Elden Ring, at first, may not seem like the kind of game that welcomes steady grinding, but there are a ton of ways to grind out runes to beef up your level.
First and foremost, making your runes less volatile is going to be key to leveling up in the long run. Finding golden runes and holding them in your inventory until you’re ready to purchase a level is going to make leveling up a much less frustrating endeavor. The Lands Between are dangerous and losing a level’s worth of runes on a careless run off of a brand new cliff is going to add a solid thirty minutes to your run, but an inventory of golden runes will mitigate this danger.
Take a look at your map, graveyards litter Limgrave and its surrounding areas, these graves will constantly spawn golden runes ripe for the taking. Line your pockets with these runes to protect your assets and you’ll eliminate a great deal of grinding.
Swallow your pride
Take some time to role play as a merchant, The Lands Between are replete with sundries, and money is quite literally power in this world. Sell the armaments you find that you’re never going to use, placing a few points in your Arcane stat is going to raise the amount of loot you find on enemies. More loot is more runes, baby. On that note, crafting items is a quick and easy way to grab a few hundred runes here and there. At first, it may seem like slow going, but the lack of risk, the ease of access, and the return on effort invested are going to make it well worth your time if your levels are lacking.
You also don’t need to take on the biggest and baddest foes to slurp up the runes. Once you’ve settled on a strategy for felling the trolls that dot the countryside, you’ve found a strategy for reliably farming a thousand runes at a time, which is a huge boon once levels start to cost a few thousand runes.
Patience is the name of the game, and ironically slow and steady is the quickest way to churn out levels in Elden Ring.