TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - A General Guide to RuneScape Skills and Training            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - General Guide - Strategies and Techniques for Efficient RuneScape Skill Training

Avoiding Waste and Making the Most of Combat Drops Getting the Most from Experience Bonuses and Special Methods

One trait that most efficient skill trainers have in common is that they never think of only one skill at a time. Not only do they always look for ways to exploit synergies, but they also find ways of taking advantage of opportunities that arise to enhance all of their skills, not just the one they are training at the moment. Planning ahead in your activity choices and multitasking whenever possible are essential to succeeding where others fail.

Here are a few of the ways that you can more efficiently train skills by simply planning ahead and keeping multiple skills in mind as you go about your business.

Many skills require resources that are a tedious bore to collect quickly in large amounts, but that with some planning you can collect slowly over time. Don’t underestimate how significant an impact this can make!

Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• Willow branches are a secondary ingredient for Summoning, but you can only get them from player-grown willow trees, six at a time every half hour. Trying to get a bunch of these quickly is impossible, and most people can’t be bothered to make special trips for them. There’s a better way, however: plant a willow tree in the farming patch near Varrock castle. Every time you go to Varrock or the Grand Exchange, grab your secateurs and prune six branches while “in the neighborhood” (Figure 143). I now have almost 1,000 willow branches in the bank from doing this.
  
  
• Similarly, every time you head over to Brimhaven to take the cart to Shilo Village, stop at your tree patch there and pick produce. There are also pineapple plants not far away.
  
  
• Each time you teleport to Camelot to go over to the Catherby farming patch, you pass an area that has two unicorns. It may only be two horns at a time, but it adds up.
  
  
• Headed to the kalphite lair to fight the giant bugs? When you’re done, fill any inventory slots that don’t have good drops in them with potato cactus that you pick up while “in the neighborhood”.
  
  
• Going to the Duel Arena using a duelling ring? Take a side trip to pluck three cactus spines.
  

  Figure 143: Free Willow Branches for the Taking

  Trying to get 1,000 willow branches for Summoning would seem to take forever. The key is to grab six of them every time you are near one of your Farming-grown willow trees.

  
  

And so on. You’ll notice that many of these are related to Herblore and Farming, and that’s because those are the skills that most make use of items that are spawned or generated over time. There are literally dozens more opportunities in these skills and others; the limit is only your creativity.

Just as you can gather resources as you work on skills, you can also take advantage of opportunities that arise in your other travels. Here are a few examples:

• If you are going to a Summoning obelisk to recharge your Summoning points, why not bring with some charms, shards, empty pouches and secondary ingredients to make some pouches? That’s one less trip you have to make trying to level the skill up later. (Note that you can’t do this with the small obelisks, only the primary ones.)
  
  
• If you’re planning to go to your house to access a teleport there or recharge prayer, you should bring with bones, marrentills and a tinderbox to use on your gilded altar for Prayer XP (assuming you have one, naturally). It is far less boring to train skills this way than to grind them endlessly.
  
  
• Mine ores in the Heroes’ Guild when you go to recharge your amulets of glory: free Mining XP and resources for Smithing.
  
  
• Every time you teleport to Ardougne, you can grab some quick Thieving XP at the stalls in the marketplace.
  
  
• Each time you turn Lunar Magicks on or off, bring with a load of essence to craft into astral runes.
  
  
• If you find yourself near a flax field on your travels, pick a load to later spin into bowstrings for Fletching.

One of the best ways of increasing efficiency through multitasking is to make use of Summoning familiars while engaging in skills. They will only stick around for a limited amount of time, but while they are out they can help in many ways—in fact, there are so many good familiars now that there’s no reason to ever be doing anything without using one!

Here are a few examples of ways that Summoning familiars can help out when doing skills:

• The macaw is one of the very best familiars. Not only does it increase the quality of herb drops in combat, but it can also be used to generate herbs once a minute, so you can use it when fishing, woodcutting or performing other “stand around” jobs.
  
  
• Use a granite crab, ibis or granite lobster while fishing to get free raw fish.
  
  
• A spirit spider can be used to generate red spiders’ eggs several times every two minutes while you are working in a bank, Fletching for example.
  
  
• The fruit bat forages all sorts of high-level fruit, including papayas and coconuts, as well as strawberry seeds and even watermelon seeds (Figure 144)!
  
  
• You can use a spirit cockatrice to periodically forage cockatrice eggs for Herblore or Summoning.
  

  Figure 144: Fruit Bat Foraging

  The newly improved fruit bat can forage an impressive array of useful fruit, including coconuts and papayas, and also strawberry and watermelon seeds.

  
  

In addition to these, there are also the beasts of burden, which can enhance many other skills by allowing you to carry extra items.

Avoiding Waste and Making the Most of Combat Drops Getting the Most from Experience Bonuses and Special Methods