If you thought your Elden Ring runs were already punishing enough, the Deathless Randomizer League is here to remind you that there’s always a harder way to play. Season 2 is underway, and it brings a fresh batch of randomized chaos for the community’s most dedicated and masochistic players to dig into.
What Is the DRL?
The Deathless Randomizer League (DRL) is a competitive Elden Ring event organized by Forsa, built around a deceptively simple premise: defeat as many bosses as possible within two hours, without dying. Every run uses a randomized seed – meaning item locations, enemy placements, and loot are all shuffled – so no two playthroughs are the same. You can’t memorize your way to victory. Adaptability is everything.
Season 1 ran from October to December 2024, pulling in 118 players who collectively played through 745 seeds. pirl_fresh took the top honors in the winners bracket, while catalystz claimed the losers bracket title. If you want the full breakdown of how Season 1 unfolded, we’ve got you covered in our post Elden Ring Deathless Randomizer League: Join the Fun. The bar has been set – now it’s time to clear it.
How Season 2 Works
Qualifiers
Qualifiers for Season 2 run from March 9 to April 9. Eight seeds are made available over that period, and you have ten days to attempt each one. Your final qualifier ranking is based on your five best scores, so a bad run here and there won’t necessarily tank your chances – but consistency is rewarded.
Every qualifier seed is identical for all participants, which levels the playing field while keeping the experience fully blind. In fact, the rules are firm on this point: watching another player’s run before you attempt the seed yourself is strictly prohibited. Your score is the number of bosses you’ve killed when the clock runs out or when you die – whichever comes first.
The top 32 scorers move on to the playoffs.
The Permadeath Rule (Qualifiers)
Here’s the part that gives the league its name. During qualifiers, a single death ends your run immediately. Your score is locked in at that moment, however many bosses you managed to defeat before it happened. The only exception is falling out of bounds through a map geometry issue with no enemy involved – that one can be reviewed and allowed to continue, but it’s verified manually.
The Playoffs
The top 32 qualifiers enter a full double-elimination bracket. Players ranked 1 through 16 start in the winners bracket; ranks 17 through 32 begin in the losers bracket. The Grand Final is a best-of-three series between the winners bracket champion and the losers bracket finalist.
One important shift from qualifiers: permadeath is off in the playoffs. Both players run the same seed simultaneously for the full two hours, and the one with the higher boss count at the end wins. If scores are tied, the tiebreaker is who killed the final boss first – tracked to the millisecond.
All playoff matches are broadcast with commentary in both English and French.
The ScaduRun Mod
To keep things competitive from the very start, Season 2 uses the ScaduRun mod. You don’t need to install anything manually – seeds come as .zip files you download and launch through a provided batch file.
When you load in, you start with 50 randomly selected items — a mix of crystals, talismans, and armor pieces – but only your class’s default weapon. You also receive enough runes to instantly level your character to level 30 at the first chapel Site of Grace. From there, the available world opens up as follows: Limgrave and Liurnia are always accessible, with two additional regions randomly selected from a pool of ten spanning both base game areas and Shadow of the Erdtree DLC locations.
That DLC pool is worth paying attention to. Season 2 introduces DLC regions into the mix, meaning some players will find themselves navigating the Land of Shadow on top of everything else. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse depends entirely on what the seed has decided to place there.
What’s Allowed and What Isn’t
The ruleset keeps things tight. Glitches are banned outright, as is LiveSplit (which would create an unfair timing advantage). Quitting out is also off the table, with one exception: brief pauses in safe areas away from combat are permitted.
On the allowed side, using the Memory of Grace ability to return to your last Site of Grace is fully legal – even mid-boss fight. It’s a small but meaningful tool for repositioning without forfeiting the run.
Getting In
The barrier to entry is deliberately low. All you need is a Twitch account and a copy of Elden Ring plus its DLC on Steam. All runs must be streamed live on Twitch with VODs saved permanently, and the boss counter overlay must remain visible on screen throughout your attempt.
From there, it’s a matter of reading the rules carefully, joining the Discord, and getting your runs in before the April 9 qualifier deadline.
If you’re ready to sign up or just want to follow along, head to drl.forsa.tv. There are also 30 practice seeds available to help you get a feel for the format before committing to a qualifier run – highly recommended before you throw your first real attempt into the void.
One Death to Lose
The Deathless Randomizer League continues to be one of the most compelling things happening in the Elden Ring community right now. It takes a game already built on challenge and consequence, strips away everything familiar, and asks you to perform under conditions you’ve never seen before – all while one death away from starting over.
Season 2 raises the stakes further with DLC regions in the mix,and a growing player base that knows what it’s doing. Whether you’re here to compete, to watch, or just to marvel at people who are clearly much better at this game than you are, the DRL is worth your time.
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