Elden Ring New Game Plus: What Carries Over and What Scales

Beat the Elden Beast and the game offers to start you over. Say yes and you are standing in the Chapel of Anticipation again at your current level, with your current gear, in a world that has quietly rebalanced itself around you.

The rebalancing is the part the game never puts a number on. Elden Ring does not apply one difficulty multiplier to the whole map on Journey 2. It applies a different multiplier to every region band, and the multipliers run backwards — biggest at the start, near-nothing at the end.

The Tree Sentinel goes from 2,889 health to 6,805. The Elden Beast goes from 22,127 to 22,149. Same Journey, same button press, and one of those bosses gained 22 hit points.

Here is the whole system: what survives the transition, what the game deletes, and the datamined numbers behind the difficulty change.

Journey 2 keeps your build and deletes your keys

The rule of thumb Fextralife lands on is that anything used to unlock an area or advance a quest is stripped, and anything that is just power comes with you. That is close enough to be useful and wrong in enough places to be worth reading carefully.

Two entries there are worth pulling out. Stonesword Keys carry over, which means an imp statue you skipped on Journey 1 costs nothing extra on Journey 2 if you hoarded keys. And Larval Tears carry over, so a stack of them is a free rebuild — respeccing at Rennala before you press yes is a cleaner way to change builds than doing it mid-run.

The entry easiest to misread is the map. The Fextralife wiki is explicit that the overworld map stays revealed but every Site of Grace must be rediscovered. You know where everything is and you cannot fast-travel to any of it.

The Bell Bearings have to be handed in first

The two wikis word this differently and mean the same thing, so take the operational version: hand your Bell Bearings to the Twin Maiden Husks before you start the new Journey.

Fextralife lists 14 bearings whose Roundtable Hold shop unlocks persist into New Game Plus — the Bone, Meat, Medicine and Gravity Stone Peddler's, the Smithing-Stone Miner's and Somberstone Miner's, the Glovewort Picker's and Ghost-Glovewort Picker's, the Herbalist's, Mushroom-Seller's, Greasemonger's, Moldmonger's, Spellmachinist's and String-Seller's. The condition is that they were turned in. A bearing still sitting in your inventory when Journey 2 starts is destroyed, and the Fandom wiki says the same thing in the other direction: only the ones given to the Twin Maiden Husks are kept.

That matters more than it sounds. The four Smithing-Stone Miner's Bell Bearings cover Smithing Stone 1 and 2, then 3 and 4, then 5 and 6, then 7 and 8, so a full set turns the Twin Maidens into an unlimited source of every standard stone short of the Ancient Dragon one — enough to take a weapon to +24. That is the difference between upgrading a second weapon on Journey 2 and farming for it, and the upgrade math is where most of your damage actually lives.

Anything that opens a door goes back in the box. Both Dectus Medallion halves, the Academy Glintstone Key, the Rold Medallion — all of it has to be collected again. So does every Great Rune, which means the two-Great-Rune requirement for Leyndell's front gate is a fresh errand every cycle.

New Game Plus does not scale the world evenly

Here is where the interesting part is.

Elden Ring assigns every area a scaling SpEffect that multiplies enemy stats, and it uses a different set of them once you are past Journey 1. Fextralife publishes both sets, pulled from the game files and checked in-game. Read the two health columns side by side and the design intent is immediately obvious.

The base game already stretches enemy health across the map by a factor of more than seven. Something in the Haligtree Roots has 7.422 times the health the same creature would have in the Stranded Graveyard. That is the difficulty curve.

New Game Plus does not add a second curve on top. It fills in the bottom of the first one. The NG+ health multiplier is 3.434 in the Stranded Graveyard and 1.015 in the Haligtree Roots. The early game gets dragged up toward the endgame; the endgame barely moves.

The full region scaling table

Two caveats on that table. The wiki's NG+ list skips the Volcano Manor / North Caelid band that appears in the base-game list, so those two cells are genuinely absent rather than omitted here. And the band names are datamined difficulty tiers, not map borders — the Tree Sentinel outside the First Step sits in the "Limgrave North" band despite standing a short walk from where the game restarts you, which you can confirm from its own health numbers below.

