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Using Summoning Familiars to Improve Combat Herb Gathering Getting Free Herblore XP From Unwanted Herbs

You can get up to 200 herbs per hour by fighting primary herb droppers, which is great, except that you have to find some place to put them all! You have only 28 slots, and at 160 herbs per hour, for example, your inventory will get filled up after only around 10 minutes—and that’s assuming you don’t pick up other valuable drops. Using a beast of burden can certainly help, but not everyone has the high Summoning level needed for one of the better beasts, and some don’t train Summoning at all. Even if you do have a beast, that only delays the inevitable, so no matter how you slice it, inventory management is a big part of herb gathering.

The inventory management problem sets up a decision that ends up being another time versus money trade-off. You can choose to keep all the herbs you get, running back to the bank whenever necessary; this nets you the value of the herbs but costs you time in banking, as well as less combat XP per hour. Alternately, you can decide to leave some herbs behind so that you don’t have to bank quite so often; this saves you time but also costs you herbs, or the money you could get by selling them. Your own priorities and preferences in terms of the time versus money equation will dictate whether leaving herbs behind or taking them all makes more sense.

One factor in making the decision is how far you are from a bank. Some of the primary herb droppers take as little as one minute for banking, such as the chaos druids in Ardougne. Others may take up to 3 minutes to get to the bank and then return, including flesh crawlers and banshees, both of which are well into their respective dungeons.

The choice will also depend on whether you are getting herbs for your own use or just to sell for cash. In the latter situation, a more analytic approach to the value of time spent or saved makes sense: how much money worth of herbs are you saving by taking the time to run them back? Most players never really think about this, but even a load of guams can be worth saving if it only takes one minute to get to the bank and back again.

If you do decide not to keep all your herbs, be sure you take advantage of some of the ways to get free XP from them.

In my experience, I have found that most players do seem to leave at least some herbs behind to cut down on banking, because otherwise they just spend too much time running back and forth. The next question then becomes which herbs to keep and which to drop.

You might be surprised how many viewpoints there are on this, which tend to form a spectrum from those who are very selective about what they keep, to those who are very selective about what they discard:

• Single Herb Strategy: I’ve seen some players who go into a dungeon only looking for one herb type, usually ranarrs; they leave everything else behind. (Note that if you are doing this looking for kwuarms, you should consider fever spiders.)
  
  
• Value Strategy: Some players keep only the most valuable herbs; usually they are selling them for cash. This generally means ranarrs, kwuarms, lantadymes and dwarf weeds.
  
  
• Ranarr-and-Over Strategy: Many players only keep high-level herbs, which are defined as being ranarr, irit, avantoe, kwuarm, cadantine, lantadyme and dwarf weed.
  
  
• Harralander-and-Over Strategy: This is the same as the ranarr-and-over strategy but also includes harralander.
  
  
• Harralander-and-Over Plus Guams Strategy: Harralander herbs and higher, plus guams.
  
  
• All-But-Marrentill Strategy: At the present time, marrentills are by far the cheapest of the herbs; they are worth less than 100 gp each, where even guams and tarromins are worth over 300 gp. Some players will thus save pack space by discarding marrentills, while keeping everything else.

The single herb strategy is generally an unwise approach. Sure, taking only ranarrs saves you a lot of time, and you’ll probably get more ranarrs than players who keep other herbs. But as you can imagine, it’s incredibly wasteful: you may throw away up to 100k worth of herbs an hour doing this. And if you’re only keeping one herb and it isn’t ranarr, you are really throwing money away—you should always keep ranarrs, even if just to sell so you can buy more of the herbs you want!

Most players go for one of the “happy mediums” that keep most of the better herbs while discarding the lower-valued ones. The “ranarr and above” approach is particularly common, though some may prefer the value strategy, leaving behind cadantine, irit and avantoe as the least valuable of the high-level herbs.

Harralander is the herb that’s a bit of a quandary for a lot of players, because it’s on the “cusp” between the cheap herbs below it and the more valuable ones above. My problem with harralander is that it is worth about 900 gp, so I hate to waste it, but I get so many of them that it really increases time spent banking compared to just keeping ranarrs and higher. As we’ll see in the next topic though, there’s a clever alternative that can let you get the best of both worlds.

One final note is that many players now choose to keep guams even when they discard marrentills and tarromins, and the reason is Summoning. Guams are used in the very handy macaw familiar pouches I mentioned in the prior topic.

Using Summoning Familiars to Improve Combat Herb Gathering Getting Free Herblore XP From Unwanted Herbs