These Elden Ring group passwords can give you an easy Rune buff

Elden Ring best group passwords

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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.

Group passwords to use for a Rune buff in Elden Ring
As the game explains, “you’ll be more likely to see messages, summon signs, bloodstains, phantoms, and so on from others using the same password,” so there’s more to this system than just gaining extra Runes.

There are five slots to fill out, though you can do as few as you’d like.

At the moment, I’m using these five Elden Ring group passwords:

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):

The Rune buff status icon.
The Rune buff status icon.

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.

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Jordan Devore
Jordan is a founding member of Destructoid and poster of seemingly random pictures. They are anything but random.
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