Tip: Earning Cash On A New Player

As one of the steps in preparing to do a serious upgrade of the Runescape Newbie Guide site, I'm going through all of the comments that are in need of moderation. I'm down to 606 comments left, out of the 1080 that existed when I started wheedling down recently.

There was a great tip by Uncle Vernon that I just published to the "Starting A New Character" posting, I'd like to share it, as it's a way for a brand new character to make 10-15k without having to deal with selling to other players:

One of the easiest ways to make money is killing chickens by Varrock or Lumbridge;

1)collect about 500 feathers
2)collect 20 raw chickens
3) bury all your bones

go to port sarim and cook all chicken (raise cooking) eat them or sell them by the wilderness later, now for "the real money"; go to fishing shop and value feathers they stay from 1 gold to 4 gold, when they are 3 or 4 gold sell them 10 at a time with 500 feathers you can: make 15 to 20k, raise a little combat, and the most important... raise cooking level!!!

Thanks for the tip Uncle Vernon!

Tutorial Island And What You Can Leave With by Epza

One of the most commented-on articles on the Runescape Newbie Guide blog is the one about Starting A New Character. The comments are there mainly because I made some errors in my recommendations and some friendly folk were helping me to fix it. One of the best comments on the topic was by someone who used a player name "Epza" to test out Tutorial Island fully and reported back on their results:

NOTE! I didn't write this part that follows, this was from a comment on my blog that I thought was great and wanted to share as a post of its own.

"Epza, the character (toon) I used, was created solely for the purpose of checking the limits and boundrys of Runescape's Training Island. What follows are my findings.

On the Runescape Training Island, you can NOT go higher in any skill than level three (3). Not even one point higher. On the training island all skills are capped at level three (3).

You can melee kill as many rats as you want, and you don't even have to use food to heal with because you will never go below one (1) hitpoint. In otherwords, you won't die fighting rats on Training Island.

You can collect all the inventory items you want while on the island, but when you leave the island you will end up on the mainland with the following items in your inventory:

one bronze wood cutting axe
one tinder box
one small fishing net
one cooked shrimp
one bucket
one pot
one cooked bread
one pickaxe
one bronze dagger
one bronze sword
one wooden shield
one short bow
twenty five (25) arrows
twenty five (25) air runes
fifteen (15) body runes
six (6) water runes
four (4) earth runes
two (2) body runes

and in the mainland banks you will find:

twenty five (25) coins

Any stockpiles you made to your inventory, regardless of whether you stockpiled arrows, shrimp, bread, bronze bars or whatever, will NOT reach the mainland with you. You will get exactly that which I listed above and not a bit more.

Fishing skill-ups are a little faster on Training Island than on the mainland, and so are fire skill-ups, but leveling attack, strength, and defense are slower because you hit less often than you would with either normal rats or chickens on the mainland. This same slowness could apply to ranged, but killing chickens with free runes from the wizard might be worth considering.

But truthfully, my recommendation would have to be not to waste your time on Training Island. On Training Island you can't get loot to make money with. In the low level mainland areas, you can get loot from your kills, and loot from the kills of other players who just leave it on the ground.

And one last thing, the very easiest and quickest way for a "newbie," at least on the f2p (free to play) servers, to earn money is probably one of the most boring. It works like this:

Step 1) You get the "Rune Mysteries Quest" from Duke Horacio on the 2nd floor of the castle. (The castle you ended up in front of when came off Training Island.) You take the talisman the duke gives you to the head wizard, Sedridor, in the Wizards Tower south of Draynor Village. Sedridor wants you to take a package to Aubury, the owner of a rune shop in north east Varrock, and gives you directions to Varrock. (In the last update, Runescape made the barbarians hostile and they will now aggro newbies, so if you can't figure out how to avoid their village, don't walk through it, run.) When you find Aubury, keep in mind where he's located, and that there is a bank just north of him. Aubury gives you his notes and asks you to give them to Sedridor. Take them to Sedridor and in return he gives you the privilage of being teleported to the rune essence stones via various npc's.

