Earning money in RuneScape

Originally published as an email for my clan.

Here are some general tips on making money (gold coins) in RuneScape – since this seems to be a fairly frequent concern for players. After all, money is used both to advance skills faster, and to get great-looking items. I wrote some tips in my last email; now I want to go into more detail.

It is important to note that there is is no magic trick to get millions or billions quickly. What I mean is that whatever method you use to earn money, it takes some effort – and in some cases, it involves risks.

Membership: First and foremost, make sure that you get a membership; and, if you already have a membership, make sure that you keep it. The reason for this is that members have much better options of earning game money. (Of course, members also have much better options to train skills, and have access to great game content.)

If you are unwilling or unable to pay real money for a membership, you now have the option of paying in bonds. As of November 2014, a bond costs about 7 million coins (prices vary, like the price of any other item, due to supply and demand), and gives you a 14-day membership. (It is likely that the prices for bonds will soon go up.) There are lots of ways to earn this amount of money in a few hours, especially when you already have a membership. So – assuming once again that you don’t want to pay any real money – it’s fairly easy to spend a few hours every fortnight to earn enough money to buy a membership (make sure to keep a reserve, in case you can’t play for a few days), then you have the remainder of the time available to earn money for other things, train skills, do quests, etc. As an example, you can earn about half a million in a few minutes, once a day, just by making vis wax (if you decide to sell it). That alone is enough, or almost enough, to buy the bonds for membership.

Opportunity cost: Most players are not sufficiently aware of the opportunity cost of anything they do, so it may be worthwhile to discuss this briefly. For more information, you may want to check the Wikipedia article “Opportunity cost”. Here, I’ll discuss some specific examples in RuneScape.

For a start, to determine whether it is worthwhile or not to spend a certain item, it hardly makes any difference whether you already have the item, or can get it yourself, or whether you have to buy it. As an example, let’s say you decided to train Farming by planting yew trees, and now you consider whether you should pay 10 cactus spines to protect the tree, or not. My opinion is that you shouldn’t – since 10 cactus spines are worth about 45K at the time of this writing, the yew seed costs 73K, and if you don’t pay (but use supercompost), you have approximately a 10% chance of losing the tree. So – unless you are willing to pay a lot more money to get slightly more experience (since you don’t get experience from dead trees), it isn’t worthwhile. (That is, on average, if you don’t pay to protect the tree, you will pay less coins for each experience point.) Now, what happens if you already happen to have some cactus spines – or decide to harvest them yourself? The answer is that this hardly changes anything, because if you sell the spines you harvest, you won’t get much less than 45K in this example. So, if you decide to harvest spines, you have the opportunity cost of not selling them. That is, you miss the opportunity of selling them. So, let’s compare the two situations: (a) if you buy 10 spines (per tree) for the payment, you have 45K less cash than if you don’t buy them; (b) if you harvest them yourself, and use them as payment, you have 45K less cash than if you sell them. In summary, to decide whether it’s worthwhile to pay cactus spines, it makes hardly any difference where you get them from. (The only caveat here is that this calculation assumes that you can easily buy and sell at any time, and at approximately the same price.)

As a second example let’s take a look at the use of vis wax. If you want to pay 50 vis wax to extend a daily challenge, and another 40 vis wax to reset the Jack of Trades aura, that’s fine – in fact, in this case I recommend you do so, if you can afford it at all. You can make most of the vis wax yourself – but once again, if you use 90 vis wax instead of selling them, you should be aware that you are, in a way, “spending” 600K at current prices. That is, you are missing the opportunity of earning 600K in income.

