Smithing Stones [1] through [8] all have a Bell Bearing. Find the merchant’s bearing once, hand it to the Twin Maiden Husks, and every stone in that tier is yours forever for the right number of runes. The Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone does not work that way. There is no bearing for it, no shop slot, no farmable source — just 13 fixed pickups scattered across the back half of the game, and exactly one of them is spent every time you push a standard weapon from +24 to +25.
That single design difference is the whole reason this item causes so much second-guessing. You can farm your way to +24 on every weapon you own if you’re patient enough with runes. You cannot farm your way to +25 on more than 13 of them, ever, in one playthrough — and two early quest decisions can quietly shrink that number before you’ve even reached Liurnia. Verified against Patch 1.16.2 (May 28, 2026), which Screen Rant confirms was a stability-only update with no changes to items, smithing stones, or locations.
All 13 Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone Locations at a Glance
Here’s the full list, region by region, with the condition attached to each one. “Open pickup” means there’s no quest state to manage — just get there and grab it.
| Region | Location | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| Stormveil Castle | Nepheli Loux’s throne room | Quest reward for completing Nepheli’s questline |
| Stormveil Castle | Gatekeeper Gostoc, purchase | 20,000 runes — needs Gostoc alive AND Nepheli’s quest finished |
| Raya Lucaria area | Sorceress Sellen’s questline | Side with Witch-Hunter Jerren, not Sellen |
| Bestial Sanctum, Dragonbarrow | Gurranq, Beast Clergyman | Feed him 9 total Deathroot, or take it after his death — either path works |
| Mountaintops of the Giants | Inside a large skull SE of Church of Repose | Open pickup |
| Consecrated Snowfield | Dropped by the Night’s Cavalry pair guarding a caravan | Optional enemy pair, southwest of the map |
| Consecrated Snowfield | Inside Yelough Anix Tunnel | Past the Onyx Lord boss |
| Consecrated Snowfield | Corpse at a frozen waterfall above Great Wyrm Theodorix | Open pickup |
| Crumbling Farum Azula | Dropped by the swooping dragon near the entrance | Optional dragon fight |
| Crumbling Farum Azula | Floating platform north of Dragon Temple | Guarded by a Beastman; requires timing the moving platform |
| Crumbling Farum Azula | Dropped by the stationary dragon SE of Dragon Temple Rooftop | Optional dragon fight |
| Miquella’s Haligtree | Below the “hugging statue” | Guarded by a Lesser Leonine Misbegotten |
| Miquella’s Haligtree | Chest after defeating Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree | Reach the room via the roof route, not the elevator, per DualShockers’ navigation notes |
One scope note before you start collecting: this list is for the standard Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone, the one that upgrades ordinary weapons and shields — anything you’d buy from a blacksmith or find as a normal drop. Legendary weapons like the Moonveil, Rivers of Blood, or Sacred Relic Sword run on a completely different track. They upgrade with Somber Smithing Stones to +10 instead of +25, capped by the separate Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone, per the Elden Ring Wiki’s own breakdown of the two systems. If your main-hand is one of Elden Ring’s nine legendary armaments, none of the 13 locations below apply to it — that’s a different scarcity problem with its own location list.
Why There’s No Bell Bearing for This One
This isn’t a gap in the loot tables — it’s confirmed by three independent sources. The Elden Ring Wiki’s Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone page lists no bearing anywhere among its sources. Game8 states it outright: the item “cannot be farmed infinitely.” And the Bell Bearing item itself confirms the gap from the other direction — Smithing-Stone Miner’s Bell Bearing [1] through [4] only ever unlock Smithing Stones [1] through [8] for purchase from the Twin Maiden Husks. Nothing in the game sells the tier above that.
Compare that to what those numbered bearings actually let you do. The Elden Ring Wiki’s Smithing Stones page puts the full cost of buying every stone needed to take one weapon from +0 to +24 at 129,600 runes — a real number, but one that just means more boss runs or more time exploring. Runes are renewable. The Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone isn’t. Every other tier in the upgrade chain is a rune problem; this one is an inventory-of-decisions problem, and it’s the only tier in the game designed that way.