Step 2) The the boring, but rewarding part. Go to the bank and store everything but your pickaxe. Wield your pickaxe. Your inventory should now be empty, the pickaxe in your hand. Go to one of the teleportation npc's and get teleported to the rune essence stones. Mine the essence (ess), fill your inventory, then use the teleportation device back to the teleporting npc. Next, go to the bank and store the twenty eight (28) ess you've mined. Now go back to the teleporting npc and repeat this operation thirty five (35) times. (I said it was boring.) 8-)

NOTE: Don't try to sell until you have at least 1000 ess. Buyers don't like piddly amounts, and you can always take breaks if it gets to boring. Oh, I almost forgot, you should be able to sell your one thousand (1000) ess for thirty thousand (30,000) if your patient--most likely to just a single buyer. If you are willing to sell for less, don't let them get you down to low, because there are buyers that will turn around and sell the thousand essences's they bought from you for 35,000.

Good hunting.

Epza"

Catching up on 1000+ blog comments

Blog comments are fun to go through.

Some are great! I've approved a great number of comments today and they now appear in the comments section of the various posts they were posted to. I especially like the friendly comments from other blog owners - when I update this site, I'll be setting up cross-linkings with some of the ones with quality content.

Some are spam - runescape gold, runescape scams disguised as helpful sites, etc. I'm sure the spammers don't really care that they get comments rejected on some sites, as their modus operandi is "spam lots, all over the place" and even a %.01 return rate on their spamming is enough of a reward for them.

Some comments, however, are well-meaning people who are probably a little frustrated, and their frustration is coming across in their attempted communications with me.

Like the guy who hadn't looked at the most recent postings on the blog to realize it hadn't been updated in over 8 months when he said, exasperated:

dude wtf top blocking all my comments and stop trying to make people thing thoughs are yur runescape stats

All ridiculousness and jest aside, I'd like to let and commenters know that I don't ignore them, exactly - but I've left this blog unattended for a while and have a lot of work to do to clear out the backlog of comments. So, if I haven't answered your question, it is likely that I haven't gotten to it in the comments yet.

And of course, because of all the spammers that abound, all of the comments in this blog need to be approved by me before they show up on the site. If the world were full of people who don't try to clog the system up for the rest of us, I wouldn't have to do this.

But it has to be said - why do my character stats threaten you so? Certainly there are many players much higher level in everything than me now? And what "accomplishment" exactly is it for me to have wasted so much time to level all those silly skills? :) :)

Silly noters. Thank you for your entertainment - good and bad.

New Runescape Project: Runescape Pals!

Are you looking to earn some extra cash in Runescape by getting a "job"?

Are you looking to buy mass amounts of raw materials to level skills, and wanting to hire a "worker"?

Maybe you're looking for a Runescape friend around your age who is also looking for friends.

Or you're looking to Join a Clan!

Or maybe even you're a Clan recruiter looking to get the word out about your new clan to join!

For all of you, and because it's fun for me, I've started this new project:

Runescape Pals - find friends, clans, jobs, workers and more!

This is a brand new roll-out and needs a few people to start the ball rolling by getting themselves listed (for free of course). I have more updates planned over the coming months as well!

Finding a Job in Runescape

One of the main things people leave notes about in my blog is about "getting a job" on Runescape to allow them to earn some cash for their decently-leveled players so that cash can be turned around and turned into the expensive, cool, unique equipments that float around from all the various sources.

How I Found Workers

When I was playing regularly, I started out as a "solo" player who would collect all of my own materials and process them all and then use them up. I became a Member partially because I wanted to make my own arrows instead of buying them, and for the first while, I was happy with this. Cash was accumulating because I mined my own ore, blacksmithed the results, and took pains to sell them in small doses to shops on different worlds to get as much cash as I could.

At some point, however, I ran across someone who offered to do some mining for me, or some wood chopping, to speed up my creation and levelling processes. Ken was 11 years old and AMAZING at making deals with others - he became my middle-man. I'd tell Ken what I wanted and how much I'd pay for it (note, I always pay well compared to the market, it's part of why Ken would work so eagerly for me), and he'd go out and buy materials for cheaper than that, and resell it to me.

Then, Ken stopped playing for a while, but I had become addicted to having someone else do a lot of collection work FOR me so I could just produce product, sell it, and get bigger, stronger and better, faster.

So, I had to find other workers.

Truthfully, I find going to a busy bank and calling out that I'm looking for a worker to gather wood in lots of 100 will get me a LOT of responses. From the "employer" end, there's no shortage of workers.

