In Elden Ring, like the vast majority of RPGs, you level up and get more powerful as you play. Here's how to level up quickly in Elden Ring, including what's the actual level cap.
If you've played Dark Souls games before, then the following explanations about levelling up in Elden Ring should all sound quite familiar to you. And if you're new to FromSoftware games, don't worry. You have no reason to be intimidated by the difficulty everyone hypes up.
Because levelling up is easy in these games, and actually acts as a kind of difficulty modifier for the player. If you find something too tough, you go away, farm some Runes (Elden Ring's name for XP), level up, and come back stronger. Simple.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In this article, we're going to go through the basics of levelling up in Elden Ring, and then introduce you to some ways to level up even faster.
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How To Level Up In Elden Ring
If you want to level up in Elden Ring, you will first need to find Melina. She gives you the ability to "turn your runes into strength", meaning that you can level up. In order for her to show up, you will have to activate three Site of Grace in the open world, and Melina will show up the next time you rest at a grace.
In Elden Ring you collect Runes (XP) as you travel the world and kill enemies, once you have enough Runes to "buy" the next level, you can do so when you next reach a Site of Grace (bonfires). But this is where these games get their difficult reputation: if you die before you reach a Site of Grace, then you lose the Runes you were holding. You can see how many Runes you're holding from the menu:
On the top left, we can see that this character is level 132, and is carrying 5029 Runes. But they will need to collect a total of 114,330 Runes to afford the next level. Once they have the required Runes, all they need to do is head to a Site of Grace and spend the Runes on their next level up. This will then bring up this menu:
With every new level up, you can spend one Attribute Point to improve one of the 8 core abilities. However, the max that any one stat can be increased to is 99.
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Elden Ring: Level Cap
The max level in Elden Ring is 713. By this level, the player will have raised every attribute to 99 (the max) and therefore cannot spend Runes anymore.
Getting to 713 will take a very long time, but don't worry, you start with 79 attribute points to spend at the beginning of the game, plus one for the specific class you choose. But if you do want to reach the max level one day, you're going to need to know the best ways to grind Runes. This is where farming routes and boosting items come in.
How To Level Up Quickly In Elden Ring
When you're playing Elden Ring, or really any Souls game, you need to think of levelling up a bit differently. It doesn't just happen organically as you play. It's an actual activity in itself; you go away and level first, and then you go and explore a new region or kill a new boss. Therefore, you want to make your "grinding" as effective as possible, so you can get back to the adventure of exploring Elden Ring.
To do this, you want to find items that can boost XP, and equip them while killing enemies on specific routes. These grinding routes will see you spawning in, collecting quick and easy kills for Runes, and then doing it all over again.
Items In Elden Ring That Buff XP Gain
There are items and consumables in Elden Ring that can equipped or consumed to increase the amount of Runes you gain. Here are the one's known about so far, and their in-game descriptions:
- Gold-Pickled Fowl Foot: Boosts the amount of runes obtained from defeating enemies for a certain duration.
- Gold Scarab: Increases runes obtained from defeated enemies.
- Celebrant's Skull: Grants 20 runes on any successful hit.
- Celebrant's Cleaver: Grants 10 runes on any successful hit.
- Celebrant's Sickle: Grants 10 runes on any successful hit.
- Celebrant's Rib-Rake: Grants 10 runes on any successful hit.
Farming Routes In Elden Ring
In addition to using specific items and consumables, specific farming routes can help you maximize rune gains. There are so many routes out there, and you'll find many yourself. But we want to showcase one of our favorites, this route gives you 40,000 Runes a minute and can be accessed when you're only a couple of hours into the game. FromIts Shatter on YouTube:
If you find a route as good as that, then we'd love to hear about it. Until then, try not to get too sucked into the majesty of Elden Ring, we've already heard troubling reports of addicts losing their partners over this game...