TruthScape.com - The ZMI Ourania Altar - Introduction, Location and General Description

The new altar run by Zamorakian mages that lets you craft any type of rune, even ones above your Runecrafting level. Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Of course, any time you deal with Zamorak there are bound to be a few catches, and so it is here, with some drawbacks to the altar that will become clear as we look into it. Despite those, the new altar has great promise to not just change how many people raise the Runecrafting skill, but actually revolutionize it.

Let’s find out more about the altar and how it works, starting with the story behind it and how it was discovered.

The story goes that followers of Zamorak discovered the Ourania altar when digging near the grave of Scorpius, the renowned Zamorakian astronomer, north of the Observatory. The Zamorak Magical Institute (ZMI) discovered that the now ruined altar had the unique ability to produce runes of any type—not just a single type like conventional Runecrafting altars. Recognizing the great power and potential of the site, the ZMI seized it, and set about to repair it for their own uses.

They were only partially successful, due perhaps to limited knowledge of how the altar was originally created. It turns out that this altar is one of those that was in fact originally established by the Moon Clan of Lunar Isle ages past, lost during the clan’s clashes with the Fremennik. The ZMI was able to get the altar into a working state, but not perfectly, and the result is an altar that has great utility, but that is unpredictable in terms of what it actually produces.

For its part, the ZMI wasted no time putting the new altar under its firm control. Accessing it is still possible by brave adventurers, but those who are in a hurry will have to deal with loyal Zamorakian followers who have been put in place to protect the site.

The new altar is located in a cave whose entrance is near the chaos altar north of the Observatory, which is itself north of Castle Wars. It is southwest of West Ardougne, west of the Khazard battlefield, and northwest of the Tree Gnome Village. (See the map in Figure 26.)

**Figure 26: Location of the Entrance to the Ourania Cave**
The Ourania cave is in the northwest part of this map. The red dot is the location where you land when using the Ourania Teleport spell, after which you take the short path to the actual cave entrance, located just to the west of the chaos altar.

This is a fairly remote area, and since leveling up Runecrafting requires many trips to the altar, having to walk to the area every time would make this new altar not terribly useful. Fortunately, Jagex has put a bank in the area (with a cost, though).

Also, the link between this altar and the Moon Clan will prove useful to those who know Lunar Magicks. Speak to Baba Yaga, owner of the magic shop on Lunar Isle, and you’ll find out she knows something of the altar. After telling you a bit about its history, she’ll tell you how to cast a new Lunar Magicks spell that can teleport you right near it. The new spell is called Ourania Teleport (surprise, surprise) and requires 1 law rune, 2 astral runes and 6 earth runes.

Note that the new teleport will also be extremely useful to those who train Hunter using red salamanders, since they are right in the same area near the Zamorak altar.

The ZMI altar works in the same basic way as other, conventional Runecrafting altars. You fill your inventory with pure rune essence—regular rune essence will not work—travel to the altar, and click on it to craft the essence into runes. You can also use essence pouches, emptying them and clicking on the altar to craft those essences as well. When done, you go back to bank by any expedient means, put the runes in the bank, get more pure essence and repeat.

Where the Ourania altar differs from other altars, though, is in what runes it crafts. Rather than being dedicated to a specific rune type like the others, it turns your pure essence into a whole variety of runes, ranging from airs and minds at the low end up to bloods and souls (the only way to craft these at present). The number of each type of rune you get has a random component, but is also heavily based on your Runecrafting level. Thus, at level 20 Runecrafting it is very unlikely that you will get blood or soul runes from your essence, while at level 90 you’ll see many more bloods, deaths and souls, and relatively few of the basic elemental runes, minds and bodies.

An analogy of this new altar would be to the fishing trawler minigame, where the type of fish you get is based on your fishing level. Just as the fishing trawler is the only way to get sea turtles and manta rays, at present the Ourania altar is the only way to craft bloods and souls. One difference is that at the fishing trawler you cannot get fish above your fishing level, while the Ourania altar does let you get runes above your Runecrafting level. Don’t get too excited by this, however; as we’ll see, you will only get them rarely.

The ability to get runes above one’s level is nice, but the true, major benefit of the new altar is that you get double the XP for each rune crafted that you would if you crafted at a regular altar. So, for example, you get 20 XP for each death rune that is crafted, and 10 XP for each air rune. Obviously, again, those who are higher level will make more of the higher runes and so will get more XP than those who are lower in level. The major downside is that you only get one rune per essence, no matter what type. Thus, even if you could get six air runes per essence if you made air runes at the air altar, you only get one air rune if the game randomly chooses to give you an air rune for a particular essence. So, if you go to the altar with 41 pure essence, you will leave with a total of 41 runes, no more.

This altar represents a major shift in the entire way that Runecrafting works, because for the first time your Runecrafting level affects not just what rune types you can access to craft, it directly controls how many good runes and how much experience you get. For example, a level 50 Runecrafter gets the exact same amount of experience when he goes to the nature altar as a level 70 Runecrafter. At the new altar, though, the level 70 player would get both better runes and more XP for his or her trouble. This of course means that higher level crafters are far more likely to appreciate the new altar than those who are less experienced in the skill.

Since Runecrafting requires a lot of back-and-forth travel, Jagex put a bank near the entrance to the cave that contains the altar, run by a poor dude named Eniola (shown in Figure 27). The bank comes with a catch, though: you have to pay 20 runes (of any type) to access it. This means that walking back and forth to the bank from the altar to the bank can be not only slow, but somewhat costly as well. For this reason most who use this method will prefer the Lunar Magicks teleport.

**Figure 27: Ourania Cave Bank**
Poor Eniola, that’s gotta hurt. No wonder he charges 20 runes per access!

There are two paths between the cave entrance / bank and the altar itself: a short and a long route. Keeping with Jagex’s usual “risk versus reward” design strategy, the long route takes more time to traverse, but is safe; in contrast, the short route is loaded with aggressive Zamorak warriors, mages and rangers who will take pot shots at would-be Runecrafters. Most people will still use the short route; as we’ll see in later topics, there are ways to minimize the impact of these evil minions.