From the worker end? I could only choose one. So, how did I go about choosing?

Traits I'd Look For In Workers

Generally I am not going to have a forever-ongoing need for any one commodity on the game (logs, ore, fish), so the first thing I'd look for in an ongoing "job" situation would be for the person to have high skills in the following:

• Mining
• Woodcutting
• Fishing

At the very least, be able to mine coal and fish lobsters. Most of the logs I'd be buying off of you would be regular low-level logs for fletching into arrows, but many players would buy up every bit of Yew you have if you can advance that far and get into Members areas.

The second big thing I'd look for in a worker is the ability to sell product in lots of at least 500 at a time. Some things I'll buy in lots of 100 at a time if I absolutely must, but if I have 5 people providing 100 at a time and find one new guy who's willing to provide 500 at a time, those other 5 people are out of a "job" with me. Thus, before you offer to sell anything, gather up at least 500 of that product if at all possible, with 100 being a bare minimum.

Finding Buyers On The Web

Forums are another place you could turn to in order to sell your wares or buy wares from others - here are a few sites I found when I searched on Google this morning:

• RS Boards
• Rune Market
• Nomad Gaming Runescape Market

Note, I haven't used any of these boards myself, just did a search on 'runescape market' and keywords like that in Google to provide links here.

What's Your Favorite Runescape Market Site?

If you know of better sites to list here, be sure to let me know!

Get A PK Noob Going Quickly

Here's a great comment that I just approved on the post about The Wilderness, aka "wildy":

Hey I have some tips for new players for the Wild(lvl 3 players). First, sell all the stuff you start out with. make sure you go to the specialty shops to do this. then you should have enough for bronze pl8 and legs. Then buy a bronze or iron weapon. Then get defence and attack to 5. then unequip everything and go into the Wild. Make sure no one follows you. Stay away from mosnters and run through the graveyard. You should find a steel dagger. equip it. Next find some ruins and get steel legs that are there. Also theres gold ore there. Then speed back to non-wild area. There now uyou have steel legs and a dagger an money from selling the gold ore.

Excellent advice! And since some of those things reset, by doing it every time you can, you'll earn a bit of extra cash as well, which is always important!!

Mage Training Minigame strategy by Drawrof

Another great contribution by Drawrof, who has given us some great content in this blog over the years - Thanks D, hope you're still checking in periodically while the site had been dormant.


Drawrof writes:

"I spent some time in the Mage Training minigame. In particular I went to the Alchemist Playground. I took a fire staff and 100 natures. What I thought would be a short trip ended up lasting a long time. Here was my stategy.

1 - Casting High Alchemy gains 65 experience.
2 - Waiting for "Green Arrow" allows for all of that indicated item to be converted for free.
3 - I would accumulate 8 of a particular item, those that had not been given the green arrow lately.
4 - Every now and then I would convert 30 without the arrow.
5 - the items are sorted in the cupboards in clockwise order, according to the list (Boots, Kite, Helm, Emerald, Long) So if you are looking for a long and you find a helm, more 2 cupboards to the right and you will find the long.
6 - do not save coins for big deposit. Your computer may crash and you will lose all the coins. Therefore it is best to continue to deposit.
7 - although Im level 69 mage, this method is best for a level 21 member mage. The money that you collect for low alch compare to high alch is the same. Therefore the magic bonus of 2 times the money deposited is the same.

Result.

With only 100 Natures I was able to deposit over 10,000 gp. Averaging about 10 gp per cast, or 1000 high alchs.

total Experience:
1000 High Alchs- 65,000
10,000 gp X 2 - 20,000 bonus
total 85,000

Yes you do not get the gps of high alching mith armor. However, most mages high alch at a loss. This method takes discipline and sometime. However, you can cast an infinate number of alch spells with only 1 nature rune and 5 fire runes in your inventory.

This makes mage advancement abosolutely free after level 21 for all members. If you were to do the same for low alch at level 21, you could be level 45 in one after noon. try it out."



Wow! Excellent, I'm always into free skill levelling, myself! Great way to save cash is to not spend it after all.

Reader Tip: Powerlevelling your PK character

Some people really take some excellent time in their notes in my blog, I'm blown away by the detail and amount of information shared! Thank you!

