In Elden Ring, runes are pretty much everything. Not only are they your currency, with which you’ll purchase goods and services, but they also function as XP. Think of them as the Elden Ring version of souls from the Dark Souls/Demon’s Souls games.
Earning tons and tons of runes can be a tedious, grindy prospect. So what if I told you there’s a way to speed up the process? Well, there’s actually a rune grind that’s estimated to earn you about 10,000 runes per minute (a number which is admittedly a bit exaggerated, but I’ll explain that later).
Now, all of the credit for this goes to TagBackTV, who posted a video about the discovery on February 27, 2022. I’ll post the video here so you can see the method for yourself:
Of course, I had to test this out for myself. As it turns out, it does work, though with some caveats that aren’t mentioned in the video. First and foremost, if you leave the immediate area where the boulder launches off the cliff, you won’t get the runes for the boulder kill.
Secondly, TagBackTV estimates you can farm this run about five times per minute. He must have quicker load times than I do, because I topped out at about three per minute (my calculated run time includes loading time and time spent waiting for the boulder sound that triggers the rune gain). Still, each run gets you 1,952 relics (plus an additional 26 if you manage to squash the poor wandering deer that’s nearby); almost 6,000 runes isn’t bad at all for a minute’s worth of work.
And, for the record, if you can somehow get your run time to about 12 seconds, you would actually be earning just shy of 10,000 runes per minute. I personally couldn’t, but I’m certainly not complaining about my 20-second runs here.
One last thing I should point out: This is clearly a game bug. There’s another boulder a bit further down that same path, and it only gains you 21 runes when it’s destroyed. It seems that there’s something about that specific boulder rolling off of that specific spot (while you are still in the immediate vicinity) that causes the massive rune gain.
Will this be patched out of the game? I can’t say for certain, but my gut instinct here is that it probably will be. So if you want to power up your character like mad, you probably want to get on that before the next patch.
