Grind The Rail

The Unofficial Runescape Guide to Everything

Current guides are widely copy/paste adfarms, often with outdated, misleading, or incorrect information. Runescape isn't that hard to play, it's mostly just a matter of knowing where things are, and how to use them. This knol contains some useful tips to minimize time spent wandering about looking for this vital information.

Part 1: The Grand Exchange. Slightly NW of Varrock, it'll look like an octagon on the map. This is the best place to find materials, typically for much less than shop prices, and offering much greater variety. Also, it's got a bank conveniently inside it. You'll be here a lot if you're out to make money, or training certain skills, such as firemaking or cooking. Part 2: Making Money. For any money making plan, keep it simple. Your resources are your time, your skills, certain items, your knowledge, and your bank and exchange slots. Any good money making plan must require comparatively few slots, so make sure it's something widely demanded. Typical examples are items needed in bulk for grinding up skills. I'll start out by assuming relatively low or no skills, but over time, more methods will become available to you. Here's a list of good items to collect, and where to find them.

• Feathers. They stack, you can find them at the chicken farm NW of Lumbridge, the starter town. Incidentally, this is the absolute best place for a new player to grind. Level 1 mobs, tons of drops, and you can train half a dozen skills at once.
• Bones. You can find these guys anywhere, and frankly, prayer is a huge pain to level. Unless you're a member, the payout is pretty weak, so selling bones can earn a decent profit. The downside is, they take up a lot of inventory space.
• Rune Essences. Complete the Rune Mysteries quest, and you'll gain access to the rune essence mining area. The fastest access to this is speaking to the shopkeeper in Varrock, just south of the eastern bank. As a fringe benefit, you get a bit of mining exp. You'll need a pick.
• Ore. Smithing is remarkably painful to level, so there is always a great demand for ore, especially coal and iron. You can progress to mining iron relatively quickly, and incidentally, iron offers the best mining exp. This is a great combination of money and skill, but suffers from rather long walk times per load. For iron, the mine SE of Varrock is best, for coal, the barbarian village to the west of Varrock. You'll need a pick.
• Wood. Fast and easy to collect, logs are used extensively in fletching, a member skill, and are also used in firemaking. The lowest and highest logs sell best, with middle logs such as willow sitting on the market for ages. I reccomend stashing those for burning if you opt to cut them. Basic logs can be found almost anywhere, but the fastest cut/bank run is just west of varrock, and has the advantage of oak trees as well. Ok money, but bulky per run. You'll need an axe.

• HP. Your life. You will gain 1 xp in it for every four you gain in the other combat skills(usually), so don't bother with it really. It'll take care of itself as you do other stuff.
• Defence. Keeps you alive. However, it does not speed your exp gathering speed, so prioritize this lower than your damage dealing skill. Just keep it high enough to avoid running for food constantly.
• Prayer. Slows down quickly, and leveling it by buying bones is extremely expensive. It suddenly gets very nice for members at level 49, but otherwise, it's a lot of work for little payout. I advise not trying to train this skill, just bury bones whenever you need inventory space.
• Ranged. Strong against mages, weak against melee. Given that melee is the most common build, this is a serious downside. Also has the disadvantage of requiring a lot of expensive ammo. As a free player, you cannot learn to make this.
• Magic. Costs runes, but unlike ranged, you can make many of these. Also, the fastest leveling of the combat skills, thanks to the high damage. If you do have money, once you have your first teleport, buy a stack of law runes, wield an air staff, and mash the button until you run dry. It's expensive, but insanely fast, and each higher teleport(save for teleport home) gets you more exp per click. Also, has the advantage of acting as magic defence as well as offense, so it's a must-get skill even for non-magical builds.
• Attack. How frequently you hit mobs. Keep this high enough that damage is pretty routine against whatever you're attacking. It's necessary for any melee build, and generally should be higher than defence for rapid leveling. A higher level in this also grants access to better weapons.
• Strength. The #1 skill for any melee build, strength directly controls your damage. Pour as many exp into this, as rapidly as possible to maximize your leveling speed. Combined with a good weapon, you can be dealing great damage in short order.