Here's one such donation, by an Anonymous writer, in response to the post about Mage and Range: Powerful but Expensive:

NOTE! I didn't write this but thought it was good enough to pull to the front and share.

"its pretty simple if u wanna b good pker.

a)fish. skip sardines, pike, and tuna when training. when u can fish lobbies, get about 100 cooked and sell for 25-30k

b)buy tons and tons of bronze and iron arrows with the money.

c)kill chickens untill ur range is 10, then go to cows untill 20, then go to barbarians untill it is 30(make sure to bury all bones u get). now here comes the big money

d)get a brass key and go to the hill giants. there are multiple ranger spots that you can use. make sure to train on rapid, keep ONLY THE BIG BONES and expensive runes(natures, laws, deaths, chaos)

e)sell all your big bones when you run out of arrows. they sell from 300-410 each. buy more arrows and get more big bones, do that untill u got 60-70 range( i recommend 70)

f) buy as many rune ess as u can in world 1-4. ull hav like 2-3 mil at least so u shouldnt hav to worry about prices too much

g)do runes mysteries, and start making airs until u get 17 runecrafting. then, make minds until u get 22 rc(make sure to use edgeville bank for mind runes), then airs untill 28 rc, minds until 33 rc, airs until 39 rc, minds until 44 rc, and so on until u run out of ess

h)get mage to 13, then start using fire strike at hill giants. if u feel like it, then u can go to the leser demons and kill from there, but make sure u got good connection, food, and not too many runes(keep it at 500 minds and 1k airs per trip)

i)ull hav tons of money, so use it. i suggest gettin all the deaths and addy arrows that u can. get some ess also so u can make airs and fires.

j) now heres the fun part...owning every1 in sight! bring teleport varrok runes, binds, 100 fire blasts, and 100 addy arrows in ur inventory. here is the suit u gotta wear to walk on every1:

helm: blue mage hat
sheild:none
ammy: power ammy, glory ammy for p2p
shirt: blue mage top
pants: best d-hide chaps u can wear
weapon: best shortbow that u can use

find sum1 with full rune in the wilderness in a less crowded world, but make sure that he is max 10 lvls higher than u( i suggest varrok wildy, they like to go ther). now, most of the time, he will attk u. bind him once and run. u will weigh about 20 kg and the full rune person about 45 kg, so he will run out of energy fast. when he starts walking, you start walking also. keep taking him deeper and deeper and start ranging him down. this is where multiple binds are useful. when ranging him down, also use fire blasts every 2 range hits. if he starts running, then bind him. there are rarely any full rune peeps taht can "run" from u. they like always die

Reader Tip: Chaos Rune Drop Spot, Powerlevelling Magic

Thecutezapp contributed a great little nugget of information I'd like to bring up to the front of the blog:

"Buy an air staff, lots of chaos runes and lots and lots of earths. Go to Varrock sewers and use the crumble undead spell on the skeletons, they drop chaos runes so you can stay ages. I got my mage up from 39 to 50 in one night!!!"

Great little tip for non-members, since Chaos runes are a difficult drop to find!

Where else can Chaos runes be found for non-members?

Merchanting (Price Gouging) -vs- Scamming

(aka, "On Scamming, part 2" Part one can be found here)

On the continued topic of Scamming on the free online role playing game Runescape, I'd like to add some of my own thoughts.

I've often heard people cry "scam!" when really, they're mislabelling what just happened to them - they've either been price-gouged by an or are uninformed about what they're buying, and neither are really the seller's fault nor problem.

Not the seller's fault??! What on earth do I mean by that??!

I mean this:

If you're desperately looking for an item, and someone charges you twice the regular cost for it, and you pay that price they request, that's opportunism, aka price-gouging. Personally, I like to sell things to people who are desperate to get them, precisely due to the fact that I can ask for 1.5-2x the normal selling price, and I'll generally get it.

In real life, the government protects us as citizens from price-gouging, as an attempt to keep things "fair". In online multi-player games, the game government (Jagex) is a much smaller presence, and thus Merchanting (sometimes negatively referred to as price-gouging) is NOT bad nor evil, since Jagex is more worried about other types of "crimes". The raw truth is that the prepared adventurer will think ahead about what they're going to do in the future, and NOT get caught so desperately needing something that an opportunistic player could overcharge for.

