20% increase in Snapdragon Seeds

I just finished a farming run and had to say that Snapdragons are going gangbusters. 20% increase in price over the last 30 days. Here is the graph of the price on the GE. Based on the price of other herbs, this is way over priced. The seeds tend to average out at about the cost of 3-4 herbs, but this is now at 5.

If you have Snapdragon seeds saved up, sell them while the price is high, then repurchase them when the price drops back down to a more reasonable 1-32k each. The averages of the game dictate that the price will find an equilibrium, so barring any sudden increase in disease free herb plots, these should get an adjustment in the near future.

Red Spider Eggs

I have been busy this week (sorry subscribers). This one will be a shorter post, but I have been doing a ton of farming runs lately and keep using this trick for herblore seconds. You can choose to save or sell these, but I always use mine to make Super Restore potions. The principal is the same.

Unless you have a Summoning level of less than 16, you should buy your Spirit Spider pouches. Making them is just an inefficient use of your gold charms at that point. Today they sell for 281gp, and have held steady at that price for over a week. The Egg Spawn scroll, is 28gp, and does fluctuate a bit more. You can grab some free XP here if the scrolls are less than the cost of 1/10 the pouch, but converting 28 pouches into scrolls is only 59.6xp, so it isn't really an efficient use of your time.

I can usually get 70 casts of Egg Spawn before the spider's timer runs out. The easiest place to do it is just outside of the Edgeville bank. There is a mini-alter very near there so you can restore points as needed too.

The rest is easy, just grab a pouch, summon the spider and cast away at Egg Spawn. Done well, you can generate 70-90 eggs per pouch. The price of eggs on the GE today is 285, for a total profit of about 50k an hour. In and of itself this not the best or the fastest way to make money, but if you have herbore, alching, fletching, or crafting do do, you can combine it with casting egg spawn and maximize your time.

Where this really helps is after you hit 62/63 herblore and can make Super Restore potions. It significantly reduces the collection time for this second if you collect your own resources.

Just about any herb will more than pay for itself in terms of ROI in terms of time invested, so I am only going to focus on the top five. Keep in mind the best seed to plant for XP will always be the best you can plant that is at least three levels below your farming level. Anything above that will tend to get diseased and die far too often to be worthwhile.

Flowers:
Flowers are the easiest so I will get them out of the way first. Basically you have two options.

1. Limpwurt - These seeds sell for 241 today and are easy to come by. They harvest 3 roots (569 today for 1,707 or 1,466 in profit).

2. Marigolds - 63gp on the GE, and the harvested flower wells for 4,225.

Profit wise marigolds are the way to go. That is nearly 20k gp in 10 minutes of farming for planting just one patch.

Herbs
Like mentioned previously, never plant herb seeds that are within three levels of your current faring level (unless you are wearing an amulet of nature that is bound to that plot and are planning on staying logged in for at least 75 minutes). Here are the top 5 herbs to plant for profits:

1. Snapdragon: Today these are above 35k, which is on the high side. Try to pick them up around 31-32k. Even though this is the most expensive of all seeds, it offers the best return. 7.1 Snapdragons made into potions, and sold for 288k gives you a ROI of 113kgp. With more reasonable seed prices, I make about 150k per trip with these.

2. Ranarr: Today these are almost 20k each, high, but still very reasonable. Made into prayer potions, these would sell for 210k, giving a ROI of 110k. This is about the max you can expect for a round of ranarrs.

3. Toadflax: These seeds are 316gp. In this case, you are better off cleaning the herbs, adding them to a vial, and selling them if you do not have 80 herblore to make sara brews, so I will use the herb price. These will sell for about 94k, giving a return of nearly 90k, but at the expense of some herblore XP.

4. Kwuarm: These seeds are 3,282 each and made into super strength potions, they sell for 82k. ROI: 63k gp.

5. Harralander: These seeds are 36gp each and made into energy potions, they sell for a whopping 7k. ROI: 7k.

There are two honorable mentions here of seeds that didn't make the cut. Cadantine is good to sell if you sell the weeds, but loses money if made into super def potions, so it got skipped. Torstol offers incredible ROI, but the number of farmers who can farm it is so low I didn't thing it would be of worth to most of my readers, and those who can farm it know enough about power farming.

All seeds will give you a good return on your seed investment if you sell the herbs. Unless you never plan on training herblore, it is best to make your harvest into potions, because at some point you will need to buy those herbs back anyway. If you do choose that route however, make sure that you clean the herbs and add them to vials to make unfinished potions. In general, these sell well and for more than the cost of the added vial.

All sales figures were calculated using 7.1 as the average herbs per plot, that number includes a death rate of about 93%. The cost of vials and seconds are not included in the ROI.

