Elden Ring is an action-oriented game, similar to Dark Souls and Bloodborne. As an action game, it does reward precise timing and knowledge of the enemies.
If you are really good at soulsborne games, such as Elden Ring, you can beat enemies that are not meant for you yet. However, it can be unnecessarily tough, and not all players want to become masters in the art of parrying and dodging.
Since it’s an RPG, Elden Ring characters can be quite different depending on how you build them. Strength builds might deal a significant amount of damage in each swing of your weapon, while Faith builds can deal reliable area of effect damage from a distance.
No matter what build you decide to use, having those extra attribute points and better defense stats does help you to survive a few more hits and end enemies with fewer attacks, but gathering those runes can be a chore.
If you’re looking to get ahead in Elden Ring and save yourself some time grinding levels, this guide will help you do just that.
When you learn how to farm runes in Elden Ring, it’ll be easier to make your character become able to venture into more dangerous areas of the game sooner. It’ll spend less time worrying too much about how little damage you deal to certain creatures and how fast they kill you.
It may be helpful to have played a few hours of Elden Ring before reading this guide, so you have a good idea of what’s expected of you as you progress through the game’s content. But since you are here, I’ll assume that you’ve been playing this for a while.
Here’s how to level up fast in Elden Ring.
First Things First in Elden Ring
This guide will have many different tips that will depend on where you are in the game to work well. When you first start the game, farming runes will be a bit difficult.
If you are a newcomer, it can be incredibly frustrating to deal with the enemies that kill you in a couple of hits, which is why boosting your stats is so important.
In all fairness, there really isn’t a great way to farm quickly when you’re just starting, so we will start with you going to the ruins on the northeast of the first site of grace to get the horse. With that out of the way, get the Spirit Calling Bell.
You might want to try to spend some time killing the first soldiers you encounter on your way to Stormhill Castle.
This task will be a bit tedious, but it is especially useful to those who don’t trust their dodging skills yet.
After a couple of levels, the soldiers will not give you enough runes to be worth repeating this cycle. You might want to spend some time in Stormfoot Catacombs to get some new items, more runes, and defeat the easiest boss in the game.
Make sure that you return to the entrance once you defeat the Erdtree Burial Watchdog to spend the runes you got from it. Always spend your runes when you have the opportunity; you never know when an enemy will jump on you and cause you to be stun locked.
How to Farm Stormhill Giants
Alright, I’ll assume that you spent some time farming soldiers and defeated the Erdtree Burial Watchdog. Maybe you even managed to upgrade your weapons and got some new gear. Now what?
By now, you must have seen those wandering giants carrying huge swords. They are not that hard to kill when isolated, especially if you can deal a somewhat decent amount of damage.
There are two giants chained to a wagon located past the stone bridge to the southeast of Gatefront Ruins. Once you cross the bridge, look to your right and you will probably be able to see the giants slowly walking towards you.
This is a somewhat easy way to farm runes, but it’s not the most time efficient way to farm giants. If you feel confident to take on unchained giants, there is a better way to farm that will grant you five thousand runes each time you succeed.
Fast travel to the Gatefront site of grace and go west surrounding the mountain until you find a spiritspring. It should be right after the field where lightning is constantly striking the ground.
Once you jump there, Torrent will land on a field where five giants are wandering around. There are a few different ways that you can go by this situation.
If you can’t deal with the giants on your own, it might be worth trying to lure two and let them damage each other while they try to hit you.
That is a risky strategy for many reasons, but most importantly, because you might accidentally lure other giants and because you might be knocked out of Torrent and be sent back to a site of grace. Still, I’ve managed to farm thousands of runes doing it before I had enough power to comfortably handle a giant on my own.
The other way you can do it is by luring them one by one. If you can deal enough damage, a couple of charged strikes to their legs might knock them down, giving you a chance to finish them off. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Once you finish, fast travel to the Gatefront site of grace and do it all over again.
When you bait two giants at once, even if you manage to make them hit each other without any issues, you will end up having to deal with the one that defeated the other for you.
Instead of finishing it off, lure it to the next giant that you want to take down. The damaged one will already have his sword in his hand and will deal a lot of damage to the other one that has just been lured.
If you managed to do this successfully, only luring two at a time, they would attack each other, and, in the end, you will only have to deal with a single foe with low HP.
How to Farm Runes Fast Without Fighting
This is sort of a cheap trick to farm runes, and it can actually grant you nearly ten thousand runes per minute if you manage to optimize your timing. Since these are advanced areas and you might get lost, you might want to check where to find all map fragments of the regions we’ll visit.
Farming this way is a bit harder to get started since you will have to search for the place and get into an area that is most likely too high level for you. However, it is by far the best way to accumulate runes quickly and safely once you get there.
