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Limpwurt Roots Potato Cactus

Mort myre fungi are perhaps the most unique of all Herblore secondary ingredients. Unlike most others, you don’t get them from spawns, or Farming, or monster drops (well, one monster drops them, but in amounts too tiny to be more than a curiosity.) Rather, you must make them with a special method: using a blessed silver sickle to cast a “bloom” spell near rotting logs in Mort Myre Swamp, which causes fungi to grow on them that you can pick. While doing this to get a few fungi is simple, getting large numbers of them efficiently is not—it requires both good technique and meeting several skill, quest and even house design requirements.

Through experimentation, I have discovered four methods and variations for getting mort myre fungi. The basic method is the fastest, but only works for players who meet the necessary requirements to allow them to quickly get to Canifis; the second is essentially the same, but slightly modified for those who have a lower Prayer level. The third variant is for players who cannot get to Canifis quickly but still want to get fungi despite it taking longer. And finally, the last method is an alternative for those who want to combine getting fungi with training prayer on ghasts.

All of these methods require you to have completed the quest Nature Spirit. You also need a blessed silver sickle, which you make during that quest; if you no longer have it, you can make another by casting it from silver and then having it blessed at the nature grotto in Mort Myre Swamp.

Note that, as with other gathering activities, using a beast of burden or the combining method can improve your overall efficiency.

This is the most efficient method, taking advantage of the design of a player owned house to allow you to quickly get a load of mort myre fungi, recharge prayer, bank and get back to the swamp as fast as possible. The requirements are as follows:

• Player-owned house with a prayer altar and portal to Kharyrll (Canifis). These should be located near each other. (The location of the house itself doesn’t matter.)
  
  
• Desert Treasure quest complete. This is needed to build the Canifis portal.
  
  
• Prayer level of at least 60; preferably, it should be 70 or higher.
  
  
• Teleport to house tablets, either made on a lectern or purchased.

A high combat level and a set of weight-reducing gear are also recommended.

Start out by teleporting to your house and taking the portal to Canifis. Go to the bank there and equip yourself with weight-reducing gear. Get out your blessed silver sickle and a stack of house teleport tablets, and then follow these steps:

1. Run west and then southwest along the main road in Canifis through town. When the road starts to bend to the northwest, continue going southwest, past the fairy ring and the Farming patch, until you come to the gate in the fence that marks the boundary of Mort Myre Swamp.
   
   
2. Go through the gate, and then head just a little west, until you find two rotting logs near some water with one empty square between them (see Figure 220).
   
   
3. Stand in the empty square, right-click the blessed sickle and choose “Cast Bloom”. You’ll see some nifty sparkly graphics, and then mushrooms will grow on one or both of the logs (Figure 220); pick them as soon as the sparkles fade out. Repeat the bloom spell and keep picking mushrooms until your inventory is full.
   
   
4. Cast the spell one more time, then wield the silver sickle to free up an inventory slot and pick your last mushroom. (If there’s an extra on a log that you don’t have room for, don’t worry about it.)
   
   
5. Click one of the teleport tablets to go to your house. There, pray at your altar to recharge your prayer points, then go through the Canifis portal.
   
   
6. Store the fungi in the Canifis bank, unwield your sickle and you’re ready to repeat the process.
   

   Figure 220: Casting Bloom to Generate Mort Myre Fungi

   Right-clicking your blessed silver sickle and choosing “Cast Bloom” will cause one or both of the rotting logs near you to sprout mort myre fungi that you can pick. Note the location, just past the fence west of Canifis.

   
   

The exact amount of time required to get a load of 27 fungi varies from one run to the next, since you sometimes get one fungus per “bloom” and sometimes two. In my tests, though, on average, it took 3:20 to get a full load, so you can get about 485 per hour.

Each time you use the bloom spell, you lose 1 to 6 Prayer points, which again is random. In my tests, I found that usually I used up a total of 60 to 70 Prayer points to get a full load of fungi.

If you want to save some money in lieu of going a bit slower, bring a stack of law runes and dust runes instead of teleport tablets. You’ll get 26 fungi per load but save around 500 gp per trip.

If you have a lower prayer level, you may find that you run out before you get a full load of fungi. You can just decide to get fewer per trip, teleporting home when your points run out, or instead use a different spot near the one described above. Its advantage is that it has three rotting logs nearby, so you get 1 to 3 fungi per cast instead of only 1 or 2. This allows you to get more fungi in the same number of casts, and thus, more fungi for the same number of Prayer points.

