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Avoiding False Economies, or, Why You Can’t Afford to Be Cheap Avoiding Waste and Making the Most of Combat Drops

The American Heritage dictionary defines synergy as “the interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.” RuneScape skills aren’t agents or forces, but synergy is evident here in that training two or more skills together is more efficient than training them separately. In addition, there are many situations where the outputs from one skill act as inputs to another, creating natural tie-ins between skills that you should definitely take advantage of in your skill planning.

Some skill synergies are obvious and well-known to most people; others are far more subtle. I’ll now lay out some of the synergies you should be aware of, starting with a look at how combat interacts with non-combat skills, and then the various ways non-combat skills work with each other.

It is not generally possible to train both combat and non-combat skills simultaneously, though there are a few special exceptions. Mostly, the synergies between combat and non-combat skills are related to resources that pass between them. There are also a few synergies that don’t involve resources; as we’ll see, these often have to do with skills making combat easier.

Resource synergies can go in one of two directions. First, there are non-combat skills that provide resources to assist in combat; obvious examples would be food, potions, runes and ammunition, which are inputs to combat. And conversely, there are resources provided by combat activities that are essential to training non-combat skills; examples here are bones for Prayer, dragonhides for Crafting and charms for Summoning. These items are, of course, combat outputs.

Again, these synergies don’t mean that you can train these non-combat skills as you train combat. Rather, they are ways in which you can tie your training of multiple skills together:

• Agility: There’s not a lot of synergy here, because Agility both uses and produces very little in the way of resources. High Agility does help access certain monsters, but that’s about it.
  
  
• Construction: There’s not much in the way of synergy here, though having a well-designed player-owned house will help with combat activities.
  
  
• Cooking: There is a strong input synergy to combat, which obviously is food for healing. There is a weaker synergy in the other direction; some monsters drop considerable amounts of raw food and food ingredients, though it admittedly is not many.
  
  
• Crafting: This skill has a broad set of synergies with combat. First, the skill provides items such as combat jewelry, leather armor, and especially dragonhide armor for fighters. On the output side, many of the essential resources for Crafting come as combat drops, such as cowhides, gems, seaweed and especially dragonhides.
  
  
• Farming: The synergy here is mostly in the form of herb and allotment seed drops, which are a primary way in which these essential items enter the game.
  
  
• Firemaking: Virtually no combat synergies here.
  
  
• Fishing: There are no meaningful synergies here either, though you can get a few Strength points from barbarian fishing. (Remember that raw fish is an input to Cooking, not combat.)
  
  
• Fletching: This skill produces bows, crossbows and ammunition for Ranged fighting. In the other direction, there are some monsters that drop items like bolt tips and arrowtips, and even one or two that drop bowstrings. Gems are also used in Fletching, and come largely from combat.
  
  
• Herblore: Herblore and combat have strong bidirectional synergies. Combat is one of two primary means of getting herbs for making potions, and also a way in which many secondary ingredients are obtained. The potions made from these herbs are then important inputs to combat.
  
  
• Hunter: The only notable synergy here is chinchompas, which can be caught using Hunter and then used to get lots of Ranged XP in combat.
  
  
• Mining: There aren’t any significant synergies here.
  
  
• Prayer: This is a combat-related skill so the synergies are obvious: getting a higher Prayer level makes combat easier, and combat is also the primary source of bones for training Prayer. This is one of the skills that can be trained alongside combat.
  
  
• Runecrafting: This is one of the primary sources of runes for combat magic.
  
  
• Slayer: Obviously there are strong synergies here: this skill not only can be trained along with combat, it must be!
  
  
• Smithing: The relationship between Smithing and combat has changed over the years; at one time it was mainly Smithing that supplied combat, but now it is often the other direction. At one time, Smithing was an essential source of armor and weapons for fighting, but now most players mid-level and above use more advanced equipment that isn’t smithed. In contrast, combat is now an excellent source of both ores and bars for smiths.
  
  
• Summoning: This skill is tightly tied to combat in both directions, with charms being obtained only via combat, and Summoning familiars being designed to assist in combat.
  
  
• Thieving: There’s little to no synergy between combat and this skill.
  
  
• Woodcutting: Like most resource skills, there is no real synergy with combat here.

Where the synergies between combat and non-combat skills tend to be simple matters of input and output, the relationships among non-combat skills are often far more complex. There are interactions of items, of course, but also many instances where skills can be trained together to mutual benefit.

