STR build 101:

Find the heaviest weapon you can. Bonk.

Find the heaviest armor you can. Anti-bonk.

Ugga ugga big bonk is not something you build for.

You can, but such planning is clearly indicative of DEX thinking. All Bonk requires is the bravery to face your foes, and bonk them.

You simply start, grab the biggest, heaviest, most bonky bonk stick you are blessed with within 15 minutes of playing.

It will be there. The bonk is always there, waiting to be recognized.

You grab it and you pump your numbers into enough str to bonk really fucking hard with it.

You then go and bonk.

In the course of bonking, you learn you need to sustain a minimum amount of bonking yourself, in order to bonk the best you can bonk.

You then hold up three fingers, that is all you need. That is more syllables than 'bonk' has, so for every time you say bonk, you put a point in STR and another in VIT.

This continues until you feel you are no longer being bonked before your own bonking takes place.

Depending on how many syllables you think 'bonk' has as you were chanting it earlier, you will end up with roughly 1 VIT for every 3-4 STR.

That is all the thinking you need. Even other bonk sticks, while plentiful, are optional.

The two builds I played were an int caster and a str big bonk. The caster had a much easier time with bosses but open world was more dangerous. The opposite for the str build, had to learn more timing and patterns for bosses but open world was a smash fest. Great sword in caelid is easy to get early and is pretty great, just pumping up str and hp/end and a little dex just to meet weapon requirements.

To build a proper STR character, the first thing you must do is level vigor to 60.

The great sword is a great early game weapon, you can also get the bell bearing hunters sword early on, although it is behind a boss fight. I also enjoyed ordovis's greatsword

Try a lot of different weapons. Greatswords are fun, but big hammers are awesome too. I think the great club is easy to get early hammer

In my opinion, a true strength build uses clubs. Maaaaybe a mace if you want to be creative, but in DS3, for instance, the big wood club was the most fun. If in elden ring, go for funsies and start as a wretch to get the club, then eventually switch to the grafted greatsword (or whatever it's called) at the weeping peninsula castle that you can get.

As you get to ranni or radahn, just use whatever makes the most satisfying 'WHACK!' sound.