Capitalism Mod

This is a highly customizable mod which takes runes from you when you move, consume stamina, take damage, deal damage, or exist (passive drain over time). You can also configure consequences when you run out of runes, like being unable to move, unable to use stamina, unable to attack, or to die immediately.

This is a capitalism mod in the sense that souls are already a highly applicable metaphor for primitive and capital accumulation (the dark soul is literally enclosed), but also because it incentivizes actions which maximize hoarding and capital accumulation for its own sake at the expense of otherwise reasonable behavior. The mod's mechanics also bear some resemblance to real-world attempts to apply these incentives with microtransactions and in-game currencies. There are admittedly no relations of production in the mod, but if you really want you can imagine Marika extracting surplus value from you.

Half-baked metaphors aside, the mod is meant to be a fun challenge. It was created for this youtube run:

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The mod design itself is a collaboration with LilAggy, starting from a basic idea and adding whatever features were possible to implement in Elden Ring. As part of this I added a ton of additional customization, playtesting and tuning the mod extensively, especially the scaling system. If you use it for content, credit/links to this mod page are appreciated.

Pro tip: start with the Lands Between Rune.

Installation

Basic installation

The mod comes with modengine2 and a launcher. In its most basic form, you can

1. Download the mod and unzip it to anywhere

2. Go into the capitalism directory and click launchmod_eldenring.bat to launch Elden Ring (it must be installed on steam, and steam must be running, and only run as admin if you marked eldenring.exe to run as admin)

3. When loading into the game, you should drain runes on actions like movement and attacks, and not be able to do anything at 0 runes

The rune logic is all managed from the dll directory, and it gets loaded from config_eldenring.toml which includes Capitalism.dll as an external dll. If the mod has been loaded, it will create Capitalism_log.txt in the dll directory, which also will include details for any initialization errors.

Most importantly, you can edit Capitalism_config.ini in the dll directory to change which actions cost runes and what the consequences are for running out. For the most part, as soon as you save the config file, the new settings will be immediately reflected in-game. Each setting is thoroughly documented in the config file, and most of it can be managed with