Elden Ring’s quick hotbar is a massive help that people are missing
If you find yourself playing ancient ring and not use the Quick Access Toolbar (also called pouch), you will be forgiven. The game briefly mentions this very early on, but even the tooltip about it is vague. It took me several times to scour the menu to figure out how to assign something to it.
What is the Elden Ring (aka quick bag) hotbar?
To be clear, these are not the four icons that live in the bottom left corner of the screen, showing your equipped items, spells, and equipment. This behind this. If you hold Triangle/Y during normal play, you will see these four icons change to four new icons. This is the quick access panel we are talking about. (It’s technically called a pouch in the game, but sorry if you don’t know that.)
By default, one of these icons is a basically useless item that teleports you back to the last place of grace, while removing any runes you are wearing. We can do much better than this. In particular, we are going to assign your two flasks, your medicine and your horse to the hot bar and make your life much, much better.
How to assign your items to the Elden Ring hotbar/quick pouch
Pause to open the main menu. On the left, you’ll see familiar menu items such as your inventory and gear. But if you click directly on the D-pad, you’ll be taken to a row of easy-to-miss boxes that represent your shortcut bar/quick bag. Here you can assign each of the D-pad directions to your potions and your horse. You can put other items there, but these seemed to me the most useful.
Here’s how I have it set up:
And poof, I just did ancient ring much easier for you.
