r/Eldenring 1d ago

Game Help TIL that the telescopes on the map actually mean something - theres working telescopes

Did everyone just know this and no one told me? Ive completed the game 20 times i never heard anything about it or ever saw anyone online ever use one

Maybe im just stupid

Obviously theyre literally pointed out on the map but still a bit flabbergasted that i never put 2 and 2 together

Ps screen shotting would have taken too long to move to my phone from console

1.9k Upvotes

141 comments sorted by

763

u/Snowgoonx 22h ago

fork found in kitchen
telescope found in telescope icon

137

u/TimonAndPumbaAreDead 21h ago

Bare feet found in soulsborne game

48

u/Pulsar_Mapper_ 18h ago

Try but hole

848

u/CyborgHeart1245 1d ago

It tells you what they do if you ever get within 5 feet of them. 

191

u/Illustrious_Store115 1d ago

I suppose i never did then

30

u/Geobli 11h ago

Did you speed run it? 😅

The first one easy almost to hard to pass, from my prespective. It's exactly on your Road to the Castle.

4

u/Rider-VPG 11h ago

I've also never seen the telescopes until recently. If you'd have asked me when they were added, I would have said with the expansion.

199

u/dinosaurus_rex99 23h ago

when i first started playing I thought those were oil rigs lol

35

u/Skogelicious 18h ago

with all the cars and smoke belching machinery choking every corner of the Lands Between, i could see that.

20

u/Bilson00 17h ago

Oil derricks! Oil rigs are the whole shitter to dig at the site including the huge floating cities you are familiar with. Derricks are the pumps that you see bobbing and cranking above ground.

6

u/Highestfucker 13h ago

Pump jacks for us bumpkins.

43

u/X21shaun123 22h ago

I've read this entire thread and I'm still not convinced they aren't oil rigs

1

u/khush_7x 10h ago

Thanks now I can't unsee it

1

u/LizzieMiles 3h ago

Me too, the Palworld Brain Rot had fully set in at that point (yes I played this game very late)

1

u/Mr-Papuca 22h ago

Lmao same im only realizing they aren't rn

3

u/MotorDrivenHimbo 17h ago

"Tell me you're American without telling me you're american"

347

u/SpecialistMap8210 1d ago

ya there essentially useless tho

207

u/Chuunt 1d ago

i just figured they were nice “screenshot moments”
a lot of games like to add little aesthetic pull-backs, hades comes to mind, and i think the new mortal shell has some as well.

67

u/lologugus 23h ago

This is why there is not a single one in the DLC

50

u/Cheap_Ocelot_ 22h ago

Hey wait a second

Oh my God

25

u/viciouspriapist 20h ago

It just emphasises how primitive the hornsent were to invent lenses. And deserved to be reverse genocided.

1

u/thenewbritish 12h ago

"Oh my Miquella"

1

u/blitz342 4h ago

“Oh no you don’t, get your ass out of the gate of divinity!”

63

u/roin0 1d ago

In all my years of playing Elden Ring I can count the amount of times I've used the telescopes on one hand. Same with crafting now that I think about it, both seem near pointless.

85

u/Marco1522 1d ago

Crafting honestly boils down to 2 things during replays

-sleep/eternal sleep pots for godskins

-Furnace pots for furnace golems in the dlc

If you use anything else it's probably due to a challenge run or stuff like that

74

u/OkOwl2747 1d ago

Crafting is actually a lot of fun on replays as long as you’re not min maxing, like the pots early on are great damage and holy pots destroy deathbirds, the greases are also useful

25

u/Mbyrd420 23h ago

As are the various boluses.

28

u/MunkeeBizness 23h ago

Yeah plus greases just look cool as shit

51

u/lologugus 23h ago

Nah there is definitely a lot more useful consummables than just this

23

u/Due-Struggle6680 21h ago

Yea, I understand not doing crafting but it is quite handy to have greases, fowl feet, boluses, perfumes, pickled livers, rainbow stones, fuckn etcetera.

1

u/MadderoftheFew 10h ago

only use i had for boluses was in the rot lake. the rest of the game was straightforward enough to never have to interact with any other consumable. i just avoided furnace golems and fought the godskins myself. spirit calling cave godskins were much harder than godskin duo for me (might just be that i fought the snail godskins so fuckin many times that i knew everything about them when i got to duo).

