Elden Ring Adds Challenging Free Game Mode, Not For The Weak

Elden Ring players can now enjoy a fun twist on the typical gameplay formula, and it doesn’t sound like it’s for the weak of heart.

As one of this generation’s toughest games to beat, Elden Ring is full of challenges and high difficulty baddies.

Despite this, there are plenty of players who are after a fresh challenge, which they may seek by doing new self-imposed challenges or by downloading a mod that makes things tougher.

The new Rune Health mod is a great example of this, adding a fresh gameplay twist on the traditional Elden Ring experience by having your health be dictated by the number of runes that you’re carrying.

Created by Elden Ring modder Futurae, the free download replaces the game's regular Vigor-based HP system—where simply levelling up the stat would give you more health points—with a new rune-based system which calculates your maximum health from your current rune count.

Basically, the more runes you have, the stronger you’re going to be. It appears that all players start with 1 health point when they have zero runes, only for every 100 runes you have to increase your health points by one value.

Futurae

Therefore, having a rune count of 71,700 would give you a total number of 718 health points, also factoring in the baseline free health point you get.

Elden Ring's Rune Health Mod Should Make Your Experience A Lot More Gruelling

It’s a pretty interesting system where the richer you are, the more health you’ll have.

But at the same time, if you lose your runes as a result of dying or leveling up other stats, your health will drop to lower levels.

This should create some fun challenge runs, where you’re encouraged to avoid dying as much as possible in case you lose your runes (and ergo, your entire health pool), while also killing as many enemies as possible to collect their runes.

The regular version of the mod has a hard cap of 100,000 runes, meaning the maximum health you can get is 1,000 before you factor in other bonuses to increase that number.

However, an alternative version of the mod removes this cap, allowing you to have as much health as you want provided you have the runes.

If you’d like to make things even more interesting, the mod pairs well with Capitalism Mod, an alternative modification where moving, attacking, and performing other kinds of actions will cost you runes.

If you’d like to download Rune Health, you can do so now by grabbing it from the Elden Ring Nexus Mods page.