Regarding the "uninformed buyer" thing, if someone tries to sell you a pair of white boots for 5k and you buy them, not knowing they cost under 50 coins at a shop in Al Kahrid, it's NOT a scam. Ignorance of the value or availability of objects is not an excuse to shift the blame of you feeling "ripped off" onto the seller.

Personally, I refer to the following web forum page when considering all my buys and sells:

UPDATED SEPT 2007!

http://www.zybez.net/priceguide.php

Page 1 and 2 have prices for almost everything on the game, and the post is updated as required.

There ya go, more information you may not have known.

If you have suggestions for topics for me to post about, please leave comments!

Part three of this On Scamming topic can be found here.
Part four got lost somewhere but will probably come in the future.

Starting a new character

Sept 2007 update: NOTE! Some of what may have worked here doesn't seem to work that way anymore - namely, you can't stock up on things from Tutorial Island to use later, nor can you advance past level 3 on the island. See the notes at the end of this post for more detail

So, you want to play Runescape, or have played it for a while already but are dirt poor with no belongings and you want to start over. That's cool, stuff happens, sometimes it's just so we can change our names.

You venture over to http://www.runescape.com and click on the "Create Account" button under "Main Features". You agree to the terms and conditions (please read them first), and you select your player name. The system will let you know if your player name isn't available and give you some options for related names to select instead if the one you want is already taken.

Remember, no profanity in the name, or you may get your account cancelled.

When you first connect to the game, you're asked to select a gender for your character (we are all human, no orc, troll, etc races here) configure the look of your online character (aka Avatar) by cycling through the options for the various body parts. You can change the color and the look of your clothing, hair and body. You can change this later in the game but it costs money and requires some looking around to find, so choose carefully!

Once you are satisfied with your Avatar, click on 'Accept'.

The view you're put into now is "the standard view" for the game. At this time it's great to use your arrow keys to see the effect on the view, so you know how to adjust your perspective of the area you're in.

The Runescape Tutorial is designed for all new players, and all new players (ie: any "new character" you create) are required to go through the tutorial completely in order to get into the rest of the "game". Unless you've been through it before, don't rush through this part of the game - you can gather valuable tools and materials that will be tremendously helpful in getting you going once you hit the "real world of Runescape".

One of the clicking challenges of the game is that sometimes there are things in the way of what you want to click - the fire for cooking the shrimp, the various NPC's (non-player characters) you interact with, etc. The simplest solution is to employ the right-click strategy, and instead of left-clicking on something that is obscured, right-click and then select the correct option from the list that appears. This can be especially important when you're sharing your cooking fire and someone stands in the fire to do their cooking (and no, they don't get burned, it's a funny quirk of the game).

There are areas in the tutorial area that could be quite lucrative for a new player starting out - don't be afraid to smelt a bunch of copper bars and smith a bunch of daggers for sale later on.

While killing the rats with the sword, feel free to stick around and kill as many as you can before you exit the cage that first time, as you cannot return. Eat your cooked shrimp and bread to help you heal so you can kill more. You are gaining real experience and can advance skill levels while in the tutorial, and you know you're attacking safe monsters that way as well! Before you leave the cage, be sure to run around and pick up any arrows laying around. These arrows will stay with you when you leave Tutorial Island.

Once you get your bow and arrow set, don't waste your arrows killing more than one rat at this time. You can't get back into the cage to retrieve the arrows, and you want to bring as many off of Tutorial Island as possible.

Once off of Tutorial Island, do yourself a favor and talk to the Lumbridge Guide. Read all he has to talk about, but especially the information about where to find a bank. As a new player with very few belongings, you want to protect your belongings by banking everything you don't need to be carrying around with you. Even as a high level player, I keep my inventory small and focused on the specific task at hand.

Visit the bank in Draynor Village, following the directions the Guide offered you, and stow away everything but your bronze axe. Whatever you do, don't go into battle until you've stowed away your items! Without money you can't purchase replacements, and NOBODY likes beggars. It's important to be self-sufficient and that includes being able to go on without great pain if you die and lose everything you were carrying.

Now your inventory is ready to be filled with logs that you can store in the bank until you can find a player willing to buy the logs. And for 100 logs, you should be able to get 3,000-5,000 coins! That kind of money will be great for buying armor for your upcoming battles.

You're off to a great start!