TruthScape.com - Training by Cleaning Grimy Herbs

In the preceding section, I described the potential benefits of buying grimy herbs, rather than clean ones, to use for making potions. What many players don’t realize is that the cleaning process itself can be a viable method of supplemental training. Cleaning herbs has a reputation as being a tedious process that doesn’t give good XP and loses a lot of money. The “tedious” part is certainly correct, but herb cleaning can actually give surprisingly good experience per hour. As for the money, you often lose less by doing this than making potions, and in some cases, you can actually make money.

This is a method that is simple to do, but not simple to do in a cost-effective manner. It requires some patience, as well as understanding of how to buy and sell intelligently on the Grand Exchange. It’s not for everyone, but it can be very useful, and even lucrative, for those who master it.

Note: For details on the optimal mechanics of this process, please see the discussion of cleaning herbs efficiently. Since herb cleaning involves a lot of clicking, I urge you to pay particular attention to the warning there about repetitive stress injuries, and again, only use this as a supplement to other training techniques.

Conceptually, this is about the simplest way of getting Herblore XP imaginable. You buy grimy herbs on the Grand Exchange, bank them, withdraw 28 at a time, click the grimy herbs to clean them, bank the clean herbs, and then sell them. As the topic on cleaning herbs mentions, it is possible to do around 5,000 per hour.

The amount of XP for each herb cleaned depends on its level, varying from 2.5 XP up to 15 XP as shown in Table 16. Training with grimy herbs is generally only effective for herbs irit and up, so you are looking at 45k to 75k XP per hour with this method. That’s slower than making potions, of course, but it can be much more economical, as we’ll see.

Figuring out the cost of cleaning herbs for training is just as simple as the method itself: subtract the amount you paid for the grimy herb from the amount you get from selling the clean herb, and multiply by 5,000. If the number is negative, that’s how much you lose; if it’s positive, that’s your profit.

Obviously, for this method to be worthwhile, the amount you lose per herb has to be no more than a small amount: at 5,000 per hour, the losses really add up. Also, you aren’t getting nearly as much XP with this as you are with making potions, so we need to take that into account. Doing all the math required to exactly calculate the point where cleaning herbs is better or worse than making pots becomes quite complex, because of the many different item prices and factors involved. Fortunately, we don’t have to; we can approximate.

If you look in Table 27, you’ll see that most of the better potion making options have an SAS of around 100,000 to 150,000 XP/hr. Most of the herbs that you’ll clean earn you about 45,000 to 75,000 XP/hr, which is around half of that amount. You’ll also see that the SAV of the potions is around -10 gp/XP; since cleaning gives around half as much XP per hour, to be about equal it should also have around half the loss per hour, or an SAV of about -5 gp/XP. Most herbs give 9 to 15 XP per cleaning, so this means you want the loss per herb to be no more than around 45 to 75 gp.

For example, suppose we were able to buy grimy cadantines for exactly 70 gp less than we can sell the clean ones for. Each herb cleaned gives us 12.5 XP, so this means we have the following ratings for the cleaning activity:

This represents a reasonable trade-off, being significantly slower than making a high-level potion like a super restore, but also costing much less. In fact, if we calculate the time value equivalent of making a super restore compared to cleaning cadantine with that much loss, we get a TVE of 339k; since most high-level players can earn around 300k per hour, that suggests they are closely balanced.

If the loss on each grimy cadantine were much above 70 gp, this would quickly not be worthwhile; for example, at a 100 gp loss, the TVE is 93k gp/hr, so making the super restores is a better move. Then again, at a loss of only 30 gp per cadantine, the TVE becomes 668 k gp/hr, so cleaning is better.

The success of this method depends on being able to get a grimy herb at a cost close to that of the equivalent clean herb, if not below it. That’s easier said than done in most cases, though. Prices constantly go up and down, and while the Grand Exchange makes buying and selling easier, it’s not always possible to tell what items are really trading for at any particular time.

