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Training with Herb Tars Getting Herblore XP from Quests

On March 11, 2008, Jagex released the quest Kennith’s Concerns. During the quest, you find and then mine a new ore called rubium, a reddish substance that is mined during the quest. It can also be used as an Herblore ingredient; combining it with guam in a vial of water makes super fishing explosive, and grants you 55 Herblore XP. This isn’t a potion, though; it’s a souped up version of the regular fishing explosive you buy from slayer masters to fight mogres.

Any time there’s a new item added to the game, I always want to check it out thoroughly, to see what opportunities it presents. I wondered: could it be that these new super fishing explosives represent an efficient way of training the Herblore skill? Would it be possible to get good Herblore XP and Mining XP at the same time?

Well, as it happens, no. J But let’s take a look anyway.

One method of making these items would be just to go mine rubium and bank it for later use, like any other secondary ingredient. That would waste one of the potential benefits of super fishing explosive, though: the fact that it stacks in your inventory. Taking advantage of this characteristic allows us to cut down on running time, which is a good thing because of how much time it takes to get to the rubium…

Start out by wearing only weight-reducing and teleport items, like boots of lightness, a spotted or spottier cape and a ring of duelling. Then equip a rune pick or whatever the best pick is you can hold. Then follow these steps:

1. Make some unfinished guam potions from vials of water and clean guam. You need at least 53 per trip, but can make extras all at once if you prefer.
   
   
2. Withdraw from the bank two law runes, two water runes and 26 unfinished guam potions.
   
   
3. Teleport to Ardougne. Run east, then once you clear the eastern entrance to the town, turn south. You’ll soon come to the entrance to the tunnels where the rubium is.
   
   
4. Enter the tunnel and follow the same route back to where the rubium is that you traversed while doing Kennith’s Concerns. Be sure to take the agility shortcut (hole in the wall) to save time.
   
   
5. There are two rooms that have rubium deposits, which are the second and third rooms where you did those timing puzzles during the quest; the third room has the rubium spots closer together and is our target. On the way there, stop in the middle room and mine two rubium, then immediately add them to two unfinished guam potions; you’ll get two super fishing explosives that stack in one spot. Mine the other rubium deposits in the walls on your way to the door east, and keep adding them to the unfinished guam potions.
   
   
6. When you’ve mined all the rubium in the middle room, keep going east and enter the third room. Here you’ll find six rubium deposits all near each other; mine them all and add them to the potions (Figure 168). When done, exit the room using the door to the east, then immediately go back through the door again, and ta-da, all the rubium deposits will have respawned.
   
   
7. Continue mining rubium in the third room and going back-and-forth through the door, making super fishing explosives until you run out of unfinished guam potions. Then continue just mining the rubium until your inventory is full.
   
   
8. Use your ring of duelling to teleport to Castle Wars, bank and deposit the 26 super fishing explosives you made, along with 13 of the rubium. Withdraw 14 unfinished guam potions and make 14 more super fishing explosives. Then withdraw 13 more unfinished guam potions and the last 13 rubium, and make 13 more explosives.
   

   Figure 168: Mining Rubium and Making Super Fishing Explosive

   Since super fishing explosive stacks, the most sensible method is to bring an inventory of unfinished guam potions to the tunnels under Witchaven and make some of the explosive there, to cut down on running and banking time.

   
   

You can, of course, decide to wait until later to use the 27 rubium you banked.

The method above makes a total of 53 super fishing explosives, giving 2,915 Herblore XP, and you also get 927.5 Mining XP for the rubium. The problem is that this takes 11 minutes and 45 seconds to do, so the SAS rating comes out to a paltry 14,885 XP/hr. The Mining XP is under 6k per hour, which is also really poor.

The problem isn’t mining the rubium, which is actually pretty quick; there is simply a lot of overhead involved in getting to the tunnels, going through them, going in and out of the door and so forth. And 55 XP per potion is really not that impressive for the time it takes to make them.

Things aren’t much better from an economic standpoint. Making one of these potions uses one vial of water and a clean guam, which at current market prices costs 455 gp each. Add 12 gp each, roughly, to cover the cost of the Ardougne teleport, and that’s 467 gp per potion in costs. That’s not bad, but the problem is that the super fishing explosive itself is not worth much. A regular fishing explosive costs only 60 gp, and while these are better, most players don’t need help killing mogres anyway—and that’s assuming they don’t Burthorpe those assignments, which many folks do.

So if you don’t need help fighting mogres, why not sell the explosives to lower-level players who do? Oops, these items are untradeable. And the icing on the cake is that there is no option to empty out these vials once the explosive is made, so you can’t even do that.

I can only recommend making super fishing explosives to those who like the combination of working on both Mining and Herblore, or those who enjoy fighting mogres. For everyone else, you can train Herblore far more effectively in other ways.

Training with Herb Tars Getting Herblore XP from Quests