Dungeons each with a fixed loot and enemies. This led to the formation of a community known as the Tomb Prospectors, with the goal of documenting each of the 2300 Root Chalice Dungeons, which they have since done.

There is a specific dungeon that you can only get if you are on PSN+ (even if you only use a trial). You first must defeat the Blood-Starved Beast boss to unlock the chalice mechanic. You then type “cummmfpk” in the glyph search. You know you’ve done something correct if you see “?Place Name?” at the top of your screen. The resulting dungeon is constructed in such a way where the dungeon automatically gives you 86k blood echoes simply by walking a few steps because something dies instantly whenever you enter. Leave and repeat. This has led people to refer to this dungeon as the “Cum Dungeon” or the “Cum Chalice”, due in part to both its name and all of us being mentally 12 years old. 

Eventually Zullie the Witch also figured out exactly how and why the Cummmpft Dungeon yields its souls. Using a debug mode in the game, they discovered exactly what specifically was getting killed, namely a hunter with the same ID as Tomb Prospector Olek. The enemy spawns directly in the path of a swinging blade, which would normally knock him off a bridge before killing him. But because of how Bloodborne specifically is optimized and loads different enemies in, the hitboxes and harmboxes for both Olek and the blades respectively are both loaded into the game without the models, meaning he cannot trigger the animation that staggers and knocks him off the bridge. This means that his essence is functionally trapped in front of the concept of a swinging blade, giving him no choice but to die every single time. His body cannot move because his body isn’t being rendered. This means that the Cum Chalice recreates an ethereal version of the plot of Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” from first principles every single time that it loads.

The Cum Dungeon was originally discovered by user XTrinX. By Trin’s own telling, it is by no means unique. “The Cum Dungeon map itself is something anyone can generate, it's simply a Sinister Ihyll Root map with a convenient NPC placement,” XTrinX posted on the r/bloodborne subreddit earlier this month. It is also not the only dungeon where an NPC Hunter dies this way or even spawns outside of the map, simply the most convenient. “One day I wanted to run a random dungeon with a friend and while waiting for them I noticed I suddenly received quite a large sum of echoes. I knew it had to be an enemy dying somewhere and there's a high chance it's replicable,” XTrinX continued. The resulting dungeon was save-edited to make it accessible to other players as well as increase the amount of echoes received. The depth was also altered to maximize the speed that the blade kills Olek at, as trap damage increases with chalice depth. The rude name itself was a simple coincidence.

Despite my love of Darkroot Garden, cummmfpk is not simply a farming route but something far more complex and important. It is the pairing of random chance coupled with a fan community painstakingly taking the time to reverse engineer one of FromSoftware’s most convoluted mechanics in debatably its best game. The Cum Chalice is the child of a community, the baby of the Tomb Prospectors. The sheer precarious nature of the space, its status as a semi-living and semi-premade place, and the complexity of both its discovery and its mechanics make it without question the greatest farm of all time in any FromSoftware game. All hail cummmfpk.