For example, suppose you look up grimy kwuarms and see them selling in a range from 2,850 to 3,150. You look up clean kwuarms and they are trading in the same range. Great, you can break even! Not quite. They may both be listed as having a “fair market value” of 3,000 gp, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are both trading at 3,000 gp. While clean and grimy versions of herbs tend to move somewhat together, they do not march in lock step. It could be that at that moment, the lowest seller of grimy herbs is at 3,050 gp, while the highest buyer for clean kwuarms is at 2,900 gp. And when prices are moving up and down due to market changes, the potential for gaps like this is even greater.

The only way to figure out the state of the market, at least as it is now, is to make test purchases and sales. This means that if you want to try cleaning grimy kwuarms, first make a test purchase of one at the maximum price, and see how much you get for it. Then clean it and try to sell it for the minimum price, and see how much you gained or lost. If the differential is in your favor, you can then buy more, clean them and sell those. If not, you need to try something else.

In my experience, the best herbs to try to train by cleaning are ranarr and above, but especially the very high level herbs (except torstol, which has a thin market). I’ve had my best success with kwuarm, snapdragon, cadantine, lantadyme and dwarf weed. I believe the main reason is that many players have low Herblore levels, and when they get these items as drops, they sell them rather than getting them cleaned first, knowing they’ll still get about the same amount of money. Also, many high-level herblorists don’t want to take the time to clean their herbs.

Suppose you do a test purchase and find grimy lantadyme selling for 1,700 and people buying clean lantadyme at 1,670. You buy 500 grimy herbs and clean them. You then go to sell the clean lantadyme and find nobody is buying for more than 1,615 because the market shifted. Oops.

The solution to this is to keep stocks of clean herbs in your bank. With 500 clean lantadymes already on hand, you can buy 500 grimy ones and sell your stock of 500 clean ones immediately. Then you can clean the ones you bought at your leisure, to replace the 500 clean herbs you sold.

The price controls on the Grand Exchange are annoying, but you can turn them to your advantage in some cases—if you understand how the GE works. If you find an herb where people are selling the grimy version at a price near or below the minimum of the clean version, then you have a “sure thing” in terms of XP and/or profit. The same applies if anyone is buying clean herbs for a price near or above the maximum of the grimy version.

That’s confusing but an example will make it clear. Suppose that grimy dwarf weeds have an average price of 1,800, so are in the range 1,710 to 1,890, and clean dwarf weeds have an average price of 1,840 and are in the range 1,748 to 1,932. Now, suppose you do a test purchase and find someone is selling grimy herbs for 1,755 gp each. You should immediately buy a bunch. Why? Because the absolute minimum you can sell the clean ones for is 1,748, and even if that’s all you get, you are earning practically free XP.

The same situation applies if people are buying clean herbs for high prices. Take the same example and suppose players are buying clean dwarf weeds for 1,900 each. Sell your stock of clean ones and buy more grimy dwarfs! The most you will pay is 1,890, so you are going to get XP and turn a profit.

Situations like this require patience. If you are trying to buy something stuck at the maximum price or sell something that is at its floor price, it may take a while. But herbs are high-volume items: as long as you are selling at the minimum or buying at the maximum, it usually will not take very long to get the items you’re after.

To give you an idea of how lucrative this can be, two days before writing this, I sold 300 clean lantadymes for 1,731 gp each, and then bought 300 grimy lantadymes for 1,548 each (Figure 167). That’s 3.9k of Herblore XP and a profit of 55k—not bad at all. That much of a differential in your favor is rare, but small profits are not hard to get.

**Figure 167: Making Money and XP by Cleaning Grimy Herbs**
It’s not always possible to do this, but if you keep your eyes on the market and know what to look for, you can have the best of both worlds.

Note that in general, it is better to be in a position where you are near the bottom of the market than the top of the market. By this I mean the first example above with the dwarf weeds is easier to do than the second. Why? Clean herbs have a bigger market than grimy ones, so it is easier to slowly sell clean herbs at their minimum price than it is to slowly buy grimy herbs at their maximum price.

Finally, I recommend that when you are just learning this method, start with smallish quantities of say 100 herbs. Then go to greater volume as you become more comfortable with it.