The Two Choices That Cost You a Stone Before You Realize It
Read the table above again and all 13 stones look obtainable in a single run — and they are, technically. But two of them sit behind decisions most first-time players make wrong without knowing it, because the “obvious” choice in the moment is the one that costs you the stone.
| Decision point | Common first-run mistake | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Gatekeeper Gostoc at Stormveil’s main gate | Killing him early — he attacks on sight and drops a usable Ash of War, so most first-timers finish him off | Permanently locks the 20,000-rune purchase option; you’ll only get Nepheli’s separate quest reward |
| Sorceress Sellen’s questline | Staying loyal to Sellen because betraying her feels like the “evil” choice | Locks the stone tied to siding with Witch-Hunter Jerren instead |
Get both of these right — keep Gostoc alive until Nepheli’s questline resolves, then side with Jerren over Sellen — and all 13 base-game stones are reachable in one playthrough. Get both wrong and you’re capped at 10. Tarnished Traveler’s guide confirms the total genuinely resets only in New Game Plus, so there’s no in-run fix once a choice is made — Gurranq’s stone is the one exception here, since you get it whether you feed him to completion or eventually kill him, so that branch never actually costs you anything.
Farum Azula and Haligtree: The Locations That Take the Longest to Reach
The five open-world and boss-drop stones outside the quest chains aren’t hard to find once you’re standing in the right region — they’re hard to reach because the regions themselves gate you behind major bosses. Crumbling Farum Azula requires beating Maliketh to access at all, and its three stones are spread across a dragon-infested ruin where two of them are optional dragon fights and the third sits on a floating platform that needs correct timing to reach. Consecrated Snowfield opens up after Commander Niall, and its Night’s Cavalry pair is a genuine two-on-one fight — you can’t rest at a Site of Grace mid-encounter to reset it, so go in with full flasks. Miquella’s Haligtree is the latest-game location on this list; both of its stones sit past Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree, one of the toughest optional bosses in the base game, which makes this the single hardest stone on the checklist to actually claim.
Practical order if you’re collecting deliberately rather than stumbling into these naturally: grab the Mountaintops skull pickup and the Snowfield trio first, since that region opens earlier and has the lowest boss-difficulty barrier, then treat Farum Azula and Haligtree as a late-game sweep once your build can handle their surrounding content.
Why +25 Actually Matters
It’s worth asking whether the last upgrade point is worth rationing this hard in the first place. Look at the Longsword, one of the most common early weapons in the game: Standard affinity sits at 110 physical Attack Rating at +0 and climbs to 269 at +25 — a 144% increase from base. The Zweihander, a slower Colossal Sword, shows the same pattern at a bigger scale: 141 at +0 to 345 at +25, a 204-point raw gain versus the Longsword’s 159. Same relative upgrade, nearly 30% more raw Attack Rating, because the weapon started with a higher base. Every point of that climb compounds with your stat investment, which is why a capped weapon on a build you’ve actually committed to feels categorically different from the same weapon at +18 or +20.
That gain is also why the choice of which weapon gets the Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone matters more than which weapon gets any single numbered Smithing Stone. You can always buy your way back to +24 on a different weapon later if runes aren’t a problem. You cannot buy your way to a second +25 on the same run without a stone you may not have.
Which Weapon Deserves Your First +25?
The scarce resource here isn’t the stone itself — it’s certainty about which weapon you’ll still be using in twenty hours. Spend one before your build settles and you’ve locked value into a weapon you might abandon at the next major area. Here’s the order we’d work through it:
1. Is this weapon your confirmed main-hand, not something you’re still testing? If you’re still swapping between two or three candidates, don’t spend yet — every numbered Smithing Stone up to +24 is farmable and reversible in the sense that you just buy more for whatever you switch to. The Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone isn’t, so it should be the last thing you commit, not the first.
2. Does it scale primarily off a stat you’ve already invested 40+ points into? A weapon fighting your build’s own stat allocation will never fully benefit from the scaling half of that AR jump, no matter how many upgrade points you throw at it.
3. Is it slow and high-base-damage, or fast and already competitive? Greatswords, Colossal Weapons, and Great Hammers post the largest raw Attack Rating gains from a single upgrade tier because their base damage is high to begin with — the same percentage jump the Longsword shows above translates into a bigger flat number on a weapon that starts higher. Katanas, curved swords, and other fast, high-motion-value weapons are often already “good enough” for most base-game content around +18 to +20, since their damage-per-second comes from attack speed and bleed procs rather than raw AR. If you have to choose, the slow weapon usually earns the first stone; the fast weapon can wait for a second one if you find it.
4. Is this a secondary or backup tool — a parry dagger, a ranged option, an off-hand? These go last. They see a fraction of the playtime your main-hand does, so the same investment returns less overall value.
