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The ZMI Ourania Altar - Introduction, Location and General Description The ZMI Ourania Altar - Recommended Method for Runecrafting

Let’s face it: Runecrafting is a bit of a grind. It’s never been the most interesting skill in the game, and most players do it for only two reasons: to raise their Runecrafting level or to make runes to use and sell (or both). The activity involves little more than running or walking to an altar, crafting runes, then teleporting back to the bank and repeating. Most crafters get used to doing this hundreds and even thousands of times, and so being able to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible is of paramount importance.

When it comes to crafting runes, time is truly of the essence. Let’s take a look at what the major issues are in getting runes made as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As mentioned in my overview, the altar is not in a convenient location. The only efficient way to access it is to use the Lunar Magicks spell Ourania Teleport, and this is what I strongly recommend, as it will drop you right near the chaos altar next to the ladder down to the cave (see Figure 28). Otherwise you will have to walk to the region; Castle Wars is probably the closest conventional teleport spot to the altar (again, refer to Figure 26).

The reason the Ourania Teleport spell is so useful is that it will let you easily teleport out of the altar after crafting, to bank your runes and get more essence. If you haven’t completed Lunar Diplomacy, don’t want to turn on Lunar Magicks, or your Magic level is below 71, then you will have to use the bank near the Ourania altar. If so, you will only need to travel to the altar’s area once, so the time required to get there the first time won’t matter so much. The drawback is that this bank is a hassle, and you won’t be able to teleport after using the altar so you will not be able to craft nearly as quickly.

If you can cast Ourania Teleport, then your best option is to use it to get to the area, walk or run to the altar, craft your runes, and then teleport to a bank to exchange runes and essence. One popular method for doing this is to simply cast the Moonclan Teleport spell (level 69), bank on Lunar Isle, and then go back to Ourania.

This is a decent enough option, but I prefer the old standby: dueling rings. The first reason is cost: using Moonclan Teleport means you waste a law rune and two astrals every trip, while most people have a stack of dueling rings in the bank gathering dust anyway (and if not, they are cheap). Second, to use the bank on Lunar Isle you must have the annoying Seal of Passage on you. This doohickey is surprisingly heavy for something that you wear around your neck at 4 kg, and weight slows you down. (Why should something intended to be nothing more than an ID badge that goes in the neck slot weigh almost 9 pounds? Dunno, ask Jagex.)

If you do not have access to the Ourania Teleport spell, then you are going to be pretty much tied to using the bank near the ZMI altar. This not only means you have to double back on the path between the Ourania cave entrance and the altar—slowing you down and subjecting you to ZMI attacks a second time—you also have to deal with the cost and annoyance of the “convenient” bank.

Presumably to prevent that bank from making the use of the Ourania altar “too easy”, Jagex made it so you must pay 20 runes (of any type) to access the bank (Figure 29). That doesn’t sound too bad, since you can use cheap runes like fires or bodies to pay the toll, until you realize that this is for every access. Consider that if you want to use pouches that means you have to pay twice every trip—once to get ess before filling your pouches and once afterwards to refill your inventory—and 40 runes a trip will start to add up. You’ll also have to waste an inventory slot on that stack of cheap runes, reducing the number of ess you can carry by one.

These are all reasons why I strongly recommend using Ourania Teleport.

Running is obviously faster than walking, so you will want to employ the usual methods that apply to areas of the game where conserving run energy is important. These include:

• Getting your Agility level reasonably high.
  
  
• Carrying only items that are absolutely necessary.
  
  
• Wearing negative weight items to reduce your weight: these are the boots of lightness, spotted or spottier cape, and penance gloves (from Barbarian Assault).
  
  
• Taking the shortest routes possible.

When you eventually use up your run energy you will have to decide if you want to then walk while it restores naturally, or speed up the process using either energy or super energy potions. This is a simple tradeoff of time versus money. For most people, it makes sense to use the potions, because the time saved can be used to make up the cost of the potions (especially regular energy potions, which are quite cheap.)

There are two paths between the Ourania cave entrance and the altar: the short one filled with aggressive enemies, and the long one that is safe but slow (Figure 30). For players interested in efficient crafting this isn’t a tough choice: you want to use the short path. You will of course be attacked by the annoying ZMI mages, rangers and warriors, and will need to deal with that as we’ll discuss shortly.

The long path is mainly for those who are very low combat level and cannot deal with the attackers on the short path at all (such as skill pures). It can also be useful to Runecrafters who don’t use energy potions, though, some of whom will use the long path while walking and waiting for their run energy to restore. This lets you click once and not have to worry about getting nailed by the ZMI attackers. You can also browse the RuneScape forums or whatever while keeping “half an eye” on your game window.

The usual approach to dealing with the ZMI pests is to use armor and prayer. The typical advice is to wear dragonhide armor, turn auto-retaliate off, and use the Protection from Ranged prayer. Then run as fast as possible through the gauntlet, and with luck you won’t take much damage. This won’t fully protect you, since they use all three forms of attack (see Figure 31), but it will limit your hits to a small value.

There is a prayer altar conveniently located right by the entrance to the cave. For this reason, some people just leave their protection prayer on all the time while using the altar, and simply recharge every time they come back to Ourania.

For mid level to moderately high level players, wearing armor is probably a reasonable way to go, as long as you don’t wear too much (as it will consume run energy faster). I have noticed that many high level players using the altar are also wearing full armor, though, and for them it is not really necessary. In my tests, I wore no armor at all, and sometimes didn’t even bother with prayer. I took a few points of damage, but saved a lot of run energy by not weighing myself down with tons of gear. In the next topic I’ll explain exactly how I use this to best advantage.

The ZMI Ourania Altar - Introduction, Location and General Description The ZMI Ourania Altar - Recommended Method for Runecrafting