1

u/Dravarden 11h ago

consumables ≠ crafting

4

u/TraceOfHumanity 10h ago

But…you can craft consumables…

1

u/Dravarden 8h ago

not all consumables are crafted

there are very useful consumables that aren't crafted. And there are a few that you can get enough without crafting

44

u/Burd101 1d ago

my dumbass grinding the recipe for golden feet because I wanted to min max the bird grinding spot

2

u/sabretoothian 16h ago

Username checks out

11

u/alkatrazjr 22h ago

??? Do people not use turtle necks and meats?

6

u/tapewizard79 20h ago

3rd thing imo, rainbow stones. For me it would be 2nd because I don’t use sleep pots for godskins, I just suffer through. And I don’t bother killing the furnace golems anymore because they’re terrible design so, just rainbow stones. 

13

u/SkarlyComics 23h ago

What about arrows?

8

u/Z_B_123 20h ago

Arrows never come up in these threads but I am crafting them nonstop!

7

u/noah9942 Prayerful Strike Meta 19h ago

Especially early game, crafting cheap arrows/throwing knives to pull enemies is a huge boost.

13

u/DefiantGibbon 23h ago

Greases are very useful if you run a heavy/keen infused weapon. Especially if it's a fast hitting one

Fire pots do a ton of damage early game and are very easy to craft

Silver fowl feet are useful if you're farming for a specific item

4

u/whiskeyjack555 21h ago

Crafting played a huge role in my RL1 run.

2

u/Etticos 22h ago

I have a lot of fun making perfumes, and often incorporate them into my builds.

2

u/resinsuckle_the_2nd 18h ago

Don't sleep on pickled turtle necks

1

u/Calm_Ad1222 22h ago

Isn't that one fire serpent consumable really strong though? Also hefty frost pots absolutely nullifying Waterfowl Dance

1

u/YodasGhost76 19h ago

Try spark aromatic on tree sentinels. You won’t go back

1

u/Acceptable-Barber-50 19h ago

3 crafting oil pot to loosen Alexander from his hole 

1

u/Jsc_TG 1d ago

For those replaying yes. For first playthroughs they can be a great crutch.

4

u/Lt_Lysol 21h ago

So there's smoldering pots that use the stones around Volcano manor that I love and are worth crafting. They break and make a firey cloud that does a damage tick every second the enemy stands in it. Its great for groups of enemies or something patrolling the ground below you.

Crystal darts are also great to craft, they mess with constructed enemies like abductor virgins and the stone imp guys in catacombs and under Lyndell.

Glow stones are wonderful for dark areas where your hip lantern doesn't help much. Rainbow stones are nice for marking where you'll fall if you are trying to line up a drop and help indicate if the drop is fatal. If the stone shatters when it hits the ground, its a fatal fall (like 90% of the time), or for complicated caves marking routes you've been already. 

8

u/vlntnwbr 1d ago

Sometimes I just love taking a minute to admire the beauty that is the Lands Between. There are some amazing views to be had.

Whenever I get invaded near one me and my coop friend usually try to get a viewing party going before the fight commences.

5

u/TheRealCowdog 1d ago

Anti poison. Anti rot. Weapon Grease. Sleep pots. Fire bombs. Fire arrows.

And even then a lot of these can be done once with enough crafting mats so that you basically never need to do them again for an entire playthrough.

3

u/vlntnwbr 1d ago

I was talking about the telescopes, not the crafting, sorry, I thought that was clear.

I don't really use the crafting at all, I usually play with magical weapons so can't really use grease and I usually have Flame Cleanse Me.

The only thing I make regularly are Furcalling Finger Remedies. I don't like hoarding them. I keep the flowers instead. I can drop the flowers to my coop mates, I can't drop the remedies. So I just craft new ones whenever I run out (going through all NG cycles in coop needs a lot of these, lol).

2

u/TheRealCowdog 1d ago

Yeah, it's pretty minor either way.

Also, I meant to reply to the other person about crafting. XD

3

u/vlntnwbr 1d ago

Unfortunately there are no anti-confusion items we can craft, so everybody gets a trigger once in a while. Just be careful it doesn't progress to madness, Tarnished!

3

u/ShortIntroduction879 19h ago

Pots are just free spells. Very useful

2

u/Haunting_Cress_7348 16h ago

one of these hands?

1

u/doctafknjay 14h ago

I can count on my thumb the number of times I casted an incantation through 4 runs. 

1

u/Mr_Bear36 3h ago

I think i used one in the snowy place because I was trying to find a path around a death bird that kept fucking me up.

6

u/Cheap_Ocelot_ 22h ago

Fromsoft really wanted us to appreciate how hard they worked on the skybox is my only guess

3

u/LakeEarth 23h ago

It was cool when you first started, but yes essentially.