• Woodcutting. Take an axe, cut down a tree, get logs. It's dead simple, and rather fast. As you level, you can use higher, and faster axes. This can be a profitable endevour, or you can use it to fuel firemaking.
• Firemaking. Pretty much a profitless skill, but like woodcutting, it's easy. It's also the fastest skill to level in the game, so if you want level 99 in something, this is the fastest way to get it. It pairs well with woodcutting, or you can dump unholy amounts of money at the grand exchange, and burn there. All you really need is a tinderbox and some supply of logs.
• Crafting. Pots, jugs, grinding wheat into flour, spinning wool into thread. This is sort of a catchall category. This makes it a bit of a pain to skill up, but starting by making wheat into flour en masse is a good way to start, and leaves you with raw materials for cooking. Unfortunately, most of the good bits in this skill are members only.
• Fishing. The art of producing fish from water, this is also pretty easy. Start out on the coast S of Lumbridge, nets can be found for free on the ground. Merely by netting crayfish and shrimp, you can level up fishing rather rapidly, though you'll need a fishing pole and bait to catch the really good stuff later. Couples well with cooking, just bring some logs and a tinderbox with to cook your catch.
• Cooking. Food in runescape is the main method of being healed, and can be used in combat. However, it's typically very inconvenient to buy food anywhere near leveling areas, so some skill in cooking is essential. I advise starting out by cooking fish, but it's also used in many later quests, and a wild variety of food can be made with it. Good market opportunities for some of the high end food too. Side note: Due to the near constant firemaking trainers at Grand Exchange, it's a great place to grind cooking.
• Mining. Quite profitable if you don't smelt everything...and even a little profitable if you do. You'll probably start out mining copper and tin in equal quantities south of Lumbridge, but once you hit iron, the mine SE of varrock will be your best friend. Coal is also quite lucrative, and at higher levels, the Al Kharid mine is quite attractive, with a wide variety of minerals.
• Smelting. Possibly the slowest of all skills to level, smithing is the art of turning high value ore into medium value bars into low value items. One of the major downsides to smithing is that since it levels much slower than mining, you end up mining low grade ore longer than you otherwise would. It's a fun skill from the standpoint of creating items, but sadly, it's a dead loss as a moneymaker. If you want it, do the quest "The Knights Sword", it'll get you to level 21 IIRC from level 1. Rather a nice boost, especially given that the quest has other rewards.
• Runecraft. This skill is unlocked by completing the quest "Rune mysteries". Its pretty straightforward, but involves a lot of running, so make sure you have max energy before starting. In addition to being a good money maker, when leveled up, it allows you to craft huge multiples of basic runes..up to ten for every blank rune you bring. This skill definitely gets better with higher ranks.
• Agility. While technically a members skill, this skill still works in F2P mode, unlike other members privledges. Therefore, if you're a member for a short time, grab it. It increases the rate at which your energy recharges...at max level, it's about three times faster. This makes a huge difference for lowering travel times, and it trains fairly quickly. I hit level 30 in one session.

Part 4: Wrapping it all up. A few misc tips before I finish. Don't swap over to a membership before total level 500+, and all quests done. Member quests almost invariably have high requirements, and most new areas can be accessed only through quests. You get better use of your paid time if you've already got the necessary skill, or at least most of it. Money is overrated. You can always earn more, usually quickly. Skill, however, is permanent. Focus on skill first, money second. Most guide sites have outdated information regarding random events. Most of them now give an event package, allowing you to select your reward. You almost invariably want the magic lamp, since it gives 10*current level exp to the skill of your choice. Use it on the toughest high skill you have at the moment. Many events also allow you to bank items on you(maze, gravedigger events, for example). Abuse this to save yourself a run to town by banking everything you don't actually need. Macros tend to die on random events. So, if you try cheating, odds are it'll be noticed. Macroing doesnt work well in busy areas anyhow, so in general, its not worth the time to set it up. On the other hand, word is that random events happen more often if you fail them. Given the size of the rewards, this might actually be a good thing. More research is definitely needed on this new development.