The practical read: on Journey 2, Limgrave is genuinely dangerous relative to what it was, and Farum Azula has almost exactly as much health as you remember. The back half is not untouched — the same NG+ table raises defense to x1.200 and attack rate to x1.094 in the Elden Throne band, and Radagon's printed defense goes from 121 to 146 on Journey 2. What barely moves in the endgame is the health bar, which is most of what a long fight is made of.

Six bosses, one Journey, completely different bills

Fextralife's boss pages print a stat line for every Journey, which makes the region tables checkable. The health and rune figures below are the wiki's published values; the region band and the percentage change are worked out from them.

Margit more than doubles. Malenia gains 499 health — about a percent and a half, on a boss that already has more than thirty thousand. Radagon gains 14.

If your mental model of New Game Plus is "everything gets harder," this is the correction. What actually happens on Journey 2 is that the shape of the run changes: the opening hours stop being a warm-up and the closing hours stay exactly where they were. A character that finished the game comfortably will find the early bosses meaningfully chunkier and the final fight essentially identical.

Rune payouts run 5x in Limgrave and 2x at the end

The rune multiplier runs the same direction as the health multiplier, and it is a clean per-band number rather than a curve: 5x in the earliest bands, stepping down through 4x and 3x, to 2x from the Leyndell Sewers onward.

The boss table above confirms it exactly. Tree Sentinel: 3,200 to 16,000, a straight 5x. Margit: 12,000 to 60,000, 5x. Godrick: 20,000 to 80,000, 4x, which is the Stormveil Castle band. Malenia and the Elden Beast: a flat doubling.

Be careful what you conclude from that. The 5x is relative to what that specific area paid on Journey 1, and Limgrave paid very little. Five times a Tree Sentinel is 16,000 runes, which against the rune cost curve covers one level-up at level 51 and falls short at 52, where a single level costs 16,274. Mohgwyn Palace still sits in a 2x band and still pays vastly more per minute in absolute terms. New Game Plus flattens the relative rune economy across the map; it does not relocate the best farm.

What it does do is make the early game solvent. A Journey 2 character clearing Limgrave and Stormveil at 5x and 4x has real money at a point in the run where Journey 1 had none.

Journey 3 to Journey 8: the multiplier ladder

Everything above is the Journey 1 to Journey 2 step. From Journey 3 onward the game applies a second, flat set of multipliers on top of the Journey 2 values — and these are the same everywhere on the map.

These multiply the Journey 2 number, not each other. That single fact changes how the whole back half of the ladder reads.

Take Malenia's rune drop. Journey 1 pays 480,000. Journey 2 pays 960,000. Journey 8 pays 1,224,000 — which is 960,000 x 1.275, exactly as the table predicts. Six further Journeys past the first cycle add 27.5% between them. The Elden Beast runs the same shape: 500,000, then 1,000,000, then 1,275,000.

So the entire rune inflation across all of New Game Plus tops out at 2.55x the Journey 1 value for a late-game boss. It is not a runaway curve, and it is not compounding.

The other end of the table is where it gets uncomfortable. Stamina damage reaches x1.900 by Journey 8. If you play behind a greatshield, blocking on Journey 8 costs close to double what it did on Journey 2 — and that is layered on top of the NG+ region stamina values, which sit above 1.0 in every band of that table, from x1.200 in the Stranded Graveyard down to x1.065 at the Elden Throne.

Scaling stops there. Fextralife states that Journey 8 (NG+7) is the end of the ladder and every subsequent Journey is identical in difficulty and rewards. There is no Journey 12 problem.

Stance damage drops 40 percent by Journey 8

The poise column deserves its own note because it moves the opposite way to everything else, and it directly rewrites stance-break routines.

Enemies take less stance damage on higher Journeys: 5% less on Journey 3, then 10%, 15%, 20%, 30%, and 40% less on Journey 8. Journey 2 itself is unchanged at x1.000, which is why a stance-break loop that worked on your first playthrough still works on your second and then quietly stops working on your third.

