After playing through Belurat Castle in Elden Ring, you will come to your first roadblock, a massive tower overgrown by knotted shadow branches and completely closed off from your curious explorations. If you want to get inside, you’ll need to take quite the journey. Needless to say, spoilers ahead.
How to enter the sealed tower obscured by shadow at Belurat
To enter the sealed tower obscured by shadow, you will need to burn away the branches using Messmer’s Kindling. After you deal with the Divine Beast Dancing Lion and climb the steps, this is essentially when the game gives you the main challenge of the story. You need to find out how to remove these shadows to be able to face the final boss.
Make your way to Castle Ensis and clear that out, and when you get out the far side, you can head to the Shadow Keep to face Messmer. Despite being a major player in the trailers, Messmer can actually be a pretty early boss in the DLC. Once he is dealt with and you have his kindling, you can’t just bring it back to where you were and use it. There is a very specific spot in the game that you need to get to, and it involves a couple more bosses and a lot of exploration. You’ll need to take out Romina in the Church of the Bud, and that will give you access to a tree you can burn, spreading the fire and clearing out the tower at Belurat. You can then enter the tower if you wish.
I would suggest a much longer journey, as if you clear the tower too early and go there to explore it, it is highly like you will miss a lot of content and just get your ass kicked. I have what I think is a solid boss order for the game, although I will be refining that after more runs.
- Divine Beast Dancing Lion (Belurat Tower)
- Rellana, Twin Moon Knight (Castle Ensis)
- Putrescent Knight (Stone Coffin Fissure)
- Golden Hippopotamus (Shadow Keep)
- Messmer the Impaler (Shadow Keep)
- Commander Gaius (Shadow Keep)
- Midra, Lord Of Frenzied Flame (Midra’s Manse in the Abyssal Woods)
- Metyr, Mother of Fingers (Fingers Ruins of Miyr)
- Romina, Saint of the Bud (Church of the Bud)
- Needle Knight Leda (Enir llim)
- Bayle the Dread (Jagged Peak)
- Scadutree Avatar (Scudatree Base)
- The Final Boss
The boss order above is my current route, and you can follow the linked guide to find out a little more about each guide. Now, the Putrescent Knight placement above will likely need to change depending on some NPC quests, but I am busy figuring all that out and will update as needed.
To make a long story short, to get into the tower, you just need to play through the DLC and progress the story however you see fit, but the important parts are the Messmer fight and the Church of the Bud. Make sure you pick up as many Scadutree Blessings as you can on your journey, as they will make your final fight easier.
