One of the trademark mechanics of FromSoftware’s Souls games is that you drop all of your accumulated XP when you die and only have one chance to retrieve it. If you die again before you reach that spot, it’s gone for good. In Elden Ring, these are known as “runes,” with each kill adding to your count.
Runes are both currency and XP, allowing you to level up and purchase items from the game’s various shopkeepers and merchants. Spend a lot of time methodically working through a long dungeon and you’ll end up with a fat stash, though you only need to take a couple of wrong footsteps and they’ll vanish into the ether. This has resulted in controllers being tossed and rage quits, so here’s how to avoid it.
The first and best advice is to avoid losing your runes by spending them as often as you can. Elden Ring is very permissive about when you can fast travel to a Site of Grace, where you can bank runes by spending them on a level up. If you have no runes, you can die as much as you like without penalty, so keep an eye on the status screen and remember how much you need for the next stat point.
Another particularly useful tip is to never, ever enter a boss arena with a lot of runes on you. It should be obvious when you’ll meet a boss, as they’re generally behind fog doors, though even if you accidentally start a fight with one you can just quit the game and it’ll respawn you outside the arena with all your runes.
If you reach a boss gate and you’ve got runes but aren’t close to a level-up, you still have options. If you’ve collected “Golden Runes,” you can use them to top up your rune count in order to level up or you can fast-travel away to a merchant and spend them on items or consumables. (I like to top up my quiver of arrows when I need to burn off some runes I’ll probably lose). The aim is to fight bosses with as few runes on you as possible, preferably so few that you don’t even need to bother recollecting them when you die.
One other option is to use the “Sacrificial Twig” item. This can be equipped as a Talisman and will prevent you from dropping your runes when you die, though it’s a single-use item and will break on death. However, these appear to be semi-rare in Elden Ring, so don’t rely on them. As a side note, if you equip a twig in a tricky area and survive, don’t forget to unequip it afterward to save it for later.
Finally, and very importantly, all Elden Ring players will eventually come to understand that losing runes ⏤ even a lot of them ⏤ isn’t as big of a setback as it first seems.
In those early hours, it may seem like a crushing waste of time and effort when a few thousand disappear forever, but there’s literally an infinite supply out there in the vast Lands Between. Plus, the “true” currency of Elden Ring isn’t runes but rather knowledge of what’s ahead. Knowing where an ambush is going to happen, how a boss will behave, or the location of a sneaky shortcut is infinitely more valuable than pumping a stat up by a few points.
So remember: spend ’em if you got ’em, but if calamity strikes, it’s really not that big of a deal.
