YouTubers are mastering Elden Ring rune farming so you can too

When you first start Elden Ring, you don’t have much in the way of armor — at least for some classes. To put it bluntly, you are weak in a harsh world. The way that players level up and increase stats, of course, is by collecting runes. Runes are part-experience points and part currency, and to get powerful, you’ll need to collect a lot of them.

Collecting runes is something that’ll happen throughout the game, even if you aren’t particularly trying. Certain activities and enemies — like clearing guards at Gatefront Ruins — will award a bunch of runes. But if you want a lot of runes really fast, you’ll have to turn to farming. Rune farming.

Naturally, YouTube is already ablaze with some exploits and creative methods to farm runes. YouTuber TagBackTV created a video on a method that can earn players 585,600 runes per hour, he said.

He outlines the method in the video, but essentially, there’s a specific area where the player is able to trigger a boulder. The boulder will roll off the edge of a nearby cliff and gain players thousands of runes. Then you refresh back to the site of grace and do this again. And again and again and again. And there’s no fighting!

Arekkz Gaming has another video for an early Elden Ring rune farm. This one requires some fighting, however, but it’s a relatively simple process for getting lots of runes in a short amount of time. Each kill in this method grants 1,000 runes each.

Polygon, too, has a guide for Elden Ring rune farming. Our guide focuses largely on West Limgrave, the starting location for Elden Ring.

If you’re looking something that’s less like an exploit and more like an optimized route straight out of Elden Ring’s gate, Boomstick Gaming created a video with instructions for a 15-minute path to being overpowered.

Runes! Runes everywhere!