 |
|
|
 |
Sponsored links make TruthScape possible. See here for more information about ads.
|
Getting Free Herblore XP From Unwanted Herbs
Most players choose to leave behind less-valuable herbs in order to cut down on banking time. Their unwanted herbs languish on the ground, sitting there for around two minutes until they disappear. These herbs represent wasted XP potential: just as you’ve probably seen players bring with a chisel to cut sapphires they then drop for lack of space, you can do something very similar with many herbs that you don’t plan to keep.
Before the introduction of grimy herbs, all herb drops were unidentified herbs; you’d get a drop and it would just say “Herb”, so you didn’t even know what it was until you picked it up and identified it. Now you know what you have as soon as you get the drop, so you don’t need to bother picking up and cleaning grimy herbs you don’t want to keep. This saves time, but it also means you lose the XP you would have obtained before from being forced to identify every herb drop.
To get maximum XP from all herb drops, you should always pick up each herb and clean it before dropping it again. This does take a couple of seconds, so perhaps it is not worth doing for guams and marrentills, which give only 2.5 and 3.8 Herblore XP respectively. But even tarromins give 5 XP, and if you clean a dozen of them on a trip that’s 60 bonus XP per trip, which can add up. Higher-level herbs are always worth cleaning before they are dropped.
Serum 207 is a specialty tarromin potion used in the Shades of Mort’ton quest and minigame, and one that also has value as a training potion because it uses a very cheap secondary ingredient: ashes. Whether it is worth making in quantity as a straight training method is debatable, because tarromins cost over 300 gp each and you could use them for strength potions. But if you were planning to leave the tarromin behind in the dungeon anyway, then making Serum 207 from it is a no-brainer: you get 50 Herblore XP basically for just the cost of a water vial.
What makes Serum 207 so perfect for getting free XP is that not only does it use a cheap second, but it’s the only potion you can make in reverse! Just get some water-filled vials and add ashes to them to get unfinished ash potions, called “ash potion(unf)”, then bring these with you to any dungeon where you’re fighting for herb drops. Since most of the herb droppers are very easy to kill, you’ll generally not need food, so there will be lots of space for these to be brought along. (The one exception may be aberrant spectres.)
When you get a tarromin, clean it, then add it to the ash potion. You’ll get Serum 207, and earn 50 XP—plus 5 XP for cleaning the herb. Then just drop the potion. Repeat this for each tarromin you get.
Even better, some monsters drop either water vials or ashes in addition to herbs, so you don’t need to bring with the other component. Flesh crawlers and killerwatts are both good herb droppers that also drop ashes, so you can just bring with vials of water, picking up tarromins and ashes as you get them. Conversely, you will get vial of water drops from chaos druids, chaos druid warriors and cave crawlers, so you need only bring with ashes to these monsters (Figure 175).
|
The number of ash potions (or just vials or ashes) to bring with depends on how long you plan to fight between trips to the bank; you’ll have to experiment to find out. If you bring too many ash potions, just leave them behind to take herbs; if you bring too few, you’ll waste a few tarromins. There’s a randomness factor so you can’t be perfect every time.
If you have Lunar Magicks enabled, have completed Dream Mentor and are fighting flesh crawlers, you can really get fancy. After you make Serum 207, empty the vial rather than dropping it; once you’ve got a bunch of emptied-out serums, cast Humidify to refill them and you can make more when you get tarromin and ash drops. This probably isn’t worth the bother, but I thought it was pretty cool concept. J
Along the same lines as the Serum 207 advice above, you can also bring with eyes of newt—which are very cheap—and use them to make attack potions from unwanted guam leaves, dropping them afterwards. This also requires that you bring vials of water, unless fighting a monster that drops those as well, like chaos druids.
In my discussion of making herb tars, I mentioned that harralander tar is a great training method, depending on the relative cost of the items involved. Sometimes, though, harralander tar is barely worth more than swamp tar, so making it when you have to pay 900 gp each for harralanders becomes too expensive.
What if you could make it using harralander that was effectively free, though? Well, inventory space is often in short supply in dungeons, so many players often drop herbs below ranarr, including harralanders. If you weren’t planning to keep those herbs, they are effectively free! This means that even if harralander tar is worth no more than swamp tar, it’s still worth doing for the 72.5 XP you get. And since the tar stacks, it’s a way to “compact” these herbs while conserving space.
If you plan to use this method, I recommend first pre-positioning a bunch of pestle and mortars in your bank. This will allow you to “waste” these items, letting you take home an extra herb on each trip. You can buy them in bulk on the Grand Exchange, or 28 at a time from Herblore stores such as the ones in Taverley and Entrana.
To take advantage of the method, bring with a pestle and mortar and a stack of swamp tars to the dungeon with you. As with Serum 207, the number to bring depends on how many harralanders you figure you’ll get. The exact number is not as important here, because swamp tars and herb tars stack; ideally, though, you’d like not to have any left over, because if you have to take unused swamp tar back to the bank, that’s one fewer spot for herbs. Be sure you take a multiple of 15; I normally take with 90, 105 or 120 swamp tars for an herb gathering session, depending on what I am fighting and where.
You can mix the harralander into the tar each time you get one as a drop, or save up several and mix them up at once (Figure 176). Continue until you either run out of swamp tar or have to leave the dungeon for whatever reason. Then drop the pestle and mortar to make room for one additional herb before leaving the dungeon. Go to the bank, store the harralander tar, and get out more swamp tar and a pestle and mortar. Later on you can sell the harralander tar, unless of course you’d rather keep it to use yourself.
|
|
Home - Table Of Contents - Contact Us
TruthScape.com (http://www.TruthScape.com) - Information about RuneScape You Need!
Last Update: May 28, 2008
© Copyright 2007-2008 Charles M. Kozierok. All Rights Reserved.
All information is provided for free use at your own risk. Not responsible for any loss resulting from the use of this site.
WARNING: All content on TruthScape is protected by relevant copyright laws in the United States and other countries, and may not be reproduced in any form without expressed written permission. Violators will be prosecuted to the maximum extent permissible by law.