Quickstart Early Graces

This mod unlocks certain early game Sites of Grace as soon as you get your Crimson and Cerulean Flasks, significantly cutting down the travel time required when starting a new build.

This is balanced by only offering the SoGs at the very start of each early game area – they are:

• Castleward Tunnel (Stormveil Castle)
• Rotview Balcony (Caelid)
• Bridge of Sacrifice (Weeping Peninsula)
• Liurnia Lake Shore (Liurnia of the Lakes)
• Eastern Liurnia Lake Shore (Liurnia of the Lakes)
• Church of Elleh (Limgrave)
• Mistwood Outskirts (Limgrave)
• Gatefront (Limgrave)

A happy accident with this is that Melina will also immediately offer you Torrent when you first rest at a Limgrave grace and then offer to take you to the Roundtable Hold after you rest again because the game thinks you've already visited all of these Graces without her appearing!

~ LIMITATIONS AND KNOWN ISSUES ~

• For some reason the screen will be completely dark when Melina offers you Torrent at most of the QEG unlocked Graces – keep pressing Y and then press A when she asks if you will let her come with you to the Erdtree without touching the d-pad, after which the screen will fade back in.
• You do still need to at least reveal the parts of the map where the early unlock graces reside, but once they're visible on there you can instantly warp to them.

 ~ REQUIREMENTS ~

Latest DSMSPortable Version – https://github.com/mountlover/DSMSPortable
ModEngine 2 – https://github.com/soulsmods/ModEngine2/releases
(Optional) Auto Mod Merger – https://github.com/CornflakeWoof/DSMSPortable_AutoModMerger

~ INSTALLATION ~

QEG is provided as a DSMSPortable Massedit script that needs to be merged into a regulation.bin file using DSMSP in order to be used. We can either use the provided .bat file or my Auto Mod Merger utility alongside DSMSP to do this.

In this tutorial, we're going to assume we're starting from complete scratch, integrating QEG into our empty ModEngine 2 “mod” folder.

1) Download QEG, DSMSPortable and ModEngine 2 and extract them into individual folders.

2) Head to your ER game directory, copy the “regulation.bin” file, then paste that into the “mod” folder within your new ModEngine 2 directory.

–From here we can either use the included .bat file or use my Auto Mod Merger utility to merge the QEG Massedit file into this regulation.bin file.

~ Install_QuickstartEarlyGraces.bat Method:

3a) Run “Install_QuickstartEarlyGraces.bat”.

4a) When prompted for the DSMSPortable.exe path, go to the folder where we extracted DSMSPortable earlier, right click “DSMSPortable.exe”, click “Copy as Path” (Windows 11) and paste the results into the command window opened by Install_QuickstartEarlyGraces.bat.

5a) When prompted for the Regulation.bin path, go to the ModEngine 2 “mod” folder, right click “regulation.bin”, click “Copy as Path” (Windows 11) and paste the results into the command window opened by Install_QuickstartEarlyGraces.bat.

6a) When prompted for your Elden Ring directory, right click Elden Ring in your Steam Library, go to Manage, then Browse Local Files, right click the “Game” folder, click “Copy as Path” (Windows 11) and paste the results into the command window opened by Install_QuickstartEarlyGraces.bat.

7a) DSMSPortable should get to work merging QEG into your regulation.bin! If you see that “regulation.bin.prev” has appeared in our “mod” folder and our original regulation.bin has increased in size QEG should be installed!

8a) As we've placed everything in ME2's “mod” folder, which is loaded by default, run “launchmod_eldenring.bat” in your ME2 folder and play!

~ AMM Method

3b) Download AMM and extract it to a convenient folder.

4b) Open AMM and set up its paths – for the “Merged Mod Output” folder, select the ModEngine 2 “mod” folder (or the folder containing your existing mod if we're merging QEG into that instead), for your Elden Ring game path on the right select “[Your Steam Library Common Path Here]/ELDEN RING/Game” and for the DSMSPortable Path navigate to and select DSMSPortable.exe from the folder we extracted it to earlier.

5b) Click “Browse” beneath the “Mod Folder Entry” section, then navigate to and select the folder containing QEG's files.

6b) Click “Add To Load Order”. An entry should appear in our load order with the QEG folder's path in its text field.

7b) Now press “Generate Merge .bat File”, then once that's complete click “Open AMM Data Folder” and run DSMSMerge.bat.

8a) DSMSPortable should get to work merging QEG into your regulation.bin! If you see that “regulation.bin.prev” has appeared in our “mod” folder and our original regulation.bin has increased in size QEG should be installed!

9a) As we've placed everything in ME2's “mod” folder, which is loaded by default, run “launchmod_eldenring.bat” in your ME2 folder and play!

~ HOW WILL I KNOW IF IT'S WORKING? ~

If you get some (Somber) Smithing Stone [1]s, Neutralising Boluses, Golden Rune [1]s and a Stonesword Key along with your Crimson and Cerulean Tear Flasks the mod is active, and you should be able to instantly access the Church of Elleh and Castleward Tunnel on what's visible of the map at that point.

~ HOW DOES THIS WORK? ~

Elden Ring and the other Soulslike games keep track of which items have been picked up by setting a flag in your save file that indicates a particular item lot has been acquired.

All of Elden Ring's item flags come from the same pool as the flags for story events and – most importantly here – Sites of Grace being activated. 
By granting you a number of items, each of which has a Site of Grace's flag number as its item acquisition flag ID, we can unlock that Site of Grace early!

~ CREDITS ~

Thanks to Mountlover for creating DSMSPortable
Thanks to Katalash, Philiquaz and George for creating DSMapStudio