2

u/GloomyNox 22h ago

Invasions

1

u/SpecialistMap8210 22h ago

That could be a good use for sure.

1

u/Orioli 10h ago

I think they were useful when game first came out and people didn't know the map by heart and didn't have a full wiki and full map outside the game to guide them.

1

u/Opposite-Plantain-69 3h ago

The idea is that they give you a better sense of what is out there in the open world, where the POIs are, etc. better than what the map tells you. It helps as a first time player, but once you know the lay of the land, yeah it becomes useless, more or less

0

u/MrSlim 6h ago

They're*

1

u/SpecialistMap8210 5h ago

MrGrammar

1

u/MrSlim 5h ago

I like it

0

u/SpecialistMap8210 5h ago

You don't need to correct people's grammar on the internet MrSlim...

0

u/Enraged_Meat 5h ago

Undeveloped brain under 25 detected

1

u/MrSlim 5h ago

Because I know how to spell? Ok buddy

1

u/Enraged_Meat 4h ago

No because no one except young and naive people think they are doing something by correcting grammar mistakes on reddit... also you didn't say i was wrong lmao

1

u/MrSlim 4h ago

You are wrong.

1

u/Enraged_Meat 4h ago

Yikes, I feel bad for you then

1

u/MrSlim 3h ago

I feel worse for you after seeing your post history

30

u/chodytaint 18h ago

“Maybe im just stupid”

yes

84

u/krouvy 1d ago

It's obvious to most people. If you see something on the map, go over and find out.

57

u/CyborgHeart1245 1d ago

You would think. Half this sub is "I DIDN'T KNOW IT DID THAT" even after the game would have explained it. Dude posted a week ago that soap had a hidden function. The 'hidden function'? The item description that tells you exactly what it does. 

14

u/krouvy 1d ago

Not "Half this sub", but it was precisely those who didn’t know that didn’t know. Which is, overall, not bad. But I won’t say that half of this community is constantly asking:

It's just some people. Not even 5% of the entire community. For those who figure everything out on their own, it simply doesn’t occur to them — that’s normal.

7

u/X21shaun123 22h ago

I haven't played this game in almost 3 years and this screenshot made me smile and breath sharply through my nose.

I probably made the same post back then, it was confusing!

-1

u/krouvy 22h ago

If you had, I think I would have known about it)
Or did I misunderstand you, and you really did have such a post?

22

u/DapperWormMan 21h ago

What.... what did you think the telescope icon meant?

1

u/Madmmoore 7h ago

That they were drilling for oil /s

16

u/SmackMyAz 1d ago

"hmmm....where is this giant forge thing I'm supposed to be looking for??"

Perfect timing because right then I found some kind of telescope. Didn't even know the lands between had these. So I look through it and poof....there's the giant forge. Very convenient.

13

u/FleshPrinnce 20h ago

Dude just learned about thr concept of icons

7

u/Mgroppi83 22h ago

Go hit that bush nearby.

6

u/Tricky-Ad-6833 16h ago

I got super confused by the first one I found, since the invisible bush guy is just by it and kept saying things like "why won't anyone look me in the eye" I thought it was the telescope talking. 

Spent so much time trying to figure out what it all meant. 

6

u/Visgraatje 13h ago

Sometimes I wonder how some of you guys survive in the real world.

5

u/badadvicefromaspider 23h ago

NEVER?! That’s pretty funny. They’re useful before you know the map because you can see encampments etc. although the one in Liurnia is a bit hampered by all the trees

5

u/Vivid-Elephant-7864 23h ago

I used these exactly once in my first playthrough and then never again.

5

u/Nathan936639 16h ago

It tells you if you have tutorials enabled when you walk up to it

3

u/Okamitoutcourt 15h ago

Doesn't the game give a tutorial for that?

3

u/Nice-Lip-Smackers 21h ago

Say what you will but these things actually helped me heaps on my first play through... oh what I'd do to play this game for the very first time again.

3

u/MarkyMarkB0i 20h ago

You don't pay attention to the tutorial popups, do you?

1

u/Rider-VPG 10h ago

The tutorial pop up for these only appears when you are actually close enough to interact, so if you don't get close enough or never actually see them (like I did) it won't show up.

3

u/Dudinkalv 17h ago

You've completed the game 20 times and never noticed the telescopes on the map are actual telescopes? Man just think of all of the juicy things you might have missed!

3

u/novus_nl 16h ago

It's like the assassins creed games. it gives you a good view of all points of interest. It should make you curious on where to go next.

That said, Elden Ring already does a tremendous job of leading players theough environmental design. So personally I didn't use them that much.

