Elden Ring Runes: Best Place to Farm Experience Points

Elden Ring’s character progression occurs over two separate paths. First, there’s weapons. Find (or buy) Smithing Stones and you can use them to upgrade your armaments, which will greatly help you take on the game’s many, ubiquitous challenges. Second, there’s the good old-fashion character leveling. In Elden Ring, runes act as both currency and experience points. To get your character’s attributes up, you’ll need thousands and thousands of runes. 

You’ll get those sweet runes by killing foes and selling items. In the course of playing Elden Ring, you’ll earn plenty of them by defeating bosses. But if you’re looking to earn them quickly, there’s an easy way to farm them. Best of all, it’s available to you very early in the game.

To start off, you’ll need to head to the Third Church of Marika, which is encircled on the map above. If you’ve not already found the Site of Grace there, travel to Agheel Lake North, where you were granted Torrent by Melina. Travel on the path, running past everything, including a giant that’ll be waiting near the Church. Once you’ve activated the Site of Grace inside, go around the back and you’ll find a transporter by a little cove. 

Once you go through the transportation portal, you’ll be taken to a place called the Bestial Sanctum in a region called Dragonbarrow. Inside the Sanctum is Gurranq, a creature that rewards you for bringing it Deathroots. That’s a whole other guide though: What we’re interested here is outside.

Once you look out into the fields, you’ll see a giant dragon knight guarding the Sanctum. It’s a boss, the Black Blade Kindred. Do not fight it. You will die. 

Instead, walk to the left side of the steps you’re standing on and jump into the field. The boss won’t notice you unless you’re directly in front of it, so just avoid that. Go into the fields, however, and you’ll see a bunch of diminutive, statue-looking warriors walking about. These are what you’ve come for.

They’re easy (by Elden Ring standards) to kill at almost any level, since they stagger from being hit. And you can sneak up behind them to perform a critical hit from behind, which will either defeat them straight up or take a chunk off their health. And best of all, killing them grants you a little over 1,000 runes each. 

On the left side of the balcony you jump off, all these enemies are walking around alone. The right side is more challenging, since they travel in packs of two or three. If you’re a low level, I recommend hanging to the left and picking them off one by one. Either way, you can rack up lots of runes quickly by killing a set, respawning them by traveling to the Site of Grace inside the Bestium Sanctum, and doing it all over again.

I managed to get 50,000 runes in 15 minutes. See how high you can go.