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General Tips to Improve Secondary Ingredient Gathering Efficiency Using the Creature Creation Room for Secondary Ingredients

Increasing the number of secondary ingredients you can carry at once improves efficiency, because you spend less time on the overhead of traveling between the bank and where the items are found. One method is by using Summoning beasts of burden, which let you expand effective inventory space by carrying items for you. But there’s another method that works very well in certain cases, and can even be combined with Summoning familiars for even greater benefits. Simply put, it lets you carry the equivalent of 35 items like snape grass or limpwurt roots in your 28-slot inventory.

Is it magic? Well of course—it’s the magic of efficient gameplay! J

The idea behind this method is really quite straightforward: each secondary ingredient is used to make a single 3-dose potion, but 3-dose potions can be combined into 4-dose versions. This means that if you bring with the items needed to make potions from the seconds you are gathering, you can combine them on the spot, effectively “squeezing” 28 secondary ingredients into 21 inventory slots. Then you can grab 7 more seconds in the remaining slots and bank them, yielding the equivalent of 35 items in one trip.

For example, suppose you want to gather snape grass to make prayer potions. If you aren’t on Lunar Magicks then getting this involves a bit of a walk, but you can improve efficiency as follows:

1. Make 28 unfinished ranarr potions from vials of water and clean ranarr weeds. Withdraw them from the bank before heading to either the “hobgoblin peninsula” or Waterbirth Island.
   
   
2. When you get to the spawn location, temporarily drop one unfinished potion on the ground. Pick up a snape grass and put it into one of the other unfinished potions. Do this three more times. Then combine the four 3-dose prayer potions into three 4-dose prayer potions. Pick back up the unfinished potion you had temporarily dropped.
   
   
3. Repeat step #2 six more times, getting a total of 28 snape grass, making a total of 28 3-dose potions and combining them into 21 4-dose potions.
   
   
4. Grab 7 more snape grass before banking.

Figure 212 shows “before” and “after” inventory pictures for this method.

In some cases you will need to modify this method to deal with other requirements for getting the items. For example, to get potato cactus you need one slot for rope to get into the kalphite lair, while to get wines of Zamorak you need two slots for Telekinetic Grab runes. Just take fewer unfinished potions and combine the ones you do bring.

As mentioned earlier, you can also use a beast of burden in conjunction with this technique. In the example above, you could summon a spirit terrorbird and put 12 extra unfinished ranarr potions in it as well. Instead of coming home with a total of 40 snape grass, you could return with 30 4-dose prayer potions and 10 snape grass, for an equivalent total of 50!

If you are getting a second that has to be ground, like dragon scales or unicorn horns, don’t forget a pestle and mortar. Buy spares and bank them, then take one with you and drop it when you’re done using it so you have room for another second.

Naturally, this method has some downsides and limits that you need to consider.

First, it obviously only works if you are gathering secondary ingredients you plan to use for Herblore. If you’re collecting seconds to resell, then it’s simply not relevant. The same applies to gathering items to use for Summoning pouches or other applications.

Second, you trade off the savings in running around with slight slowdowns associated with making potions one at a time. This isn’t relevant in cases where you are waiting for respawns, like with wine of Zamorak, but it is with items where your actions determine the speed of the process, like getting mort myre fungi.

Third, this won’t work well in cases where you are getting multiple secondary ingredients at once, such as getting cockatrice eggs and limpwurt roots from cockatrices, or snape grass and limp roots from tribesmen. You can try bringing two different types of unfinished potion, if you want, or just bring half an inventory of a single type.

Finally, if you need a lot of items in your inventory to get the seconds, such as food when fighting goraks for claws, or supplies to hunt sabre-toothed kebbits for kebbit teeth, trying this method may be more hassle than it’s worth.

General Tips to Improve Secondary Ingredient Gathering Efficiency Using the Creature Creation Room for Secondary Ingredients