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Alternative Methods for Obtaining Herbs Using the Macaw Familiar and Herbcall Scrolls

You can’t become a king or queen of your own realm in RuneScape, but you can come pretty close. After you finish the quest Throne of Miscellania, you become the regent of that sleepy northern isle. What you get for your trouble is the ability to hire workers from the island, who will gather various resources in exchange for payment. These are all skilling staples, such as coal, flax, raw fish, logs, and yes, herbs. You can get around 60 grimy herbs per day from this minigame, all for only a few minutes’ worth of work once a week. As they say, it’s good to be the king… er… regent. J

Writing a complete guide to managing the Kingdom of Miscellania is well beyond the scope of an Herblore skill guide, but this minigame is such a good source of herbs and other resources that I felt I should at least share with you the basics. My focus here will, of course, be on how this minigame helps herblorists.

To start the minigame, speak with Advisor Ghrim. He will allow you to deposit money in the kingdom’s coffers, which is used to pay your workers. You get 10 workers upon completing Throne of Miscellania, who can be distributed among the following resources: fish (swordfish and tuna combined), coal, maple logs, and either herbs or flax (Figure 191)—you cannot do both herbs and flax at once, though. When you complete the sequel quest Royal Trouble, you get an extra 5 workers for a total of 15, as well as the ability to collect teak and/or mahogany logs, as well as farming seeds. You can only put a maximum of 10 workers on any resource; you can also choose to keep some workers idle (though you shouldn’t!)

Every day, 10% of the money in your coffers is withdrawn to pay for resource gathering, up to a limit of 50k if you have 10 workers, or 75k if you have 15 workers. Then, this amount of money is multiplied by your approval rating, which is a percentage, to determine how much actually goes to buy resources; the rest is effectively wasted. Approval is a measure of how popular you are on the island; it slowly decreases every day, while you bring it back up by helping out with tasks like fishing, cutting wood and mining.

You also get bonus items from your workers, which are mostly related to the resources they collect. When your workers are set to mine coal, you also get a few uncut gems; fishing yields items like gems and caskets; herbs and flax yield herb seeds; and logs provide bird’s nests that can contain tree seeds or rings. In some cases these are just nice extras, while in the case of maple logs, the bonus items are more valuable than the resource itself! In fact, this is a great way to get bird’s nests for making Saradomin brews.

As mentioned earlier, each worker will take 5,000 gp per day from the coffers. Table 39 shows what you get from each worker for each resource category, assuming you have 100% approval and enough money in the coffers (more on that later). There is, of course, a lot of randomness in some of these items, including herbs, and especially with bonus items.

These numbers seem rather small, but remember that you can assign up to 10 workers to any resource. Thus, you can actually get 60 herbs or 540 coal or 1,250 flax per day—and that quickly adds up!

Herbs obtained from Miscellania are always grimy, which is good if you like the extra XP of cleaning herbs, but not so great if you don’t enjoy the activity. You only get “standard” herbs tarromin and higher, which means tarromin, harralander, ranarr, irit, avantoe, kwuarm, cadantine, lantadyme and dwarf weed. The mix of herbs is similar to what you’d get from standard monster drops except that the number of ranarrs is reduced: you usually only get about as many ranarrs as you do herbs like lantadyme and dwarf weed. Unfortunate, but I guess Jagex felt it was warranted from a game balance standpoint.

The only resources that produce appreciable bonus items are fishing, mining and regular wood. A full complement of 10 workers on maple logs will yield about 8 bird’s nests per day, while you’ll get about 3 uncut gems per day with coal. And if you have 10 workers assigned to fishing, you’ll get lots of gems, caskets, odd items like colored boots and even clue scrolls!

The herb seeds you get, unfortunately, include low-level seeds that are nearly worthless, and you get them in rather small amounts. You may get lucky and occasionally get a ranarr, snapdragon or high-level herb seed, but they are somewhat rare.

There are two basic ways you can select resources for your workers to gather, which reflect the two basic methods most players apply to skilling on the whole. First, there is the self-sufficient approach: have them collect items you need to use in your skilling efforts, which in this case would mean herbs. Second is the more value-oriented perspective, where you have workers gather whatever will yield the most profit, and then use the proceeds to buy herbs you want.