First, go to the stone bridge mentioned above, the one that is to the southeast of the Gatefront Ruins. Take the left path as if you were going to farm the chained giants pulling a wagon and go through them.
You want to go all the way to the ruins of a church located past a giant. That’s the Third Church of Marika. Make sure to rest at the site of grace and get ready to cross a more dangerous area.
You are going to look for a portal behind the church, and there’s a good chance you will bump into enemies that you’re not ready to fight.
Do your best to find this portal and enter it. It might be much safer to do when there’s still sunlight. The nighttime brings out more dangerous monsters, so you might want to rest until morning at the site of grace located within the church.
Once you enter the portal, you will be transported to Greyoll’s Dragonbarrow.
There’s a site of grace within this fort-like structure, but if you can’t enter it for any reason, go in the opposite direction until you see a bridge. Rest at the site of grace that is next to the bridge and get ready to get to the other side.
You won’t be able to cross this bridge without any worries since there’s a Dragon there. This one is not Flying Dragon Agheel, but another one that is much more problematic.
It’s pretty easy to get through the dragon. However, if you do, you might get lost and not find the site of grace you need for this trick. There’s an alternative path to the other side that will take you exactly where you need to go, so let’s try.
Looking at the bridge with the dragon, go left and look for a slope that will take you to a smaller bridge. It is parallel to the one where the dragon is. That one will be much easier to cross.
Be careful when crossing the bridge. There might be a boss there, Night’s Cavalry, who is most likely too strong for you if you’re still leveling up.
He is quite easy to avoid, though. As his name strongly suggests, Night’s Cavalry only shows up during nighttime, so rest until the morning at a site of grace and go through the bridge without any trouble. You will see a temple-like structure and a site of grace next to it.
We’re nearly done. Now you need to rest and check a path nearby with a bunch of crystals on it. As you’re going down that road, you will hear a sound, and a giant ball will spawn behind you. This ball will take all your HP away if it hits you.
Once the ball appears, dodge to your right as if you were going to jump off the ledge. The ball will go after you, but if you’ve avoided it correctly, you should be okay, and the ball will fall off the cliff.
For some reason, you will get a thousand and nine hundred runes once it happens. So here’s the plan, immediately open the map and fast travel to the site of grace at the beginning of this road. Once there, call Torrent and go back to the same spot.
It is possible to do this a few times every minute, meaning that you can farm over five thousand runes within sixty seconds. If you keep doing it, you will have enough runes to have an edge against the most common enemies in Elden Ring.
Yes, it can become tedious. It is a chore, and a repetitive one, but this is a great way to exploit something that is in the game to power through some of the most annoying parts of the game. I mean, it can be the way to go if you are having a lot of trouble dealing with some bosses.
In soulsborne games, it is very common to be one-shot by a boss that is one or two hits from being defeated. In situations when strategy alone doesn’t seem to be enough, you might want to farm for a while and be able to brute force through the boss, or at least to be able to win a fight with fewer hits.
You better take advantage of this tip while you can. I have no idea why the giant ball gives you so many runes when it rolls off the cliff, and I don’t see any runes coming from down there to my character when that happens. That leads me to believe that it might be patched eventually, and you will have to go back to farming Stormhill giants if that happens.
Kill the Giant Dragon
This one isn’t really a farming strategy but a boost. If you know how to kill the giant dragon in Dragon’s Burrow, you can do it early in the game by using the teleport device mentioned above and crossing the bridge where Flying Dragon Greyll is.
You can easily get over fifty thousand souls by killing this beast, and it will also grant you a few great rewards, especially if you are a faith caster.
Final Thoughts
The first beta made a lot of people think that Elden Ring was not a challenging game. What these people didn’t know is that the characters provided for the beta test were much stronger than your initial character in the release version of the game.
Elden Ring is indeed challenging, and all of us who played the beta version immediately felt the difference between the two versions. Sometimes, Elden Ring can be very hard. This makes players wonder how to defeat Margit or other powerful bosses the game throws at you.
Frustrated players often give up on the game, and we don’t want that. Well, at least I don’t. I want more people to understand the beauty of soulsborne games because I want more games that play the same way, and therefore this guide is my way to help all of you who are stuck in an area of the game that feels unnecessarily hard.
Look, FromSoftware games are unforgiving, but they always have built-in ways to make the game easier. You can summon spirits, play with friends, upgrade your gear, and farm runes to level up and trivialize some challenges. It’s all fair game.
Since Elden Ring allows you to travel the entire world, finding a way to optimize builds and rune farming was just a matter of time. I’m sure even better ways to do it will show up in time, but for now, these are the best ways to farm runes in Elden Ring. I hope it helps you. Enjoy the power and use it wisely.
