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Efficiently Cleaning Herbs Making Potions Efficiently

Much as grimy herbs need to be cleaned before they can be used in potions, several secondary ingredients must be processed before you can use them. Most of them are ground with a mortar and pestle, while some use alternate methods. There are a few tricks to preparing these items, depending on the nature of the item and how it is processed. Let’s take a look.

WARNING: Processing secondary ingredients, like cleaning herbs, is very “click-intensive”. Don’t do it for long periods of time, or you could potentially start to strain your fingers, hand or wrist (if you don’t first fall asleep from boredom.) See the discussion of repetitive stress injuries for more information.

What these items have in common is that they are ground using a pestle and mortar, and their default (left-click) option is “Use”. We can grind them quickly by using a “back-and-forth” technique.

To begin, get to a bank that can be opened with a single click, such as the one at Castle Wars, or the Culinaromancer’s chest in Lumbridge Castle. Clear your inventory, withdraw a pestle and mortar set, and move it to the bottom-right corner of your inventory. Next, follow these steps (to make the explanation easier I’ll use unicorn horns as an example, but it’s the same for the others):

1. Find the item (unicorn horns) you want to grind in your bank, right-click and choose “Withdraw All” to take out 27 items. (Ignore the dumb warning message.)
   
   
2. Left-click on the pestle and mortar. Then left-click twice on the horn just to the left of it in your inventory. You will see that the horn you clicked is not changed, but rather the one at the top left of the screen has now become dust, and a message is shown in your chat window. The horn you had double-clicked is now highlighted, ready for the next step.
   
   
3. Now, left-click twice on the pestle and mortar. Another horn is now ground to dust, the one to the right of the top left one you did before.
   
   
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, going back and forth until all of the horns are ground. On the last step you won’t need to double-click.
   
   
5. Bank the unicorn horn dust, and repeat the process starting at step 1.

The overall process is shown in Figure 157. Each inventory load takes around 25 seconds, so you can do about 3,900 per hour.

Until recently, making chocolate dust was a hassle—you couldn’t use the method just described, because the left-click option for them is “Eat”. So you’d have to go back and forth 27 times. Fortunately, Jagex put in a “Make X” option for grinding chocolate, so all you do now is take out 27 bars, left-click the pestle and mortar, left-click one bar and tell the game to grind them all for you.

This is still slower than the method above. It takes 40 seconds, so you can grind 2,430 per hour.

Toad’s legs are obtained simply by left-clicking each toad once; the legs are retained and the rest of the toad, er, hops away (well, I guess it doesn’t, since it has no hind legs; I’m not sure what happens to the toad, but whatever. J) This is effectively the same procedure as cleaning grimy herbs, so follow those instructions. Just be careful not to click twice, as clicking toad’s legs causes you to eat them (yuck!)

Silver dust (for Guthix balance potions) is ground not with a pestle and mortar, but in the Ectonfuntus in Port Phasmatys. You probably won’t make this in bulk, but if you need to, here’s how to do it.

Start by putting on a duelling ring, amulet of glory or other jewelry that lets you teleport quickly to a bank, and withdraw your ectophial. Then do the following:

1. Right-click and “Withdraw All” on your silver bars to get 27.
   
   
2. Click the ectophial to teleport, and refill it from the Ectofuntus.
   
   
3. Go upstairs to the bone grinder.
   
   
4. Put a silver bar in the grinder; after a moment you will get silver dust. (Mercifully, you do not have to go through the whole ordeal with using pots and turning cranks to get silver dust, the way you must with bones.)
   
   
5. Repeat step 3 until all the bars are ground up.
   
   
6. Teleport to the bank, store the silver dust, and repeat starting at step 1.

There’s no real reason to make this in bulk. If you need one because you desperately want to go lava eel fishing after completing the Heroes’ Quest (why?!) then I recommend just buying one thin snail and one sample bottle at the Grand Exchange. Put these items in your inventory along with a pestle and mortar, then use that tool on the snail and the bottle will become blamish snail slime.

If you really want to make a bunch of blamish oil for some strange reason, then you should buy 13 sample bottles and a bunch of thin snails—Burgh de Rott is the cheapest place to get the snails. Use the pestle and mortar on 13 snails with 13 sample bottles in your inventory to get 13 blamish snail slime. When you use these on unfinished harralander potions to get blamish oil, the sample bottles will empty out and can be reused.

Efficiently Cleaning Herbs Making Potions Efficiently