TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore - Techniques for Obtaining Vials, Secondary Ingredients and Special Items                 9  Obtaining Vials, Vials of Water and Vials of Coconut Milk

Comparing Methods and Sources for Obtaining Vials of Water Acquiring Secondary Ingredients for Potions

Coconut milk is the base of four RuneScape potions: extra strong and super strong weapon poison, and extra strong and super strong antipoison potions. Unlike vials of water, there is no huge range of options for coconut milk, which has only two sources: you can make it yourself from coconuts, or you can buy it from other players.

Coconuts are an interesting product, because they have several uses both in their whole state and when broken down into components. Let’s look at coconuts and their derivative products, and how they are used.

Other than buying from other players, coconuts have only one major and one minor source. The major source is palm trees, which you can plant at level 68 Farming. Once the tree has grown successfully and is mature, you can pick up to 6 coconuts from it every few hours. The minor source is nature implings in the Impetuous Impulses minigame, which require a Hunter level of 58, and occasionally give a coconut as loot.

There are five fruit tree patches, so you can get over 100 coconuts a day, but this isn’t very many if you plan to make a lot of super weapon poisons (which are by far the most common use of coconut milk). Nature implings provide them only rarely and are a negligible source.

In addition to be using for coconut milk, coconuts play an important role in the Farming skill, where they are farmer payments for both poison ivy bushes and magic trees. Now, with each coconut currently costing more than a single poison ivy seed, not many farmers would pay 15 coconuts to have a farmer watch an ivy bush, but the magic trees are a different story. Those seeds cost upwards of 200k a piece, and you need 25 coconuts per tree, so Farming powerlevelers need many of them. As we’ll see, this has a major impact on the prices of coconut-related items.

When you use a hammer on a coconut, it turns into… a coconut. Well, it doesn’t look the same, as it now has its top broken off and you can see the material inside, but its name is still just “coconut”. I call these cracked coconuts, and in this state they are ready to be used to make coconut milk.

Interestingly, these are tradeable, and you can buy and sell them on the Grand Exchange. Due to the ambiguous naming, be careful about this when buying coconuts on the GE.

If you have a cracked coconut and an empty vial and use one on the other, the two items are transformed into a vial of coconut milk and a coconut shell. The vial is obviously the item we’re after, but the coconut shell is definitely not a waste product—you can use 15 of them to make supercompost! In fact, these are better than using items like pineapples or watermelons, because you can left-click them to add them to the bin, which takes less time than the right-clicking needed for those other fruits.

Making coconut milk is, well, how shall I put it… Ah yes. Making coconut milk is a pain in the derriere. J Not only does it require multiple steps for each one, but there is no “Make All” feature. To make matters even worse, you have to click each individual vial and coconut, rather than just being able to go back and forth between two items at the bottom of your inventory as you do when, say, making barbarian mix potions.

After some experimentation, I found a system that seems to work pretty well (though it is still not fun by any means.) To start with, go to a one-click bank like Castle Wars, empty your inventory, and then withdraw four hammers. Why four? Well, you need one, which leaves 27 spots, so you can only do at most 13 coconuts and vials at a time. Doing 12 instead and having a hammer in each column of your inventory reduces mouse movements and makes the process easier.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Right-click the coconuts in your bank, choose “Withdraw 10”, then click the coconuts two more times to take out a total of 12.
   
   
2. Right-click the empty vial stack in your bank and “Withdraw All” to take out 12.
   
   
3. Starting at the top left corner, click the hammer there, then the coconut right below it to break it. Move one square to the right, click the coconut and then the hammer above it to break that coconut. Repeat for the third and fourth columns.
   
   
4. Repeat step #3 for the second and third rows of coconuts, each time using the same serpentine pattern.
   
   
5. Now that all the coconuts are cracked, you can start making the coconut milk. Starting with the bottom row of coconuts (row #4 of your inventory), go to the left-most coconut, click it and then click the empty vial below it. Again, move one square to the right, click the vial there and the coconut above it, then continue for the rest of the row.
   
   
6. Repeat step #5 for the coconuts in row #3 of your inventory and the vials in row #6, and then for the coconuts in row #2 and the vials in row #7 (Figure 208).
   
   
7. Bank the coconut milk and coconut shells.
   

   Figure 208: Making Coconut Milk

   After using each coconut on the hammer above it to crack it, use each one on an empty vial to make one coconut milk and a coconut shell you can supercompost.

   
   

This takes 40 seconds, so you can make 1,080 coconut milk per hour.

Making coconut milk is slow, tedious, requires a lot of clicking, and gives you no XP. In other words, it is awful gruntwork. If you insist on doing everything yourself then it’s your only option if you want to make coconut-based potions, but otherwise you have a simpler choice: buy it from players!

Now, you would think that you’d have to pay a premium to buy coconut milk compared to buying coconuts—after all, if you aren’t going to do that boring process, then someone has to, right? Well, that actually turns out not to be the case, and the reason is the other uses for coconut products that I mentioned before.

The price of whole coconuts is often driven up by heavy demand from farmers growing magic trees—the farmer payment for those is 25 coconuts per tree! At the same time, there is also a lot of interest on the part of farmers in getting coconut shells, because of how easy it is to use them to make supercompost. All of this means that, in many cases, you can actually get cracked coconuts or even coconut milk in vials, for less than the cost of whole coconuts!

For example, on the day I wrote this topic, the price of whole coconuts was 964 gp, cracked coconuts were also 964 gp and a vial of coconut milk was 904 gp. Kinda makes it a no-brainer, now, doesn’t it? J

Of course, buying a vial of coconut milk instead of a coconut means you lose the useful coconut shell, but that’s not a big deal—you can just use watermelons (which are dirt cheap) to make supercompost. Sure, you need to right-click them, which is a bit slower, but not nearly as slow as making coconut milk yourself. Plus, you save the cost of the empty vials!

In fact, when prices are like this, there’s a very good argument to be made for herblorists to exploit them even if growing their own coconuts. Sell the coconuts whole on the GE, then use the proceeds to buy coconut milk and pocket the difference. Given the prices above you’d save 130 gp per vial, which you can use to buy watermelons for supercompost and still have money left over. And best of all, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of tedium!

Comparing Methods and Sources for Obtaining Vials of Water Acquiring Secondary Ingredients for Potions