Since you get about 6 herbs for 5,000 gp, you are paying, on average, a little over 800 gp per herb. When I first started playing RuneScape, this was an excellent deal: ranarrs were worth over 7k each, all of the herbs above ranarr were 2k a piece, and even harralanders often were worth over 1k. But since the changes in late 2007, the market value of herbs has dropped off considerably.

You still get more than 5,000 gp worth of herbs for the 5,000 gp you spend per worker, but not as much as you once did. I’d estimate that the value of the herbs per worker now is around 8,000 gp, which is a nice return, and certainly a good way to get a discount compared to buying herbs from other players. But you can make much more for your money with other resources.

In particular, both flax and raw fish are worth more now than they were six months ago. That same 5,000 gp that buys 8,000 gp worth of herbs will yield about 11,000 gp worth of flax at current prices, 10,000 gp of coal (plus gems), or 10,000 gp of raw fish (plus gems and other items). That’s not a huge difference per worker, but remember that at 10 workers, you’re talking about 20k to 30k per day.

Maple logs are an interesting counterpoint to this: for 5,000 gp invested per worker, you get about 4,000 gp of maples. Why do people do this? Simple: for the bird’s nests! You get nearly one bird’s nest per worker. The nests alone are worth over 2k each, and the seeds inside can be quite valuable as well. So players accept a small loss on the logs in exchange for the nests and seeds.

That leaves teak and mahogany logs and Farming seeds, none of which are worth gathering. Teak and mahogany prices have dropped to very low levels, and you get far fewer nests with them than maples. As for the seeds, far too many of them are low-level junk seeds to allocate resources there, in my opinion.

So should you get herbs or get other items to sell to buy herbs? Again, the choice is up to you, but remember that assuming you’ve done Royal Trouble, you can’t put all your workers on one resource anyway. So you could split them up, putting some workers on herbs and others on “cash crops” like flax or fish.

Regardless of what resources you choose, you should always exploit your kingdom to the maximum extent possible—it’s one of the easiest ways to get a lot of resources or money for very little effort. There are two items of “routine maintenance” for this minigame required on your part: watching the money in the coffers, and keeping your approval rating topped up. How often you deal with these issues is up to you: going every day is ideal, but becomes a chore—I find that heading there once a week is good enough.

Assuming you’ve done Royal Trouble, you want to always have at least 750k in the coffers so that your workers will be able to withdraw the maximum 75k allowed. If you plan to go once a week to restock your coffers, then you need to allow an extra 450k so that there’s at least 750k left on the last day. I round this up to about 1.5 million, which is what I top my coffers up to when I visit.

There are several ways to get to Miscellania quickly, but the one I prefer is the fairy ring network. I grab my woodcutting axe, lunar staff and some gold, and head for a fairy ring; I dial in “C I P”, and soon I’m standing just north of the castle. I run southeast a couple of clicks to the maple trees and cut wood until Lumberjack Leif tells me I’ve “done enough already”—that means my approval is now 100% (Figure 192). I then go to the castle and talk to Advisor Ghrim. (You can choose to mine, fish or garden instead, if you prefer.)

You do not have to collect resources each time you visit; if you do not, they will “store up” until you are ready. Be sure you have enough room in your bank for all the resources you will collect, including all the bonus items, or Ghrim won’t let you have them.

Actually, it’s worth noting that the resources themselves do not accumulate, just the work potential. That’s a bit confusing, but what it basically means is that each day the game pays attention to how much money is withdrawn from the coffers and what your approval rating was on that day, and records that that much worth of money was allocated to go to resources. But the resources themselves are not chosen until you tell Ghrim to collect them. This means you can change your mind about what resources you want at any time before you tell Ghrim that you want them delivered to your bank. (Yes, this makes no sense given that the workers are supposed to be gathering them continuously, but it’s quite handy so don’t complain. J)

One final note is that Ghrim is one of the folks you can speak with remotely using the Lunar Magicks spell NPC Contact. You can ask him to change resource allocations and to have resources delivered to the bank, but you can’t deposit or withdraw funds this way.

Alternative Methods for Obtaining Herbs Using the Macaw Familiar and Herbcall Scrolls