TruthScape.com - Miscellaneous Methods of Getting Herbs

Last but not least, here are a few miscellaneous ways of getting herbs that you should probably know about. There are collected here either because I didn’t have enough to say about them to justify a separate topic, or because they are options that aren’t popular or that I don’t recommend (usually because they are too slow).

Of course, everyone’s different, so I encourage you to try anything you read here that sounds enticing.

Normal herbs are tradeable in both their grimy and clean state, so one option available to you is simply to buy them from other players. Before the anti-RWT updates of late 2007, there was a thriving direct player-to-player herb trade market in RuneScape. This has now mostly transitioned to the Grand Exchange, so the GE is the place to be if you want to buy herbs.

I’ve made the point a few times that buying herbs can be expensive; you’re effectively paying for the convenience of not having to gather them. Given that, you’ll want to make sure to watch the market and time your purchase to get the best possible price. Patience is definitely a virtue in this regard—herb prices tend to often go in up and down cycles, so staying aware of the market is definitely advised.

Because certain monsters drop over 100 herbs per hour, many players—especially high-level ones—leave a good number of herbs just sitting on the ground in various dungeons. This opens up the possibility for lower-level players to scavenge these herbs, by going to popular herb drop spots and picking up the herbs left behind.

Straight scavenging in a busy spot can be one of the fastest ways of getting lots of low-level herbs, and thus a reasonable option for new herblorists. The problem is that in doing this you aren’t getting combat XP, so it isn’t something I really recommend in most cases.

If you combine scavenging with your own combat, the result is often a way to get the best of both worlds. And that applies doubly if you have ways of making good use of commonly discarded herbs like harralander and tarromin.

At the end of the quest Eadger’s Ruse, you have to run through a storage room, dodging guards, to grab a goutweed herb from a crate (Figure 198). I personally find this as annoying as all get-out, but if you like the challenge, you can keep doing it after the quest is over. Get as many goutweed herbs as you can, and then trade them all to Sanfew for an equal number of grimy herbs.

**Figure 198: Got Goutweed?**
To give you an idea of how *bad* I am at this sort of game, and how much I hate it, I needed about 10 minutes to get this screenshot. J

This is a rather slow and tedious way of getting herbs, though. And even if you like the concept of the game, Sorceress’s Garden is more rewarding.

If you try it, you’ll need to bring with food (the trolls hit you if you get caught) and energy potions.

This minigame is very similar in concept to the goutweed feature I just mentioned: you go through a maze dodging “elementals”. If they see you, they kick you out of the garden; otherwise, you have the option of either picking a sq’irk fruit that you can use to get Thieving XP, or picking two random grimy herbs (from the 11 standard types). Both options also give small amounts of Farming XP.

This is a better way to get herbs than the goutweed, but again, rather slow overall: combat is much faster. Most players also find it very repetitive and tedious. Even if you do enjoy it, in most cases you get a lot more benefit picking the fruit than the herbs.

This combat-based minigame is best known for the XP and equipment rewards you can get from it, but you also have an option to trade in 30 points for an herb pack. Each pack contains 1 to 4 of each of these six grimy herbs, with a total of 15: harralander, toadflax, ranarr, irit, avantoe and kwuarm.

In my first test on a Pest Control world, it took me 25 minutes to get enough points for a pack, playing on the high-level lander. I got 3 harralander, 2 toadflax, 2 ranarr, 3 irit, 1 avantoe and 4 kwuarm. I then switched to a smaller world that had only very high-level players (combat level 115 and up); this time it took only 18 minutes. The second pack had 3 harralander, 2 toadflax, 3 ranarr, 4 irit, 2 avantoe and 1 kwuarm.

Because of the inherent time limits in the game itself, 18 minutes is about the minimum. As you can see, this comes to less than 50 herbs per hour; they are mostly good herbs, so that’s not horrible, but again you must consider the opportunity cost. For example, instead of 15 herbs I could have had 5,454 Prayer XP!

In these twin minigames, you escort citizens of Burgh de Rott to the Temple on the Salve, or mercenaries from the temple back to the town, respectively. If the person you accompany makes the trip safely, you are given a reward, the value of which depends on how strong that person was and also on the difficulty of the route you chose.

One of the possible rewards is a set of noted herbs: either grimy tarromin or grimy harralander, plus a smaller amount of grimy toadflax. You cannot control which reward you get, however, so playing this minigame specifically to get herbs is rather pointless.

Note that the nail beasts you encounter in this minigame are the only source of nail beast nails used in Sanfew serum.

You play this Hunter-based minigame by chasing different types of flying implings around a maze; when you catch one, it will give you an item reward in exchange for its freedom. There are several implings that can provide herbs or other items related to Herblore. Here’s a list, with the Hunter level required to catch each one shown in parentheses:

Of course, these implings also give many other items, so the percentage of the items shown is low—this is not something you’ll do specifically for herbs, but they can be a nice bonus. Also watch out for other players discarding herbs and other useful items on the ground (quite common!)

I should also mention that several implings also give herb seeds of various sorts, especially the nature impling.

The Brimhaven Agility Arena is a RuneScape minigame where you race against the clock across Agility obstacles to earn tickets. It’s a nice alternative to the endless-running-in-circles nature of most Agility training courses. The tickets can be exchanged for additional Agility XP, or for a small number of items, including two herbs: 3 tickets will get you one grimy toadflax, and 10 tickets one grimy snapdragon (Figure 199).

**Figure 199: Agility for Herbs**
You can trade in tickets earned at the Brimhaven Agility Arena for either toadflax or snapdragon—but you give up valuable Agility XP to do so.

There was a time when this was one of the few ways of getting these two herbs, but that’s no longer the case. Considering that you can get over 3,000 Agility XP for 10 tickets, and that snapdragon can be bought on the GE where Agility XP cannot, it’s hard to recommend using your tickets in this manner…

Certain random events, such as Prison Pete, will occasionally give as a reward either four noted snapdragon herbs or six noted toadflax. Of course, you have no control over this, but there ya go. J