The opportunity cost also affects the time you spend. As an example, let’s say you want to train a skill – for example, Smithing. One option is to train it fairly quickly, by making mithril platebodies or adamant platebodies. This costs money. There are also options to train smithing more cheaply, perhaps even make a small profit – for instance, making cannonballs. Since there are always good ways to earn money by spending some time, you should seriously consider the alternative: train a skill with a more expensive method; and spend part of the time you save to earn money. To put it another way, let’s say you spend an extra hour to train some skill cheaply, saving 500K coins compared to a more expensive method. On the other hand, if you train quickly and spend the extra hour to earn money, you might earn a million in that time. As a result, you would be better off training the expensive way – but this needs to be verified for individual cases. In the case of Smithing, I don’t want to recommend any specific method. Rather, do your calculations. Let’s assume you have a method which you can use to earn a million coins an hour. In that case, training any skill in an expensive way is worthwhile, as long as you spend less than a million coins for every hour you save.

Somewhere in the guides you find a statement that picking up small amounts of coins from drops “adds up”. Of course, this is technically correct – but there is something else that adds up as well, and that is the time it takes you to pick it up. For instance, at a low level you kill men (in Lumbridge, for instance) who sometimes drop coins – a maximum of 40 at a time. Let’s say the average is 20. If it takes you a second to pick them up, that translates to a profit of 72K an hour – and even for a newbie player (with a membership) there are ways to earn far more than that. Of course, if you kill monsters that drop thousands of coins at a time, the situation is quite different – that is, for most players it would be worthwhile to pick such drops up, since the hourly profit is much greater inthis case.

Similarly, you should use teleports to get quickly to most places, even if the teleports cost money. The money you spend is usually much less than the value of your time.

Merching: Before going any further, I have to note that merching is quite risky. Anyway, I’ll briefly discuss it here.

The general idea is to buy an item cheap, and sell it more expensive – usually through the Grand Exchange. If you have reason to believe that the price of a certain item will go up (and manage to guess this correctly), you can make a good deal of money. One problem is that you might just as well lose a lot of money. another problem is that you need quite a bit of money to get started. If (for example) you have a million to invest, and after a few days you manage to turn that into 1.1 million, or even 1.2 million (and mind you, you may or may not be lucky), the profit is not that great, considering that you can easily earn half a million or a million an hour using other methods. After all, it DOES take some time to investigate what items might be interesting, and check your Grand Exchange offers regularly.

Merching can be in the long-term (you hope that a certain item will go up and buy some, to sell them back later, hopefully for more money). It can also be short-term: the idea here is that, even though the market is large (millions of players), it isn’t infinite. If a player wants to buy an item (for example, a weapon or a piece of armour) immediately, it might not be available at the average price; he may have to pay a bit more. And if a player wants to sell an item, he may not be able to get rid of it immediately at the average price; he may have to offer it for less. This is where a mercher can make some profit – for example, buying an item at a few percent less than the average price, and selling it at a few percent more than the average price. “Average”, here, refers to the average price at which an item is sold – which may or may not be close to the recommended Grand Exchange price. You will have to experiment a bit, to find out at what price an item can be bought and sold. Also, the prices may change from one day to another. It is interesting to note that with short-term merching, you can make a profit even with items that are dropping in price – for example, you might be able to buy at Grand Exchange price minus 10%, and sell at Grand Exchange price minus 5%. Or buy at –5% and sell just a few coins below the Grand Exchange price, or whatever – depending how quickly the price is dropping. But be careful not to accumulate too much of an item that is dropping in price.

Some recommendations for merching: (1) First get some starting capital with other methods. It’s hardly worth the trouble to merch if you have one or two million coins. (2) Don’t invest all your money, or most of it, in a single item – merching may go quite wrong, and you may lose a lot of money – or have to keep an item for a long time until the price rises again. (3) For short-term merching, you can check for how much you can buy an item immediately (let’s assume it is 110,000 coins), and for how much you can sell it immediately (let’s assume it is 104,000 coins). This will result in a small loss. Then, you can buy more of the item – in this example – at a few coins above 104,000, and sell it at a few coins below 110,000. If this works, you get a profit. However, please note that prices may change quite quickly.

Various ways to earn money: I already mentioned some of these points in my previous message. I am elaborating on some of the items here. I also added some methods that I had forgotten.

