TruthScape.com - The Economics of Herblore and Herblore Training

Since RuneScape started up there have been times when a discussion of the economics of Herblore would have been a short one. There wasn’t much to worry about, because it was relatively easy to get XP in the skill while making money, or at least not losing very much. But as I’ve said earlier in the guide, this is not one of those times. Fundamental changes to the dynamics of the game have made conventional leveling strategies obsolete, and cost-effective training far more difficult.

Unless you’re a billionaire who wouldn’t think twice about blowing 100 million gold on powerleveling Herblore, you need to understand the economics of this skill. Only by having a firm grasp on the nature of the skill’s costs, product prices and training options can you develop a plan that will let you get a higher skill level without putting you in the poorhouse.

I clearly take the view that Herblore is a money-losing skill, but I know that many other players disagree. Some will even go so far as to claim that Herblore is a great money-maker! This disparity of viewpoint is not because those folks have some great secret techniques that I don’t know about. Rather, it comes down to differences in definitions, and how we look at skilling.

Some players think they are making money from Herblore because they consider herbs and secondary ingredients that they get themselves to be “free”. They use these to make potions and sell the potions, then claim that this is “profit”. But are those materials really free, and is that really profit from Herblore? The materials weren’t handed over to the player: they had to be gathered, generally using combat or Farming. And so that other skill is what made the money that is represented by those herbs and seconds.

Herblore is a transformation skill: one that takes raw materials, processes them, and makes products. When I consider the ability of such a skill to make money, I always look at it from a simple accounting perspective, by assessing the value added of the skill’s activities. What that means is: does working on the skill add value to the materials it begins with? Are the outputs of the skill worth more than the inputs?

With Herblore, the answer is usually “no”—in virtually every case, the raw materials are worth more than the products that you create from them. And this means that Herblore loses money.

Table 13 shows a few examples using average Grand Exchange prices recorded on the day I wrote this topic. What’s interesting to note is just how dramatic some of the losses are: as much as 90% of the value of the inputs—and I did not deliberately try to choose the biggest money-losers, either! At the same time, we can see that there are some options that lose only a small amount of money, which is why understanding the market is so important.

**Table 13: Example Herblore Product Losses**
Product	Base Item and Cost	Primary Ingredient and Cost	Secondary Ingredient and Cost	Total Cost of Inputs	Value of Output	Net Value Added
Prayer Potion (3)	Vial of water 95 gp	Clean ranarr 5,440 gp	Snape grass 423 gp	5,958 gp	5,288 gp	-670 gp (-11%)
Hunter Potion (3)	Vial of water 95 gp	Clean avantoe 1,462 gp	Kebbit teeth dust 554 gp	2,111 gp	222 gp	-1,889 gp (-90%)
Extra Strong Weapon Poison	Coconut milk 980 gp	Cactus spine 2,422 gp	Red spiders’ eggs 276 gp	3,678 gp	439 gp	-3,239 gp (-88%)
Ranging Potion (3)	Vial of water 95 gp	Clean dwarf weed 1,833 gp	Wine of Zamorak 1,138 gp	3,066 gp	1,227 gp	-1,839 gp (-60%)
Saradomin Brew (3)	Vial of water 95 gp	Clean toadflax 3,000 gp	Crushed nest 4,815 gp	7,910 gp	6,141 gp	-1,769 gp (-22%)
15 Guam Tar	15 Swamp Tar 3,195 gp	Clean guam 383 gp	--	3,578 gp	975 gp	-2,603 gp (-73%)
15 Harralander Tar	15 Swamp Tar 3,195 gp	Clean harralander 871 gp	--	4,066 gp	3,525 gp	-541 gp (-13%)

One interesting entry in that table is the Saradomin brew, which at the time that I write this is near the peak of a huge run-up in value: from around 2,000 gp up to over 6,000 gp in a couple of weeks. Despite this, notice that it is still a money-loser—in fact, it actually loses more money than it did when it was cheap! The increased price of the potion led to even greater increases in demand for toadflax and crushed nests, so you can see that higher potion prices don’t inherently pay off for herblorists.

Herblore is a money-losing skill for most of the reasons I outlined in my general discussion of skill economics. In that analysis, I mention the problem of excessive supply of finished goods and the inability to train skills without producing massive quantities of unneeded products. This is most definitely one of the problems that plagues Herblore.

The other major cause of losing money with Herblore is also covered in that topic: players are willing to spend money to get XP, and so will knowingly pay more for raw materials than they can sell their products for. Money is easy to get in other areas of the game and then apply it to skills where spending money gives a leveling advantage, and this is seen constantly in Herblore.

But the skill has also been dramatically impacted by changes in RuneScape over the last year, these being the biggest:

Add all of those factors together and you have a recipe for a money-losing skill; Figure 150 shows another particularly bad example.

Just to be clear: I am not saying the Grand Exchange is directly responsible for the money-losing nature of Herblore. Rather, it is the GE, combined with the effective end of direct player trading, that has exacerbated the problems. Not only is “dumping” an issue, but before these changes, players could choose to spend time selling potions directly to consumers, in exchange for getting higher prices for their goods. That is now all but impossible.

I’ve made the situation look pretty bleak, but it’s really not as bad as it may seem—if you are smart about how you approach the skill. By being informed about the nature of the market, item costs and the various options for training Herblore, you can be successful at it without losing an arm and a leg.

One of the keys to Herblore is remembering that even though it is a money-losing skill, it can be trained without costing you cash by pairing it up with combat and/or Farming. Yes, you could make more money by just selling the herbs, but as we’ve seen, there are reasons other than money to train skills. You can effectively fund your Herblore training by using output from combat and Farming to provide you with herbs and secondary ingredients, rather than having to spend your money on them. And so while Herblore won’t make you money, the combination of these skills will do so.

The trade-off between training economy and training speed also comes into play here, as it does with most skills. Players who are willing to train more slowly will find that they can save millions compared to conventional training. They may also be able to take advantage of little-known techniques that actually make money.

There are several alternative training methods that many players do not know about. These may allow you to train more cheaply than by making potions the conventional way, and some even let you get effectively free XP from raw materials that would otherwise go to waste.

Finally, be a patient buyer and seller. If you are buying herbs and ingredients, don’t automatically offer to buy at the highest price in the GE—offering at average or just above it may get you a better deal, even if it takes a few minutes. Similarly, don’t be too quick to “dump” potions at the lowest range in the GE—try offering for a few coins below the average price, wait a little while, and it may very well pay off. I’ve seen countless cases where I could have sold potions quickly at, say, 6,200 gp, but sold them all at 6,500 gp each in less than 10 minutes.