Dark Souls III: How to Make 750,000 Souls per Hour with Low Risk

Maybe you want to gain a couple of levels before attempting to kill the next boss, maybe you're saving up to get the Fire Keeper to cure your Dark Sigil, or maybe you just want to be the most filthy-rich hollow in all the realm. Whatever your reasons for farming souls are, they're good enough for you and that's all that matters in your game ;-)

You could probably push harder and be more efficient than me and get close to a cool million souls per hour using this technique, but I wanted to keep it real and show you a reasonably relaxed soul farming method that anyone can do once they're at this point in the game. I'm playing on NG, so it's not a requirement to have completed the game once to get these gains.

The area we will be doing this in is called the Grand Archives. It is like a huge library with shelves, bookcases and books all over the place, and it has a maze-like feeling to it with multiple levels.

Before starting this farm for souls, make sure you have appropriate gear. The Covetous Silver Serpent Ring and the Shield of Want are mandatory for best results as they both increase the amount of souls gained from kills. You can also equip Mendicant's Staff if you don't lose too much damage output by doing so. I'm not using it because I like using my bow and twin blades.

Another obvious item to equip is the Symbol of Avarice, which will boost soul gains significantly, but comes with the huge drawback of you constantly losing a small amount of health, so it does increase the risk of dying somewhat, especially if you often get distracted and have to move away from the game for a couple of minutes. I am in fact not using the Symbol of Avarice because I do indeed often get distracted while I play and as the title says, I want to keep this low risk. If you can handle using it, you could easily go over 1 million souls per hour with this run.

When you first enter the Grand Archives, you will have to contend with a crystal sage mini boss, which is a weaker version of the crystal sage boss you encountered earlier in the game. It is still highly annoying, but fortunately it doesn't respawn once you have dispatched it.

When proceeding through the archives, be careful of those annoying thrall mobs you've also encountered before. You know, the little guys with big hats that look like Greirat and like to stunlock people with their axes. Yeah, those. They cling to bookcases up above you in many places, ready to drop down and ruin your day if you walk beneath them without noticing, so remember to look up frequently until you are familiar with the place. An arrow to the face works well to get them down in a controlled manner.

Other than the thralls, you are going to encounter wax priests. These are the scholars of this big library, and they don't seem to particularly enjoy being interrupted in their studies.

They all have their heads covered in wax, making them similar to walking candles, but only some of them have the candle on fire. The ones without fire are melee fighters and can be nasty with some quick dagger stabs if you don't dispatch them fast enough, but the ones with fire on their heads are casters and more dangerous at a distance. Fortunately, both varieties have fairly small health pools and are easy to kill.

The caster priests are the reason why this is an excellent place to farm souls, as they give almost as many souls as elite red-eyed knights, but can be easily killed in a couple of hits.

Other hazards to be aware of when going through the archives are some magical arms and hands that extend out from bookcases and sometimes also the piles of books on the floor when you get close to them. They can't be attacked, but while you are within their reach, they will stack a curse on you that will instantly kill you if it reaches full stack, so try to stay out of it.

Fortunately, on this run there are only a couple of places where you need to get close to these hands, so just roll through them and get out of the way before it becomes too much.

One way to make the cursed arms and hands less dangerous is to use the large tubs of wax you find in a few places in the library to dunk your own head and look like a wax priest. The priests will still attack you, but the cursed arms and hands will leave you alone.

This being a Souls game and all, I was certain that dunking my head in anything would instantly deep fry it and make me dump a pretty green stack of souls on the floor, so it took me quite a while to realize that this is really a buff.

I don't actually use the wax head buff because I did in fact pay the Fire Keeper a very large sum of souls to cure the Dark Sigil and remove the roasted kebab-look I had been sporting through most of the game since being tricked by that naughty mage and his so-called free levels, so now that I'm pretty again I want to look my best while slaughtering for profit ;-)

Also, I don't generally consider the cursed arms and hands a huge hazard, but if you get slowed by a frost spell from the priests while you're within their reach, they can and will kill you.

As the title says, this run is low risk, but it's not no risk. You can see at least once in the video that I have a close call with a couple of thralls because I mis-time my attack just a bit, so the second one gets several quick axe swings in before I can dispatch it. This was obviously a mistake on my part and not supposed to happen, but mistakes do happen and since this is a Souls game, they are not easily forgiven. Just remember that although most enemies on this run die very easily, so do you if you let your guard down.

The toughest enemy we're going to take on on this run is the red-eyed knight looking out at the view. You can skip him if you want, but I always find it a very satisfying change of pace to sneak up on him, backstab him and then push him over the ledge ;-)

When you get to the elevator near the end of the run, it's a good idea to walk over the floor button on your way off it to make it go up again while you proceed. That way, you won't have to pull the lever and wait for it to come up on the next run.

When the run is complete, you end up at the same bonfire as where you started, so just sit down to reset the area and then start over. I like that it's a round like this, so you don't have to backtrack, although to be fair, once you have the Coiled Sword Fragment, backtracking isn't much of an issue anymore.

As you can see, I made just over 63,000 souls on the run and it took just under five minutes. If I kept up this pace for an hour, that would net me just over 750,000 souls in total. And that's with a relaxed pace, relatively easy enemies and still wearing good gear.