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Obtaining Vials, Vials of Water and Vials of Coconut Milk Sources for Obtaining Water-Filled Vials

One way to get the vials of water or coconut milk you need for making potions is to start by buying, make or gathering empty vials yourself. There are a surprising number of ways to get plain vials, as it turns out—some let you get thousands of them quickly, others let you accumulate them slowly over time, and still others may be methods you never thought of.

I’ll show all of them to you below, and also give you my brief opinion on the viability of each. See the analysis topic for a full comparison of techniques for both empty and filled vials.

The fastest, easiest way to get large quantities of empty glass vials is simply to buy them from other players. And, of course, the most convenient way to do this is on the Grand Exchange.

There are times when certain items become hard to buy on the GE because of price controls that lead to supply and demand imbalances. Vials, however, are rarely in this situation, because their price does not fluctuate very much. Since around February 2008, vials have generally maintained a trading range of around 70 to 80 gp each.

Current limits allow you to buy up to 10,000 empty vials at a time every few hours. If you are looking to buy a bunch of vials, try first buying at the average price, not the maximum—it may take an hour or two to get them all, but you’ll save some money.

There are several stores that stock empty vials for purchase:

• The Herblore shops in Entrana, Taverley, and Gu’Tanoth
  
  
• Sigmund the Merchant in the marketplace of Rellekka
  
  
• The general store on the west bank of the river in Keldagrim
  
  
• Jiminua’s store in the far northwest corner of the main part of Karamja
  
  
• The general store in Shilo Village

All of these shops have an infinite stock of empty vials that they sell for 5 gp each. The closest one to a bank is the general store in Shilo Village, which makes it the best choice if you want to go this route. I didn’t do a time test for buying empties from Shilo, but I did for vials and water and so it should be the same: 4 loads of 27 in 2:25, yielding 2,680 per hour.

Of course, if you’re going to run back and forth buying vials, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy vials of water instead?

With a Crafting level of 33, you can make your own empty vials from molten glass (Figure 205), for which you get 35 Crafting XP. If you also make your own glass then you get more XP, of course: 20 XP for the old-fashioned slow method, or 10 XP using the Lunar Magicks spell Superglass Make (which also gives you 30% more glass).

I’m not going to get into the details on making glass, because that becomes rather complicated due to the need to consider different sources for glass materials, and methods for making it. Once you have the glass, though—however you obtain it—you can make a load of 27 vials in just under one minute. This works out to about 1,650 vials per hour.

The effective cost of doing this is the difference in the value of molten glass and the vials; glass is currently worth about 320 gp and vials about 70 gp. The skill activity ratings for making vials from glass are:

SAV = ( 70 - (320) ) / 35 = -7.1 gp/XP

SAS = 1650 * 35 = 57,750 XP/hr

SAP = -7.1 * 57,750 / 1000 = -412 kgp/hr

There are much more efficient ways of training Crafting than this—and even more efficient ways of using molten glass. But if you really want to make your own vials, it is at least an option.

There are exactly two categories of monsters that drop empty vials. First, there are druids and druidesses, both level 33, which will drop a few on occasion; in a half-hour test I got 13 of them. They are also right near a fountain in Taverley, where you can fill the vials. Second, many of the townspeople in Rellekka will on occasion drop empty vials—they are spread out and higher-level, and not worth bothering with.

This is a very inefficient way of getting empty vials and I include it only for completeness.

It is fairly easy to buy decent quantities of “junk vials” on the Grand Exchange: these are ones that contain potions or other liquids that nobody really wants. They are actually sold for below the cost of empty vials, which may seem surprising, and obviously seemed to me a potential way to save money. So I started testing… and it turns out that they are cheap for a reason. J

The best opportunities for junk vials are partially empty low-valued potions. Many 3-dose potions are dirt cheap, and the Grand Exchange forces down the prices of lower-dose potions proportionately, so you can sometimes buy 2-dose potions for a song (1-dose potions are even cheaper, but harder to buy.) Try 2-dose agility potions, which I had no trouble buying for 45 gp each; 2-dose or 1-dose restore and fishing potions are also possible, though right now at least, they cost more. Another option is to buy plant cures and empty those (buy them at the GE, not Farming stores.)

Many players consider emptying vials in this way to be a good way of saving money, but it isn’t: it’s slow, tedious and hard on the fingers. In my tests, I found that emptying 28 vials takes 35 seconds, so it is possible to do 2,880 per hour. If I’m paying 45 gp for junk vials, I’d save around 30 gp each compared to buying empty vials, which works out to 86k per hour. Clearly this is not worthwhile—especially since emptying vials is also a horrid “click-fest”.

The methods above are all active ones, where you engage in a specific activity to get vials. There’s also a passive method I’d like to recommend, which I call accumulating and scavenging. There’s no magic here: this simply refers to saving, banking and then reusing empty vials left over when you drink a potion. You can also get more empty vials by looking for others’ discarded “empties” and picking them up.

Now, you won’t get a lot of vials quickly in this way—rather, what you’ll do is save ones that would otherwise be lost. Over the course of many weeks, you’d be surprised at how many hundreds of vials you end up with.

Here are some specific tips:

• When possible, drink potions like energy pots at the bank, then store the vials.
  
  
• Save vials when combining 3-dose potions into 4-dose potions.
  
  
• Always make maximum use of your inventory: when finishing a potion in combat, don’t drop the empty vial until you’re sure you’ll need space for a more valuable drop.
  
  
• Watch for empty vials that other players leave behind in banks, dungeons and other places.
  
  
• Save empties from using plant cures, compost potions and so forth.

Obtaining Vials, Vials of Water and Vials of Coconut Milk Sources for Obtaining Water-Filled Vials