Elden Ring player loses 10 million runes to fall damage after grinding for 2 days

One particularly daring Elden Ring player managed to lose 10 million runes in one fell swoop after two full days of grinding thanks to the game’s most unforgiving foe – gravity.

As GamesRadar+ reports, this tragic tale was documented in its entirety over on the Elden Ring subreddit, where Reddit user DementedEnjoyer announced that they had “wasted nearly an entire day of my life” grinding for four million runes with a level eight character (seemingly by wiping out the entire population of Giant Crows at Mohgwyn Palace). It was at this point that they asked the internet what they should do with the runes, and they settled on a monstrously difficult challenge – complete the rest of the game using only a bow, and without spending any of the runes to level up until they beat the final boss. 

It wasn’t just four million runes on the line, though – before continuing on their adventure through the Lands Between, DementedEnjoyer continued to do irreparable damage to the Giant Crow population, and ended up with a tidy 10 million runes. For reference, that would have been enough to take their Tarnished character to level 166.

UPDATE POST from the tarnished who wasted an entire day farming 4 mil runes at lvl 8 from r/Eldenring

Even if you’ve not played Elden Ring before, I’m sure you’ll be aware that FromSoftware’s action-RPG is full of deadly enemies and brutal bosses, and you’d think that there’d be a very strong chance that DementedEnjoyer would end up losing their hard-earned runes to one of those, but no. In a painful (but hilarious) final update, they shared a clip of them trying their very best to navigate safely down a steep drop to reclaim their runes (which had already been dropped, for some reason), and slipping, causing them to lose everything. It hurts to watch.

FINAL UPDATE from the tarnished who wasted two days farming 10 million runes on a lvl 8 character and refused to level up until he beat the final boss from r/Eldenring

Needless to say, in that moment, the challenge came to a swift end, and based on the lack of updates since, it seems that DementedEnjoyer has decided against giving it another go, and I can’t say I blame them.

If you’ve had your fill of exploring the Lands Between, you can take a look at our list of the best open-world games on PC to find something new to immerse yourself in. You can also check out our selection of the best PS5 games available now.