Borderlands 3 How to Get Eridium

Eridium is a special currency in Borderlands 3. It’s mainly used to buy cosmectics from Crazy Earl but you can also trade in Eridium for Epic Gear at the Veteran Rewards Machine in Sanctuary. This guide explains how to get Eridium.

How to Get Eridium

Before you can start to farm Eridium you must loot the first vault, which is part of the main story mission “Beneath the Meridian”. This gives you the ability to break open purple Eridium Crystals found across planets, as well as destroying Anointed enemies later in the game that drop Eridium. Up until the first Vault you can only get some Eridium from quest rewards.

All ways to get Eridium:

• Purple Crystals (easiest method): Find purple crystals that are randomly placed across all planets, for example in Pandora “The Droughts” area you will frequently see them. Just drive around in a car and watch out for the purple crystals. Melee them to make Eridium drop out. This is the easiest way to farm Eridium but it still takes a while to accumulate large quantities.
  
• Anointed Enemies: These are special purple colored enemies that start to spawn later in the game from Eden-6 onward. After defeating them they turn into an Eridium Crystal which you can melee. However, they don’t drop that much more Eridium than the Crystals you find around Pandora and require much more work to kill them (they are pretty strong compared to normal enemies).
• Story & Side Mission Rewards: Some missions will also give you the occasional Eridium reward. While this isn’t repeatable, it does give you some Eridium passively without having to go out of your way.
• Circles of Slaughter: Beating Circles of Slaughter drops some Eridium.
• Crew Challenges: Crew Challenges often drop Eridium as a reward, especially Hammerlock’s Legendary Hunts (they are marked with green icons on the map when you’ve uncovered the entire map). In the map you can press L3 / Left Stick to see how many crew challenges there are per area.
• Eridian Slabs: They are a type of Crew Challenge that give 25 Eridium each. You unlock the ability to read Eridian Slabs near the end of the game from one of the vaults. When you uncover the whole map they get marked with a green icon. There are 30 Eridian Slabs total (=750 Eridium).

In Mayhem Mode (unlocked after the story) you earn more Eridium. Mayhem Level 3 yields the best rewards and greatly increases the chance for Eridium.

Where to Spend Eridium

• Crazy Earl: You find Crazy Earl in the Cargo Hold of Sanctuary (your space ship). You actually have to talk to him during the story, no way around it.
  
• Veteran Rewards Machine: The Eridium Rewards machine is found standing next to Crazy Earl, in the cargo hold of Sanctuary (your space ship).
• Slot Machines: Also found in Sanctuary, at Moxxxi’s bar you can find a purple colored slot machine that uses Eridium.
• Eridian Fabricator: At the end of the story, after looting the 4th vault, you get a special weapon called the Eridian Fabricator. It requires 10 Eridium to be used and makes 10 random weapons from that (1 weapon per Eridium).

Farming for it is not actually necessary though. To put it in perspective: After the story I had 700 Eridium without doing a lot of side missions and without ever farming for it. I only destroyed the purple crystals I ran into during the story and the rest was from quest rewards and Anointed enemies. Cosmetics cost between 50 – 300 Eridium per piece. If you know what you want you can get that easily at some point in the story without having to farm for it. Just destroy the crystals you run into. Using Eridium to buy weapons is not that useful either. It can give some purple gear but the legendaries (orange) still come from enemy drops. Especially in the endgame you will see purple and orange gear dropping everywhere, which is much faster than farming crystals for hours.

That’s all there is to know about Eridium in Borderlands 3 (BL3). For all other Collectibles check out our full Borderlands 3 Wiki & Strategy Guide.