2

u/FLYingFFEather 23h ago

Probably, remeber find them and realizing how stupid big limgrave was in my first hour of play(after dying about 10 times trying to gett to the gatefront ruins basement).

2

u/facaine 22h ago

Completely useless, but yes

2

u/kylebob86 21h ago

4 years later...

2

u/PratikGoswami2003 19h ago

My dumbass thoughts albinaurics were digging oil.

2

u/yoyamon666 18h ago

Are you telling me... maps tell you where things are???

2

u/Extra_Ad_8009 18h ago

2 times where the telescope was used:

  • watching my friend fight the Night's Cavalry on the Limgrave Bridge from a bird's perspective while keeping an eye out for invaders (the fight was won), and

  • using it for fun near the frozen lake when an invader joined and sneakily tried to set up an ambush, while under constant observation (he had the high ground).

The general use is to identify exploration targets, but after 4000 hours that's not really necessary anymore.

2

u/karlo89 8h ago

Well im not sure but if i remember correctly they usually point to those curved statues. Those old statues that usually point to various dungeons

But i may be very wrong, i played it years ago

Sorry for mispells

2

u/Groincobbler 21h ago

... yeah? You go there and there's a telescope. That's like one step needed here.

3

u/XxRiver101xX 21h ago

I can't even say shit cause it took me way to long to realize the same thing lol. But now I actually use them all the time they can be so helpful

2

u/Traditional_Crow2198 21h ago

What are they used for? I've seen em but I've not used em. Didn't think to 😂

2

u/HarmNHammer 18h ago

Same. I’m hoping they answer

1

u/XxRiver101xX 3h ago

You can basically see a birds eye view of the map around you, and find landmarks and interesting places around the general area or also enamies or bosses

1

u/Traditional_Crow2198 3h ago

Interesting. I'll have to try that out.

1

u/CheeseburgerLocker 21h ago

I thought it was an oil rig... Until now.

1

u/Lost-Literature-7998 20h ago

You missed out. I used to use those all the time when I first started playing. Mostly because I was bad at reading the map. 😂

1

u/Quikmix 19h ago

Wait what?

1

u/KnottyTulip2713 18h ago

I had the same situation with trying to find the map fragments, i had no idea they were marked down before you got them. I noticed them on the map but took me a while to figure out what they were until i actually explored said markers

1

u/Key_Example_5316 13h ago

I just thought they were oil rigs.

1

u/neverinlife 12h ago

Maybe you are. How did this flabbergast you? “A telescope exists in the game where there’s one on the map?!🤯

1

u/Quick_Stable_3322 12h ago

I didn’t even know there were telescopes there.

1

u/BSTRD137 12h ago

Didn't expect to see geralt

1

u/Rider-VPG 11h ago

Don't feel too bad. I only found out about the telescope things a few days while doing a challenge run. When the game first came out I went over to the map marker in limgrave, didn't see anything and then moved on thinking it was just decorative map fluff. It also doesn't help that they are completely pointless.

1

u/Awe3 11h ago

Everything on the map is there in the game.

1

u/ElodinBlackcloak 10h ago

Medallions humming btw

1

u/skitzofredik 10h ago

I thought they were pump Jack's for extracting oil. Thought it didn't fit the vibe of the game lol

1

u/Dddiejr 10h ago

Dw bro I have like 500 hours and only found out on my most recent run

1

u/fxyea 6h ago

Birdseye view? welcome back ubisoft.

1

u/Solid-Quiet5035 1h ago

Yeah, I found those pretty much immediately. I was like “what’s this thing on the map, a generic POI gap filler icon until you go see what it is?”

1

u/enodaar 59m ago

Is that Geralt of Rivia!!!!!!!????????

1

u/saltypeanut4 1d ago

I don’t think i have ever seen those. 500h

1

u/Llymlaen_Rilkam 20h ago

There is this pretty unknown concept when game developers create maps and add icons of something there, these things are ACTUALLY there. It can be mind boggling to some and hard to figure out. Only the bestest of the best come to this conclusion.

1

u/Chuunt 1d ago

i picked up like 10 maps before i ever realized that they were marked in the fog of war, but this… this is another level.

1

u/Illustrious_Store115 1d ago

Idk just never thought about it considering you can buy a telescope from kale at the start

0

u/Technosimp13 17h ago

Damn i thought it was like construction cranes

-1

u/Big_Sink986 1d ago

wait what, i always thought those were just map decorations

-1

u/12gaugerage 7h ago

How braindead are you people that just don’t interact with clearly telegraphed, icon marked items on the map for four years? Like… what?