It’s free real estate!
It feels really nice to get a spontaneous health top-up in Elden Ring when one of your messages is appraised, but did you know you could be cashing in on group passwords, too? It’s an easily overlooked feature for players who are more solo-minded, so here’s a quick PSA, inspired by VaatiVidya’s recent breakdown of essential game discoveries.
As Vaati explains, you can temporarily earn a five percent Rune buff when someone in your collective takes out a shardbearer boss. The best part is that it’s all asynchronous — you don’t need to do anything other than type in a group password — and you can have up to five groups going at once. It’s a nice feature for playing with (or at least alongside) your close friends, but it also scales way up if you hitch a ride with a popular community.
After popping open the menu and selecting Multiplayer, you can press Triangle on PS4/PS5 to change your password Settings — from here, you can enter a Multiplayer Password or a Group Password. The latter is your ticket to scoring more Runes.
There are five slots to fill out, though you can do as few as you’d like.
Popular group passwords
At the moment, I’m using these five Elden Ring group passwords:
- “SEEKERS” — VaatiVidya
- “straydmn” — r/EldenRing
- “FEXTRA” — Fextralife Elden Ring Wiki
- “fcb” — FightinCowboy
- “Koopy” — r/TwoBestFriendsPlay
Before I could even finish filling out all five entries, my Rune buff was already active. Here’s the status icon (it looks just like the Gold-Pickled Fowl Foot with an up arrow):
You’ll also notice that your character has a golden glow while the effect is active.
It’s worth noting that while group passwords only need to be typed once (and you can change or remove them whenever without any penalty or restriction), they won’t automatically carry from one character to the next; if you’ve got a bunch of alt characters, you’ll need to fill out the passwords again for each individual tarnished.
This is probably something I should’ve looked into before finishing Elden Ring, but I guess that’s what subsequent playthroughs are for! I’ve been dominating the living-room TV with this game, so I should cool it for the time being. (The keyword being “should.”)
For further Rune farming, check out this late-game guide.