A stance break that took four charged heavies on Journey 2 takes seven on Journey 8, because each hit is only worth 60% of what it was. Combine that with the boss health multiplier and the stance route gets materially worse relative to just hitting things, which is the argument for Spirit Ashes over phantoms on deep cycles — summoned players and NPCs already cost 40% of your stance damage before any of this applies.

One number the wiki disagrees with itself on

There is a discrepancy in the source worth flagging rather than quietly copying.

The scaling table lists Journey 8 health as x1.450. All five boss stat pages I checked on the same wiki apply x1.400 instead. Each is checked against its own printed Journey 2 value:

• Radagon: 13,353 x 1.400 = 18,694, and the page lists 18,694
• Malenia: 33,749 x 1.400 = 47,249, and the page lists 47,249
• Elden Beast: 22,149 x 1.400 = 31,009, and the page lists 31,009
• Godrick: 13,049 x 1.400 = 18,269, and the page lists 18,269
• Tree Sentinel: 6,805 x 1.400 = 9,527, and the page lists 9,527

At x1.450 those would be 19,362, 48,936, 32,116, 18,921 and 9,867. Every rung from Journey 3 to Journey 7 matches the scaling table to within a point of rounding on all five bosses; only the last one disagrees, and it disagrees the same way every time. Treat the applied Journey 8 health figure as x1.400 until the wiki reconciles the two, and treat the defense and rune columns as sound — those reproduce on all five of those bosses at every rung, the rune column exactly and the defense column to within a point of rounding. The poise column is not printed on any boss page, so it is unchecked either way.

One more quirk the wiki records: the movement slowdown from hazards like lava and swamps is removed on entering New Game Plus, and the page notes it is not known whether that is intended. It has not been patched.

Shadow of the Erdtree has a separate one-time bump

The DLC runs its own, much simpler system, and it is not part of the Journey ladder.

Your Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes carry over — Fextralife's fragment page says acquired fragments carry into New Game Plus, and the Fandom wiki lists both under its Shadow of the Erdtree carry-over section. The blessing caps themselves are 20 for Scadutree and 10 for Revered Spirit Ash, from 50 and 25 collectibles respectively, so anything you missed on Journey 1 is still worth picking up.

Separately there is DLC+: the first time you start a new Journey after having beaten Promised Consort Radahn, DLC enemies permanently gain health and attack power for that save file. It happens once, it is binary — you are in DLC+ or you are not — and per the wiki it affects nothing in the base game. The stat pages back that up in both directions: Godrick and the Limgrave Tree Sentinel each carry a "DLC+ HP" row identical to their normal HP at every Journey, while the Hinterland Tree Sentinels, who stand in the Land of Shadow, show a genuinely higher one — 21,287 normal against 22,968 in DLC+ on Journey 2 for the torch variant.

The practical consequence: if you have never played the DLC, entering it on Journey 2 without having beaten Promised Consort Radahn first is easier than beating him on Journey 1 and coming back.

Quick Action Checklist

• Hand your Bell Bearings to the Twin Maiden Husks before you press yes. Any bearing left in your inventory is destroyed, and the shop stock from the 14 named bearings only persists if it was handed in first.
• Respec at Rennala before you start, not after. Larval Tears carry over; the Academy Glintstone Key does not, so on Journey 2 you have to find it again before you can even reach her.
• Spend your Stonesword Keys or keep them, either is fine. They carry over, so an unopened imp statue costs you nothing.
• Expect Limgrave to bite. The earliest bands multiply enemy health by roughly 2.4x to 3.4x on Journey 2; Margit goes from 4,174 health to 9,831.
• Do not expect the finale to change. The Elden Beast gains 22 health on Journey 2, and Radagon gains 14.
• Bank on 5x runes early and 2x late. The multiplier is per region band and steps down as you progress, so the early game is where Journey 2 feels rich.
• Rebuild your stance-break plan from Journey 3 onward, not Journey 2. The poise penalty starts at 5% on Journey 3 and reaches 40% by Journey 8.
• Stop counting at Journey 8. NG+7 is the ceiling — every Journey after it is identical in difficulty and rewards.
• Decide about the DLC before your first new Journey. Beating Promised Consort Radahn and then starting a Journey permanently switches the DLC into DLC+ for that save.