TruthScape.com - Bird’s Nests and Crushed Nests

Bird’s nests are ground using a pestle and mortar to make crushed nests, one of the most valuable secondary ingredients in the game. They are used in Saradomin brews, which are both a staple of powerleveling herblorists due to the XP they provide, and an essential potion for fighting difficult monsters. The high demand for these potions has led to increasing prices for crushed nests, which has been exacerbated by the difficulty in obtaining them. There are several different sources for nests, but as it turns out, none of them let you easily get them in large quantities as is possible with other seconds.

While cutting wood you may occasionally receive a message in your chat window saying: “A bird’s nest falls from the tree”. When this occurs you have about a minute to look on the ground, find the nest and pick it up. Within the nest will be either a tree seed or a ring, and the nest itself can be ground to make a crushed nest.

This is generally considered the “standard” way of getting nests, because it is the original method by which they were obtained. The problem with getting them this way is that it is very slow: you can only get a few an hour, which is why the other sources were eventually added.

There are two ways to increase the number of nests you get while Woodcutting. First, the more logs you cut, the more chances you have to get nests, so you will get more per hour by cutting easy trees like willows (a standard training tree) than yews or magic trees. Second, wearing a strung rabbit’s foot is claimed by Jagex to give a better chance of having nests drop, though there’s no practical way to test this.

After completing the quest Throne of Miscellania, you gain the ability to access the Kingdom of Miscellania minigame, which allows you to pay virtual workers to collect various resources for you. Each type of resource you choose gives you a basic set of items as well as bonus items; if you select maples as one of your resources, you get lots of maple logs, and also bird’s nests as your bonus. The original quest gives you 10 workers you can allocate in the kingdom, while the sequel, Royal Trouble, gives you 5 more.

You can put a maximum of 10 workers on maples, and as long as you keep your approval rating high and at least 750k of money in the coffers, you will get approximately 10 nests per day from your workers. These nests can have tree seeds, rings or bird’s eggs in them. You can also get some additional nests by putting some of the other 5 workers on hardwood (teak or mahogany). However, you get far fewer nests from these than you do for maples, and most people don’t consider this cost effective.

Since the NPCs are effectively doing the work for you, this is a very attractive method for herblorists to slowly collect nests over time. You just have to keep an eye on your approval rating (“favor”) and also add money periodically by speaking to Advisor Ghrim. I have a more complete discussion of this minigame in the section on alternative ways of gathering herbs.

The giant mole is one of the most interesting monsters in RuneScape, because Jagex made it challenging not in the usual manner—by simply making it dangerous—but rather by requiring planning and strategy to kill it. In fact, I enjoy killing the giant mole so much that I wrote a detailed guide to hunting it, which is part of the TruthScape Monster Secret series.

In addition to its normal drop, every time the mole is killed it also drops one mole claw and 1 to 3 mole skins. Each of these can be traded to Wyson, the gardener in Falador Park, for bird’s nests; some nests are empty, while others contain rings, allotment seeds, herb seeds, or rarely, tree seeds (Figure 217).

**Figure 217: A Good Source of Bird’s Nests**
After getting mole claws and skins from the giant mole, trade them to Wyson for bird’s nests, which may contain seeds (usually allotment seeds) or rings.

High-level players can kill the mole up to 15 times an hour, so getting 40 or more nests per hour is possible. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is actually the fastest way in the game of getting nests, by far, short of buying them from other players.

These rather annoying low-level monsters live on the walls in the Dorgesh-Kaan South Dungeon. Unattackable in their default state, you must ring a special item called a slayer bell in their vicinity, which causes them to jump down from the wall and attack you, at which point you can respond. They are level 51, have 52 hitpoints and require level 39 Slayer to fight.

Jagex claims that these beasties occasionally drop mole claws, which can be traded to Wyson like the claws from the giant mole. If they do, though, they are exceedingly rare—I’ve never gotten one.

This is a monster encountered as part of the Grim Tales quest, and also drops mole claws. Like molanisks, though, they are very rare drops, so I mention them only for completeness.

Saradomin brews are not one of my recommended training potions, because they give a lot of XP but at a substantial loss per potion. If you are very wealthy and don’t mind spending many millions to powertrain more quickly than is possible with more cost-effective options, your only viable option is to buy crushed nests in bulk from other players.

If you want to get nests to make brews for your own use, your obvious choice is to get the nests slowly and passively, or quickly and actively. The slow but steady approach is to collect them as you train Woodcutting, while also making use of the Kingdom of Miscellania. The fast approach is to spend time killing the giant mole and trading for nests. (Of course, you can combine these approaches as well, to get nests even faster.)

For many herblorists, Miscellania is particularly a “no brainer”, not just for the nests but the seeds they contain, which can be sold for cash or used to help synergistically train Farming. Just remember that there is an opportunity cost here: by choosing maples, you lose out on the ability to get other useful resources such as raw fish, coal or flax, which can help other skills.

Also, while the nests and seeds are valuable, so many people choose this option now that the value of maple logs has been driven very low. With most Miscellania options you pay less for the basic resources than they are worth—for example, flax only costs 40 here but sells for over 80 each to other players—but you pay your workers about 56 gp for each maple log, and they only sell for around 42. So while you are getting useful nests and seeds, you are paying a high indirect price for them.