How to get the Glintstone Key in Elden Ring

Getting into a school has never been this tough.

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If you’ve reached the second major area of Elden Ring, then you’re probably being stumped by a certain roadblock that makes getting into the Raya Lucaria Academy a bit of a pain in the butt. Before you can pass through the magical barrier into the school, you’re going to need to get your hands on a Glintstone Key. Even worse, if you want to complete a certain character’s questline then you’re going to need to find two of them. Luckily, we know exactly where they are and how you can go about finding them for yourself.

Getting the first Glintstone Key

Your first introduction to the concept of a Glintstone Key will probably happen when you get to Liurnia of the Lakes. At the Lake-Facing Cliffs point of grace, you can see a church, and inside is an NPC who is very interested in getting back into the Academy. Once you donate some money to him and then exhaust his dialogue, he’ll tell you about the need for a Glinstone Key and then ask that you give him one if you find a spare. Poor guy was locked out while he had just “popped out” for a bit.

At this point, you can continue exploring the region until you find yourself at the village near the academy. Fight your way through the hordes of enemies until you come to the gate with a big blue seal on the front. Activate the South Raya Lucaria Gate point of grace so you can get back here easily later, then go up to the door and pick up the note on the corpse near the seal. Reading the note gives you a clue to the location where you’ll find the key, but if you struggle to decipher it, it’s the little cluster of rocks closest to the academy on the west side.

Time to grab the key

Mark the point on the map you’re headed to, then you have two options. You can either warp back to the Acadamey Gate Town point of grace and head from there, or you can carefully jump down by going back into the Academy Town itself and then hopping down the rooftops. Either way, you’re going to want to head north and slightly west towards the blue column that you should have marked on your map.

As you approach, you’ll probably notice that there’s a sleeping dragon waiting to greet you. This is a field boss called Glintstone Dragon Smarag. This guy is a beast to deal with early on, especially if you’re a magic-based class due to his high resistance to magic damage. You can sneak behind him to get to the key, but he will wake up in the process. It doesn’t seem like he’ll aggro on you until you try to run away though. On the plus side, if you came straight here from the point of grace by the gate, then you’ll warp back there immediately when he sets you on fire.

The Second Glintstone key

Now that you have the first key, you can activate the seal, but make sure you stand a bit away from the door or it won’t work. Once inside, you need to work your way through the academy if you want to get a second key to give to the NPC back in the Church of Irith. Make your way through the Academy until you’ve beaten the Red Wolf of Radagon boss fight and have activated the point of grace.

With the boss taken care of, run out into the open courtyard area and sprint to the left and up the broken stairs. You’ll be attacked on your way up by magic, but you can just ignore those enemies if you’re good enough at rolling. Jump off the ledge at the back left of the area at the top of the stairs, and run right past the two enemies here as well. Grab the item if you want, then jump off the ledge onto the rooftop below.

Rooftop parkour

There are two marionette enemies here, and at the very least you should probably take out the one with multiple crossbows because they’ll make it tougher to climb up the ladder at the back. As soon as you can, climb up the ladder and sprint forwards. Ignore the enemies who fly down and dodge the magic attacks from the enemy ahead, heading around to the right of the tower. Jump down onto the roof that’s at the back-right of the tower.

From here, you need to keep jumping off the north side of the roofs until you get to the location in the picture above. Jump down onto the tower you see, instead of onto the other roof nearby. From here, run forward and jump onto the round building you see ahead. Go around the side and walk through the window onto the rafters. Grab the run if you want, then jump down onto the chandelier with a corpse on it to grab the second academy key.