* Slayer tasks: at high levels of the slayer skill, there are several monsters that drop about 1-2 million an hour. Always train with the highest-level slayer master you can access. Be sure to set the best slayer monsters as “favorites” (check the rewards, with any slayer master). At high slayer levels, those might include tormented demons (though I personally find these too hard to defeat), glacors, celestial dragons, elves (the elves in Prifddinas), muspahs, nihils, airut, ascension members, kal’gerion demons, and a few others. Some of these have quest requirements, and some need to be enabled (you pay a slayer master to assign them). You may also want to (a) pay the slayer master to extend profitable tasks by 20%; (b) cancel, or better block, unprofitable tasks.

Slayer also has the benefit that you train several skills (Slayer, combat skills, and you usually get lots of charms to train Summoning).

You can, of course, kill most monsters without having them assigned as Slayer tasks. However, usually I prefer to train one more skill, namely Slayer; also, some of the most profitable monsters (for example, airut) can only be accessed at high slayer levels. (Actually, there is so much to write about Slayer that I’ll postpone most of it for a future article.)

* Boss killing: This is supposed to be very profitable, but I don’t have much experience with it. Depending on the specific boss, it might also be risky, since some bosses can kill you quickly.

* Buying items from shops, reselling at the Grand Exchange. Good items include broad arrowheads (any slayer master; also, an NPC west of the tree patch in Taverley has a separate stock – daily profit from both ca. 310K); several types of runes (see above, under “Rune prices” – daily profit ca. 280K); battlestaves (up to 80 battlestaves from Naff, right next to Varrock Square, daily profit ca. 60K; the amount of battlestaves you can buy depends on how far you advanced on the Varrock tasks).

* Farming: You can get a profit from several high-level herbs (I don’t have much experience in this, so I won’t provide details); from cactus spines (6 spines if you completed the hard desert tasks, worth 27K, every hour and 15 minutes); morchella mushrooms (18 mushrooms if you did the elite Morytania tasks, worth 95K, every 4 hours or so).

* Making vis wax. Whether you use it yourself, or just sell it, you will either save or earn about half a million a day. It just takes a few minutes. You make this at the Runecrafting Guild; for this, you require Runecrafting level 50. You can get there quickly with a wicked hood (“teleport” option).

* Making nature runes with the free pure essence from the wicked hood. Daily profit about 138K (assuming you bought the rewards, to get 175 pure essence daily). This just takes a few minutes, and you gain runecrafting experience. (You may want to do this as one of the skills for the Jack of Trades.)

* Miscellania, also known as “The Kingdom”: After doing the two quests, “Throne of Miscellania”, and “Royal Trouble”, you have access to an activity that typically earns you over a million a week. Not much, perhaps, but (once you did the quests) it only takes you a few minutes every week. Think of it as getting 60 million extra a year, “for free”, i.e., without much effort. Use the calculator on the runescape.wikia.com site to check what items are currently most profitable. It doesn’t really matter much what items you will use yourself – if you think it does, please review the comments above about “opportunity cost”. If the items you need yourself are not the most profitable ones for Miscellania, it’s usually better to produce the profitable items, sell them, and buy whatever you need.

* Player-owned ports: If you have one, or better several, of the required skills at a high level, you can earn several millions every week here, by getting the special resources from the port and converting them into tradable items. Ports are also great to get some extra experience – sometimes you have to choose between experience, and resources.

* Skills: Of course you can also get money from various skills, especially combat skills, farming (both mentioned above already), as well as divination, mining, fishing, woodcutting, runecrafting, thieving, hunter. Most of these skills don’t get you large amounts of money per hour, but in some cases, you may find it quite convenient to combine training the skill, with getting some extra money. Then, of course, several skills basically cost you money, but can assist you in one way or another.

For additional ideas, check the site runescape.wikia.com, specifically search for “Money making guide”. Here you can choose a method that’s in agreement with your skills, quest requirements, and preference. For example, the list includes several methods that involve high-level combat; the best non-combat method is supposedly to make nature runes, using a spirit Graahk (91 runecrafting required to get 2 runes per essence).