Stone Priority by Player Type
| Player type | Advice |
|---|---|
| New player | Don’t spend anything until after Liurnia and Altus Plateau. You don’t know your build yet, and your starting-class weapon is rarely what you’ll finish the game with. Grab the open-world stones passively while exploring; don’t chase the missable questline ones on your first run. |
| Casual player | Spend your first stone the moment you find your “forever weapon,” whenever that happens. Realistically budget for 6-9 stones total if you’re not clearing Farum Azula or Haligtree solo — those are the two hardest entries on the list. |
| Hardcore / optimiser | Secure both exclusivity-locked stones deliberately (keep Gostoc alive, side with Jerren), farm the rest in the order above, and use the slow-weapon-first logic to decide which build gets the earliest cap. |
| Completionist | Track all 13 against the checklist table, take the Jerren and Gostoc-alive paths even if they’re off-build for a full first-run set, and plan a New Game Plus pass if you want the pool refreshed for a second weapon. |
Shadow of the Erdtree Changes the Math
If you own the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, the 13-stone limit above only covers the base game. The Elden Ring Wiki’s dedicated page confirms the DLC adds 8 more Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones in Gravesite Plain, Scadu Altus, Jagged Peak, and Rauh Base — a fully separate pool from the base-game 13, bringing the realistic maximum to 21 total for a character who owns both. That’s a deliberate second chance, not a retroactive fix: DLC content is endgame-targeted, built for characters who’ve likely already spent their base-game stones, so treat it as a fresh allocation round rather than a way to undo an earlier choice.
FAQ
Can I buy more Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones if I run out?
No, and that’s the point of the design. Every other Smithing Stone tier has a Bell Bearing specifically so you’re never permanently blocked from maxing a weapon — the game clearly wants that part to be a rune problem, not a choice problem. Removing the bearing for the very last tier is what turns “which weapon do I upgrade” into a real decision instead of a formality, and it’s consistent with how FromSoftware gates other late-game resources (Larval Tears, Great Runes) behind genuine scarcity rather than grind.
Should I save every stone for one weapon, or spread them across several?
Concentrate on one or two. With 13 stones (or fewer, depending on your quest choices) and typically two to three weapons that matter across a full playthrough — a main-hand, maybe a parry tool or ranged backup — spreading stones across five or six weapons leaves everything under-leveled at the exact moment late-game enemies need the extra Attack Rating most. A capped main-hand beats three half-upgraded options.
Does New Game Plus give me more stones?
Yes — the pool resets each NG cycle, per Tarnished Traveler’s guide above. That’s the actual safety valve for a bad first-run choice: if you’re planning to run NG+ anyway, don’t agonize over a single misallocated stone on your first character. If you’re a one-and-done player, though, the choices in the exclusivity table above are the only ones that matter.
I already killed Gatekeeper Gostoc — did I lose anything else?
Just the 20,000-rune purchase option. Nepheli’s own questline reward is a separate item tied to her personal storyline, not to Gostoc surviving, so you’re not as far behind as it feels — you’re still working with 12 of 13, not fewer.
No. They’re counted and awarded entirely separately, which is why a base-game-only character caps at 13 while a Shadow of the Erdtree owner can reach 21. Don’t count on DLC stones to cover a base-game weapon choice you’re unsure about — they’re intended for the build you’re running once you’re deep into the DLC’s own endgame, not a refund on earlier decisions.
Is there a weapon type that gains the least from +25?
Fast, low-motion-value weapons that lean on status buildup rather than raw Attack Rating — bleed-focused curved swords and katanas, poison/frost infusions, most daggers — see the smallest practical payoff from the last upgrade point, because their damage output is dominated by proc frequency and hits-per-second rather than the number on the weapon itself. That’s not a reason to skip upgrading them entirely; it’s a reason to send your first, scarcest Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone toward a slower weapon first, per the priority order above, and let a bleed weapon ride at +22 to +24 a little longer without much real loss.
Key Takeaways
Thirteen stones, five regions, and exactly one design quirk that makes all of it matter: nothing sells this item, so nothing recovers a wrong call except New Game Plus. Lock in Gostoc’s survival and Jerren’s path early if you want the full set, save your first stone for a weapon you’ve actually committed to rather than one you’re still testing, and lean toward your slowest, highest-base-damage weapon when two candidates are close — the raw Attack Rating gain rewards it more.
Once your build is capped and the Elden Beast is dead, the standalone spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign is worth a look if you haven’t already — our review breaks down whether solo or co-op is the better way in, and our Nightreign FAQ, answered with patch notes, clears up the mechanics most new players get wrong.
Sources
- Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
- Somber Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone Locations and Map — Game8
- Full Guide to Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones in Elden Ring — Tarnished Traveler
- Elden Ring: All Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone Locations — DualShockers
- Smithing Stones — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
- Smithing-Stone Miner’s Bell Bearing (1) — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
- Longsword — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
- Elden Ring May 2026 Official Update Announced — Screen Rant
- Zweihander — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
- Somber Smithing Stones — Elden Ring Wiki (Fextralife)
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.