TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore - Techniques for Obtaining Vials, Secondary Ingredients and Special Items                 9  Special Methods for Getting Essential Secondary Ingredients

Blue Dragon Scales and Dragon Scale Dust Bird’s Nests and Crushed Nests

Chocolate dust is used to make regular energy potions, and is one of the least expensive and most widely used secondary ingredients. It can be bought already ground, but usually is made from chocolate bars that are purchased in larger quantities from stores or other players, or picked up from spawns. And while there are several places to get it, as we’ll see, they are not creating equal…

In late 2007, Jagex changed the way RuneScape stores operate; they now have two different sections: main stock and player stock. In theory, main stock is supposed to represent the core set of items the store sells, while player stock is, ta-da, items sold to the store by players.

In practice, though, some stores have no main stock at all, yet keep an inventory of items in the player stock section. This is done when Jagex doesn’t want those items to be available in infinite quantity, usually because the items are ones also produced by players, or the store is too convenient to a bank.

The problem is that, due to an anti-RWT measure, items in player stock normally sell for the average price on the Grand Exchange. This meant that for many months, the best stores for buying chocolate had them priced at over 100 gp each, which was a real bummer for herblorists. Fortunately, on April 9, 2008, Jagex changed these stores back to selling their player stock items for fixed, lower prices!

With this change, the three player stock chocolate stores are “back in business”. The stores that have infinite stock are still potentially useful, though, if you want to buy large volumes.

There are three stores that sell fixed quantities of chocolate and/or chocolate dust:

• Culinaromancer’s Chest: Located in the basement of Lumbridge castle, this chest sells a variety of foodstuffs, including a maximum of 50 chocolate bars if you complete all of Recipe for Disaster (Figure 216). The price is 26 gp.
  
  
• Grand Tree Groceries: This is the food shop near the gnome cuisine minigame on the second floor (first floor in the UK) of the Grand Tree. Hudo has a stock of 20 chocolate bars and 10 chocolate dust, both at 20 gp each.
  
  
• Funch’s Fine Groceries: This shop is on the same floor as Grand Tree Groceries, but on the east side, near Blurberry Bar. It has the same stock as Hudo’s shop: 20 bars and 10 dust at 20 gp each.
  

  Figure 216: Culinaromancer’s Chest Chocolate

  The chest is the fastest way of getting small quantities of chocolate bars.

  
  

The advantage of these shops is that they are convenient, especially the Culinaromancer’s chest, which is also a bank! This means you can easily get what you need quickly with a minimum of fuss. The disadvantage is that since they have fixed stock, if you want to buy in quantity you have to world hop. And since the stock is shared by many players, it is always possible that a shop may be sold out anyway even when you do hop.

Five other shops in RuneScape have main stocks of chocolate bars at a price of 20 gp each. These supplies are infinite, so you can buy as many as you want, but on the flip side, they are generally farther from the bank than the player stock shops. Since they are all the same, what matters most is which lets us get chocolate the fastest; Table 42 shows the results of my tests, listed from best to worst.

All figures include running back and forth to the bank except for Wydin, for which I banked in Draynor Village, ran to his shop and then used an amulet of glory to teleport back to Draynor. You can see that even though many people think of the Port Sarim food shop as a good place to buy materials, it’s pretty far from the bank and thus, also far from ideal. (You also have to add time to recharge your amulets every 100 runs or so.)

The best store is the one in Nardah, because Rokuh’s stall is only one click north of the bank. Taking into account time to restore run energy, you can still get about 3,700 bars per hour. The store in Ardougne is a second-best option if you don’t need many bars, but you’re looking at more like 2,200 bars per hour. Getting to Nardah is a bit of a nuisance, but as you can see, it’s worth the trip if you plan to buy a lot of chocolate. To get there, use a pharaoh’s sceptre to teleport to the Agility Pyramid, and then run northeast. If you don’t have a sceptre, take a magic carpet from Al-Kharid to Pollnivneach, then run south to the other carpet area and take one to Nardah.

There are two chocolate bar spawns: one in the Cook’s Guild and another in the Lost City (Zanaris). The one in the guild is on a table along the north wall of the ground floor. The one in Zanaris is near the range south of the bankers; it comes with the added annoyance of a fairy chef chastising you every time you grab a bar.

Both of these have a ridiculously slow respawn rate of 30 seconds, even on a full world. Needless to say, there is absolutely no point in ever standing around for 14 minutes to get a full load of chocolate when you can buy over 1,000 in that amount of time!

The difference in price between whole and ground chocolate is, at present, only around 35 gp. It is not worth bothering to do this unless you are grinding bars for your own use.

I normally suggest that players just buy chocolate dust on the Grand Exchange for making potions, and I still do: it’s a cheap item and getting it is tedious. Yet I was surprising by my own analysis, finding that you can save a rather substantial amount of money by getting it yourself. A half hour spent buying chocolate bars in Nardah and a half hour spent grinding will yield about 1,850 chocolate dust. The current price of chocolate dust is 130 gp each on the GE, and the bars cost 20 at the store, so this represents a savings of about 204k for an hour’s worth of work. Not great, but not bad either—though rather sleep-inducing.

If you only need a small number of chocolate bars, the Culinaromancer’s chest is the obvious choice.

Blue Dragon Scales and Dragon Scale Dust Bird’s Nests and Crushed Nests