I discuss skill synergies in more detail when I examine each individual skill, but here’s a brief summary of the most important ones:

• Agility: This is mostly a standalone skill that doesn’t rely much on other skills in order to train it. Agility training does make use of food and potions from Cooking and Herblore, but it’s not particularly significant. You can also get a few Agility points from barbarian fishing.
  
  
• Construction: This skill has very little in terms of training synergies. It is tied to Woodcutting because of the use of high volumes of logs, but this is indirect due to the need to plank the logs.
  
  
• Cooking: The synergy between Cooking and Fishing is one of the best known in the game, and the two are often trained together. A loose relationship also exists between Cooking and Farming, since the latter supplies several food ingredients, and Firemaking, since you can cook on fires.
  
  
• Crafting: This is mostly an independent skill that has only a couple of loose “affiliations” with others. In terms of output, Crafting is well known for producing bow strings for Fletching. In the other direction, the skill makes use of gems from Mining, and gold and silver bars from Smithing, in addition to the inputs from combat.
  
  
• Farming: The obvious non-combat synergy here is between Farming and Herblore. Like Cooking and Fishing, these are naturals to train together. Weaker relationships exist between Farming and Woodcutting (bird’s nests for seeds) and Cooking (sweetcorn, strawberries, watermelons, etc.)
  
  
• Firemaking: Woodcutting, obviously! J There are also minor synergies with Crafting (lanterns, Dorgeshuun light orbs and so forth) and Cooking.
  
  
• Fishing: Strongly tied to Cooking as mentioned above; Barbarian fishing is an oddball that ties Fishing to Agility as well.
  
  
• Fletching: This skill mostly relies on the output of other non-combat skills: Woodcutting for logs; Crafting for bow strings; Mining (and combat) for gems; and Smithing for arrowtips and unfinished bolts. Output consists of ammunition used for combat, while most bows are alched, resulting in a close synergy in training Fletching and Magic.
  
  
• Herblore: Very closely related to Farming, as mentioned above, with a few minor synergies (barbarian fishing supplies roe and caviar for barbarian potions).
  
  
• Hunter: The Hunter skill requires little in the way of inputs; most hunting is done without bait, an exception being papayas for the new pawyas in Isafdar. Output from this skill produces a couple of weak synergies: the barbtailed harpoon for Fishing, for example, raw bird meat is used in Summoning, and bones for prayer.
  
  
• Mining: Ores for Smithing and gems for Crafting and Fletching.
  
  
• Prayer: This skill is related to combat and not really tied to non-combat skills.
  
  
• Runecrafting: This skill provides runes for both combat and non-combat Magic. It is related to Agility indirectly in that a higher Agility level is beneficial because of all the running involved. It is also related to mining and combat, because these are the primary ways of obtaining essence.
  
  
• Slayer: The Slayer skill is trained alongside combat, and so indirectly shares many of the synergies that combat does with other non-combat skills. It has few other synergies with non-combat skills (one example is the Wild Jade Vine feature, which gives alternating amounts of Farming and Slayer XP).
  
  
• Smithing: The skill is very tightly tied to Mining, due to ores from that skill being used to make bars both by smiths and for smiths. Smithing produces items for combat directly, and for combat indirectly via Fletching (arrowtips and unfinished bolts).
  
  
• Summoning: This extremely broad skills has interactions with nearly every other one in the game. These are all relatively minor, mostly taking the form of specific familiars that enhance other skills. For example, there are familiars that boost Agility, generate compost for Farming, assist with Runecrafting and so on.
  
  
• Thieving: Thieving doesn’t have inputs and cannot generally be trained alongside other skills, so it has only weak synergies related to the items that thieves produce. The most notable of these are seeds for Farming, courtesy of master farmers—whether they like it or not (Figure 141)—and gems for Crafting, from the safes at the Rogues’ Den.
  
  
• Woodcutting: Strong synergies with Firemaking and Fletching. Weaker synergies with Construction (wood for planks), Herblore (bird’s nests) and Farming (tree seeds from those bird’s nests, as well as the ability to cut a player-grown tree).
  

  Figure 141: Not a Noble Profession, But...

  Thieving master farmers is a significant source of seeds for Farming.

  
  

Avoiding False Economies, or, Why You Can’t Afford to Be Cheap Avoiding Waste and Making the Most of Combat Drops