2026
Elden Ring Build Planner & Optimizer
A build planner and optimizer for Elden Ring: compare builds side by side, save them to your archive, and start from six curated loadouts. Built because the existing tools work, but none of them are pleasant to use.
Elden Ring build planning mostly happens in wikis, spreadsheets, and calculators that look like tax software. This is my answer: The Tarnished’s Archive, a planner and optimizer built with TanStack Start and deployed on Railway, designed with the same care I give client work. It will be in progress for a long time, and that is the plan.
Notes from the experiment
Why this exists
There are build tools for this game already, and most of them are genuinely useful. They are also a chore to use: dense tables, hostile forms, function with no feel. I have 120 hours in Elden Ring so far, and nearly every session surfaces something a better tool could solve. So I am building the one I want, where good UX and UI are the point, not an afterthought.
What it does
The core loop is planning and comparing character builds. You can put builds side by side to see the trade-offs, save anything you make to your archive to come back to later, and start from six curated builds I maintain myself, so the first screen is never empty.
What I am building now
The next feature is a progress tracker. Elden Ring makes it genuinely hard to know what you have found, from field bosses through the main storyline, so the tracker keeps a record of every boss you have felled and every site of grace you have touched, and shows you what you have not found yet. Alongside it, each boss gets a guide: which builds, armor, and weapons hit it hardest, and what its weaknesses actually are.
Where it stands
Live on Railway and growing. Every hour I play adds something to the roadmap, which is exactly what a FAFO file should do. Check out my latest thoughts on this project in the blog post.
