Longtime From Software fans are all too familiar with the tediousness that comes with having to pop a bunch of the "Consumable Souls" in previous games, let alone in Elden Ring. The act of pausing the game, selecting which currency consumable (be it Soul, Coldblood Dew, or Golden Rune) to pop, watching the player animation of crushing it and absorbing the energy, before going into the menu and doing it all over again is something that any fan of these types of games should be very familiar with.And, while the developers have made this process a bit more convenient over time with accessible UI changes such as allowing players to pop multiple souls or leave the menu open while the animation plays, there's another trick that's so much quicker in Elden Ring specifically.
How To Sell Golden Runes
Now technically, this was a system in Dark Souls 3 as well, but, with the larger amount of Golden Runes spread like glitter across the Lands Between, this system comes in handy a bit more often in Elden Ring. All this trick requires is any one of the NPC Merchants in the game that have a "Sell" option.
The most commonly preferred one is Blacksmith Hewg, as people tend to love this guy (even though his Quest Line is incomplete). Once the player is at their NPC of choice, they should go to their Sell Menu and scroll down to the section where Golden Runes are. once there, they should see that the amount they sell for is 1-to-1: the same exact amount of Runes they would gain from popping them.
How It Used To Work
In previous games, these types of Consumables would sell for a paltry amount of Souls/Runes compares to what they gave once popped, and any player who accidentally sold anything in those games felt such immediate regret. And, to be fair, there's almost nothing else worth selling in Elden Ring, which is why these Rune-Farming areas are so commonly talked about, but at least it's finally easy to cash all those Golden Runes in.
Though, it's not entirely recommended to cash them all in at once, as Golden Runes are the only Runes that aren't lost or dropped on Death (which is sort of hard to avoid). So, it's highly reccomended to save them as last-resort items to pop in case the player is just shy of having enough Runes to level, buy an item, or upgrade their equipment.
Elden Ring is available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.