The procedure is exactly the same as above, except that in step #2 you keep traveling southwest until you find a spot with three rotting logs surrounding it. This location is in the middle of the four bogs in the northwestern corner of the swamps, as shown in Figure 221.

Since there are three logs here you might think this would be faster, not just more efficient in terms of prayer, but it turns out that it’s actually a bit slower. One reason is that it is farther from the bank, but the other is that your character has to walk around to get to the three logs (as opposed to spinning in place). It ends up taking about 3:25 to get a full load, which is around 475 per hour.

Another problem with this method is ghasts, which will attack you fairly frequently in this spot (in the location with two logs near the gate, the ghasts will rarely bother you). The easiest way to deal with the ghasts is simply to ignore them; you’ll take a bit of damage, but not much, and you can just heal up at the bank if needed. Don’t bring food into the swamp—the ghasts will rot it.

The preceding methods are fast, but they have requirements some players can’t meet, like the need to complete Desert Treasure, a pretty tough quest. If you don’t have a Kharyrll teleport portal in your house, your choices for efficiently getting fungus become limited. You could simply run back and forth between the swamp and the bank in Canifis, but then you have to waste prayer potions restoring lost points, which gets expensive.

Instead, you can try this alternative. It has a couple of requirements of its own, though: you need to have completed In Search of the Myreque, and finished enough of In Aid of the Myreque to have access to the bank in Burgh de Rott. Assuming you do, then go to that bank, put on weight-reducing gear and grab your blessed sickle. Then follow these steps:

1. Run west towards the Haunted Mine and hop over the Agility shortcut in the fence. Run northwest past the vampires and onto the westernmost part of the maze path west of Mort’ton. Keep going north until you come to the wooden bridge near the nature grotto, and cross over it.
   
   
2. Directly west of the grotto, right next to the river, you will find two rotting logs in an “L” formation pointing northwest. Stand adjacent to both of them, as shown in Figure 222
   
   
3. Right-click the blessed sickle and choose “Cast Bloom”, then pick any mushrooms that grow. Repeat the bloom spell and keep picking mushrooms until your inventory is full.
   
   
4. Cast the spell one last time, then wield the silver sickle to free up an inventory slot and pick your last mushroom.
   
   
5. Run southeast to the bridge that leads to the nature grotto. Leap over, go into the grotto and recharge your prayer points. You can also recharge Summoning points here if you need to.
   
   
6. Exit the grotto and run back to Burgh de Rott. Store your fungi and drink energy or super energy potions to top up run energy, then unwield your sickle and you can do another load.
   

   Figure 222: Nature Grotto Mort Myre Fungi Location

   Here you can see the location of a good spot to generate fungus for those who do not have the ability to quickly teleport to Canifis. The nature grotto is just east of my location, on the edge of the minimap.

   
   

This method is obviously slower, and you will also get annoyed quite a bit by the ghasts. In my tests I found I could get 28 fungi in 5:10, which works out to around 325 per hour. Each trip also consumes all of my run energy, even wearing no armor, so you need to add the cost of energy potions as well.

Note that if you are using the combining method to make super energy potions “on the fly”, you can save a bit of time by drinking one of these as you run back to the bank.

Tired of being harrassed by ghasts and want to fight back? Well, you can. This will slow you down, but it can be fun to get “revenge” on them, and you get 30 Prayer XP per kill as well.

Start with any of the methods above (though the first spot near the gate has far fewer ghasts around it). In addition to the items you’d normally take out, though, also grab a weapon (an abyssal whip is fine) and 10 druid pouch charges. If your pouch is empty, you can fill it using your sickle as you get fungi, of course.

Proceed to get fungi as described earlier, but this time the pouch will protect you from the ghasts draining your health. Each time a pouch charge is used up automatically to make a ghast visible, kill it (Figure 223). When your inventory is almost full, use the remaining pouch charges on ghasts in the area to kill those, and drop the empty pouch to make room for another fungus before banking.

To manually make ghasts visible, be careful to right-click the pouch and select “Use”—don’t left-click it or you’ll fill it up with your fungi!

Mort myre fungus is generally worth around 500 to 700 gp each, so you can get a decent amount of value for your time getting 450 to 500 per hour using the Canifis teleport method. The nature grotto technique, though, is too slow to be worthwhile, in my opinion.

Killing ghasts is not really a good way of getting Prayer XP, and their drops are mediocre at best, so do it only if you find it a nice change of pace.

Incidentally, the monster that drops these fungi is the mutated zygomite. They are extremely annoying to kill, and you only get a handful of fungi per hour, so don’t bother—trust me. J

Limpwurt Roots Potato Cactus