How to Summon a Specific Player in Dark Souls
Console
The best method to connect with your friend on console is to lay down a summon sign and be patient. Once you have connected with your friend, you will be able to recreate that connection until you close the game. Place your sign in a uncommon place to avoid being summoned by the wrong person and do not lay it down more than once.
Others have reported success in spamming the summon sign, but that is contradictionary to the knowledge we currently believe to have of the dark souls connection mechanics.
Steam
On PC we have various tools to achieve our goal with more reliability.
Now follows a short guide about how to reliably connect with your friends in Dark Souls on Steam. The instructions are quite easy.
If you are interested in the mechanics behind Dark Souls Multiplayer, I suggest you check out this steam forum post. It is not 100% correct, but it explains the basic idea very well.
1. First of all
Make sure to opt out of beta in steam by:
- Rightclick Dark Souls in steam library
- Properties
- Betas
- Select beta you would like to opt into dropdown men
- Select: NONE - Opt out of all beta programs
Eventhough regionlock is not a thing anymore, setting the same download region might help
- Steam (top left corner)
- Settings
- Downloads
- Download Region
2. Mods are love. Mods are life
Look in the "ReadMe.txt" files for installation instructions.
DarkSoulsConnectivityMod (Required)
This will be our main tool.
Newest addition to our favourite mods, will make our multiplayer lifes a lot easier.
DSCM download
DarkSoulsFix (Optional)
This mod is not necessary for our purpose
Is highly recommended for everyone that plays on PC
DSFix 2.4 download
PvPWatchdog (Optional)
This mod is not necessary for our purpose.
Is highly recommended for anyone that is interested in PVP. It allows you to identify and disconnect (obvious) hackers.
DSPW download
3. Open up the game and DSCM
Option 1:
You want to mostly just play with your friends and do not care about connecting with other players.
In this case you and your friends switch from the default channel into another. This should enable a fast connection build up between you.
The host can now switch back to the default channel and connect with random players once his game has loaded enough IPs.
Switching the multiplayer channel empties your IP pool.
This means once you disconnect from your friends you will need to repeat the entire process and build up the IP pool again if you wish to play with randoms.
Building up an IP pool can take up to 20 minutes and you would have to redo it everytime you need to resummon your friends.
Option 2:
You want to play with your friends, but still be able to regularly connect with random people.
This case has it's benefits, but is more complicated, takes longer and is harder to reliably to pull off, because sometimes the game decides to not search for IPs.
- Enable the "Draw Nodes" checkbox in DSCM - stay in the default channel.
- Wait until you get at least one node (use either DSCM or DSPW to monitor your amount of nodes). If it takes longer than 10 minutes, restart the game
- You and your friends open up the friendslist in Steam and use the "Join game" option (summons on the host and the host on everyone). Feel free to spam it a bit, just to be sure.
- Engage in multiplayer
- It may take a few minutes - be patient, but if it takes longer than 5-10 minutes something went wrong.
- Under no circumstances use your multiplayer item more than once. (unless it runs out obviously)
The benefit of this method is that you only have to build up an IP pool once.
You are permanently connected now. If you die - no problem, the IPs are still in the pools.
You can quit out to your title screen and switch characters.
If you close the game, you will empty your IP pool and have to repeat the entire process.
Option 3:
The best of both.
You and your friends connect over a certain multiplayerchannel and once every one is in the host's world, summons and host switch back to the default channel.
Once everyone has started loading nodes while in the default channel, use the method in option 2 from now on. Do not switch multiplayerchannels anymore.
This is possibly the most practical solution, because it eliminates the IP pool buildup waiting time.
4. Troubleshooting...?
Any suggestions for this section are welcome.
Make sure you fullfill every matchmaking requirement
- Be in level range
- Host must be in human form
- Boss in the host's world must be alive
- Use dried finger after you died by the hands of an invader
- Make sure to not be currently invaded or are about to be invaded (check for multiplayer foggates) when you are trying to get summoned. Summons might want to be in hollow form for this.
In some areas you can't multiplayer until certain events in the host's world have occured
- New Londo: water must be lowered
- Tomb of the Gians / Demon Ruins: Lordvessel must be placed
- Dukes Archives: You must have died to Seaths first encounter
- Darkmoon Tomb: Gwyndolin bossfight needs to be activated
Do not spam your multiplayer item. The signal needs time to travel through the ip pools and spamming the signal only resets it's journey and will cause frustrating "signal echos" aka trying to activate a summon sign that no longer exists - result is "summoning failed" in most cases.
Verifying integrity of game cache is not recommended. This may corrupt your savefile.
Sources:
Reddit Post by /u/Symbicort_208
Informative Steam Forum Post
Reddit Post by /u/Ptidus
Reddit Post by /u/Wulf2k
I wanted to add something that worked for me last night. This was for the original game, not Remastered, but I tried the restarting method multiple times and it didn't work. Instead, I invited my friend to my game from the steam overlay. Of course that didn't add the person directly to my game like a summon, but I think it somehow synced us to the same IP pool. From them on I had no issues seeing his summon sign or him mine. When he has Remastered, granted, I'll have to try this method again, but if anyone wants they could try this themselves.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
hello,i have added DS as a non-steam game...and when I try to connect with someone it says that dark souls must be running firstbut its already running...any solution??
- Anonymous
Hello, I'm playing DS1 together with a friend on PS3, and, sometimes, when it's my turn to place the sign and get summoned, it happens that my friend can actually see the sign and tries to summon me, but I don't receive any message about being summoned in another world, and the summoning process fails. It seems to happen only in certain limited areas, but it's really annoying. Does anyone know a possible solution to this, that just isn't moving from the "affected" area? Thanks in anticipation.
- Anonymous
Hi, Me and my friend play Dark Souls 1 together on steam and we can summon each other when we are human but I can never find his sign when he is hollowed. Being summoned as a hollow is a way to get back humanity but his sign never appears
- Anonymous
Wait, so to have any phantoms enter a world, said world MUST have New Londo drained? this really sucks for co-op then
- Anonymous
Okay so I’ve put my summon sign down thirty different times and my friend always sees it and tries to summon me but it waits a minute and then my screen says unable to connect with other console(s). But he lays his summon sign down and I can summon him right away...?? Any idea on why this might be??
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