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Overview of Vinesweeper Vinesweeper’s Role in the Farming Skill

I always tell RuneScape players that there are three major reasons why people play minigames: fun, XP and items. When Vinesweeper first came out, it failed on all three counts: it wasn’t fun (because the rabbits were turbocharged and very difficult to stop); the XP rewards were meager (1/6th of what they are now); and the seeds and other item rewards were too expensive (585,000 points for a spirit seed!).

Fortunately, Jagex got on the ball fast and revised the game in less than a week. It is now, I believe, quite well balanced in terms of the rewards it provides for the time you spend on it.

Regular Farming is very passive; you plant seeds and then go away for a while and come back later to harvest and repeat the process. This is time efficient, but for most people, not very interesting. In contrast, Vinesweeper is a game that requires your participation; you have to actively play to get points, but the time seems to go quickly because you are engaged in solving puzzles and avoiding tricky rabbits.

If you aren’t sure if you’ll find Vinesweeper fun or not, the obvious solution is to give it a try! But even before you do, chances are that you already know the basics of this game, which are the same as the classic computer game Minesweeper. If you enjoy the challenge of using indicator numbers to figure out where mines are in that game, you’ll almost certainly like Vinesweeper. Of course, there are some differences between the two games, beyond replacing mines with seeds; I discuss these throughout the guide.

Vinesweeper is also designed to be a multiplayer game—you can go to the farm with a friend, and if you work cooperatively, each can benefit from the other’s actions. This makes it a much more social occasion than regular farming, which tends to be a solitary activity. Whether there is an efficiency benefit to this or not is a matter of opinion, but there’s no denying that doing something with a friend is more fun than doing it alone! J

One option for using your Vinesweeper points is to trade them for Farming XP. You get one XP per point if you are level 40 or higher (but substantially less per point below that), and you can cash in your points at any time. Bear in mind that, as mentioned in the overview, you do not get any Farming XP for playing Vinesweeper; this is the only method.

The number of Vinesweeper points you can get—and thus, the number of experience points—is a function of both your skill at the game and your Farming level; good players with Farming levels in the 90s can earn up to 35,000 points per hour. I’m level 78 Farming and pretty good at the game, and my maximum appears to be around 15k per hour or so; lower level players may only be able to get 10k or even 5k per hour. I discuss the matter of XP and leveling with Vinesweeper in the next topic.

(Out of interest, you may be amused to learn that when the game first came out, you could only get 1 Farming XP for every 6 Vinesweeper points! Needless to say, I wasn’t too impressed with spending an hour digging holes just to get around 2.5k of Farming XP! J)

Obviously, any points you spend on XP cannot be used to get seeds and other items. It is possible to use some points to buy items and then use the rest for XP; you can “mix and match” as you like. See the topic on choosing rewards for some ideas on how best to spend your hard-farmed points.

Instead of trading your Vinesweeper points for Farming XP, you have another choice: you can spend them at Mrs. Winkin’s World of Seeds (see Figure 283). She carries 27 varieties of seeds for your convenience, including the rare spirit tree seed, which is untradeable and hard to get otherwise. She also offers as an option the special compost potion that turns bins of compost into supercompost. Finally, you can your points to trade for replacement Vinesweeper flags, which cost 50 points each.

For a full listing of item rewards and costs, see the topic that discusses the pros and cons of Vinesweeper rewards.

Overview of Vinesweeper Vinesweeper’s Role in the Farming Skill