TruthScape.com - Sources for Obtaining Water-Filled Vials

There are several ways to get water-filled vials, which generally break down into two basic approaches: filling empty vials, or buying the vials with water already in them. Below I will outline these methods, including information which will be used as part of the analysis that follows.

The only option worth considering for serious herblorists is to buy large volumes of water-filled vials on the Grand Exchange. At the time that I write this, vials of water can be bought in quantity for 90 to 95 gp each; since early 2008 they have ranged in price from about 85 gp to 100 gp. In the context of how much it typically costs to train the skill, this amount of money is pretty much negligible to most players, but not all…

If you want to save some money and still get vials that already have water in them, you can buy them far cheaper at a store. The catch, of course, is that you can only get 27 at a time, running them back and forth between the store and a bank.

The store selling water vials that is closest to a bank is in Shilo Village, where they cost 11 gp each. In my tests, wearing weight-reducing equipment and with my Agility level of 67, I was able to buy four loads (108 vials) in 2 minutes 25 seconds before having to use two 4-dose energy potions to restore my run energy. If you can’t easily get to Shilo, the alternative is the shop in Ardougne, which sells water vials for 10 gp; that store is about equidistant from the two banks in that town, but further than the one in Shilo is from that village’s bank. In Ardougne was able to get three loads (81 vials) in 2 minutes 15 seconds.

These numbers work out to around 2,680 vials per hour at Shilo, and 2,160 per hour in Ardougne.

Other stores selling vials of water include Sigmund the Merchant in the marketplace of Rellekka, the general store in Mort’ton, Jiminua’s store in the far northwest corner of the main part of Karamja, and the Lighthouse store.

One “homemade” option for getting vials of water is to get empty vials using one of the techniques outlined in the prior topic and then fill them. The most basic way is to simply fill your inventory with vials and use one on a water source; the game will then automatically fill all the vials you are carrying (one at a time).

The best place to do this is at the sink in the basement of Lumbridge Castle, which I described in my look at methods for filling vials. With this method you can fill 3,360 vials an hour.

The Lunar Magicks Humidify spell instantly fills all vials (and other vessels) in your inventory with water (see Figure 154), making it much faster than using a sink. You do have to meet the requirements to cast it, of course.

It’s possible to cast the spell 400 times per hour (including banking time). Thus, if you do not have a steam battlestaff, you can fill 10,400 vials per hour with the spell; with the staff, you can do 10,800 per hour. That doesn’t include the overhead involved in turning on and off Lunar Magicks, of course, and we do have some rune costs to take into account as well, as we’ll see in the method comparison.

There are more monsters that drop water-filled vials than empty vials, but it’s still a small number, and they still don’t drop many. As a result, fighting monsters cannot be considered a viable method of obtaining water vials in quantity—what you get from these NPCs can at best be considered a supplement to your primary sources.

The monster that drops the most vials of water in RuneScape is the water elemental, which has a vial of vial of water as its 100% drop (since they are made of water, I guess this is the equivalent of their “bones”). The problem is that the vials are unnoted, and so you have to constantly run to bank them. The good news is that they are only level 34, with 30 hitpoints, so they die pretty fast, and they also drop law, death, nature, water chaos and death runes (Figure 206).

The best place to fight these elementals is in the basement of the building next to the bank in Seers’ Village, where you do the quest Elemental Workshop. To access the area you must use the battered key you get from that quest, which you can reacquire by looking for a book in the building south of where the workshop is located. In a sample test, I was able to get 22 vials and a bunch of runes in 5.5 minutes, which works out to 240 vials of water per hour.

**Figure 206: Water Elementals**
Each water elemental drops a vial of water, and they also provide small numbers of runes, herbs and other items. Note the battered key, which is required to access this area even after the quest is complete.

Next best are waterfiends, which are the only monsters that I know of that actually drop multiple vials of water (5 at a time) in noted form. They don’t drop them frequently, though, and they take a while to kill—as a result, you can only get 25 to 50 or so an hour when fighting them. Of course, they are also level 115 and have nasty ranged and magic attacks, so it’s not like you’d bother fighting them just for vials. The fiends are a good source of crimson charms for Summoning, though, so many players fight them anyway. If you do, then reserving an inventory spot for the water vials is certainly worthwhile!

Beyond those two, things drop off pretty rapidly. Vials of water are occasionally dropped by named citizens in Rellekka, but this is barely worth the bother. Tortured souls (found north of the Ectofuntus) are supposed to drop them, but I’ve never gotten one. That leaves chaos druids and cave crawlers; they also drop only a small number, but since these are both good monsters to kill for herbs, any water vials you use can be combined into unfinished potions on the spot which makes them effectively “free”.