Herb Farming for Profit and XP

I am an avid farmer, and you will find few other skills that offer such a high ratio of gold to time invested. In this post I will outline my power farming course. I use this a few times a day, and with practice, you can shave your farming time down to less than 10 minutes a circuit.

Start location: Any bank

Inventory:
1 herb seed, 1 marigold seed, ectophial, and a charged wearing a glory, and any weight reducing equipment you have.

Use the ecto teleport and run to the plot there. Plant the herb and flower patch.

Glory tele to Draynor, bank, and grab herb and flower seeds, air staff and a law.

Here you can also grab a Nightshade and turnip seeds, and plant the Draynor mansion plots before doing the Fally plot. It adds about 1.5 to 2 minutes to your circuit, but is worth it for the herblore and summoning supplies.

Plant the Fally plot, then tele to Camelot and pick that plot.


Bank and grab herb and flower seeds for the next 2 plantings, plant Catherby (and pick any herbs if you had a bumper crop), then run to the Ardo plot harvest and plant there.

From here you can run to the bank, but I usually just glory to Edge, it is much faster.

Next grab a fire staff, 2 laws, and a final herb seed to plant the last herb patch.

Then entire trip should take you less than ten minutes, and when done a few times a day it will seriously increase your bank account balance while at the same time giving your farming a decent boost. Herbs grow in about 75 minutes and flowers grow much faster, but the XP really isn't worth it to chain farm flowers.

I will go over the types of flowers and herbs as well as your expected ROI to plant tomorrow.

Lose Money Making Farmer Payments?

I have long been a farmer. It is currently my highest skill. Along the way, I realized that in some cases (the big ones) it is actually better not to pay for your trees and some other plants. Payments like a basket of apples for strawberries is a no brainer, but when paying for yew or magic trees, this isn't the case.

Yew trees only have a death rate of about 1 in 10, as long as you are over 63 farming (3 levels higher than 60). This means that in order to save one yew seed, you would need to make 10 payments of 10 cactus spines. At today's GE price that is 255,700gp. Since the price of a yew seed is only about 70k, it clearly is best to just let that 1 in 10 trees die.

Even if you grow your own cactus, it is better to sell the spines and just buy more yew seeds. You still come out ahead. If you sold the payment for 10 trees, you could buy almost 4 more yew seeds for the cost of losing one yew tree.

Magic trees are also a loss to pay for, but the break even point is far lower at 1.25 deaths in 10. If you don't farm much, then it might be worth it to pay the extra gp for that bit of XP that you would save by not having the tree die.


For a more in depth description, you can also see my post on TIF.

Happy Farming

The Reason for Swamp Lizard Price Increase

I gained 3 more hunter levels last night catching Swamp Lizards, and they just kept selling. I can catch them much faster than normal chinchompas, so all around it was a good bit of training in a skill I have neglected quite a bit. I am sure this XP per hour will change as I go up in level, and the inconvenience of banking does have an impact in training, but for the time being, I will take the extra cash generated by catching them.

Now for the meat, the reason for Swamp Lizards going over 1k each is that they are in great demand as a second for summoning. The level 85 Swamp Titan (150 shards and a crimson token) takes these as the second, and is a very popular way to train summoning. Even with the cost above 1000gp, this makes them one of the most cost effective ways to train summoning above level 85.

I want to thank a buddy from my clan, Carlo, for coming up with the idea that they might be in demand as a second. A quick trip to the KG and sure enough they were. Now if I had only had had the foresight to see that a month ago, and purchased a mil worth of lizards...

Make thousands with Hunter

There are a few things with hunter that are consistent money makers, well two normal and red chins, but what about for lower levels? There isn't much. Last night I came across a curiosity while browsing the new GE graphs. Take a look at this:

I made nearly a quarter mil last night catching these things and finally got those last few levels so I can catch chins now, but I am going back to swamp lizards because they are still fast XP, and they sell for more.

In the past 30 days, the price has risen from 17gp each a whopping 3450% to 937 max price. I sold all of mine for max and the trades went through instantly. Why are they so high? My first guess is that there is some site out there doing RWT using them as a cash source. They surely aren't in demand weapon wise, and you don't see people carrying them around every day.

This is a very safe investment of time, and a decent amount of XP. Just catch bank and sell. The swamp lizards are located in the hunter area near Canafis, a short walk from the
ecto tele or the Ancients tele as well. Just grab your Larupia outfit (although catching them is so fast you really don't need it), 3-4 nets and ropes for the traps and start setting up net traps.

Here are the number of traps you can set up:

Hunter level	Maximum traps
20 - 39	Two traps at a time
40 - 59	Three traps at a time
60 - 79	Four traps at a time
80 - 99	Five traps at a time

Many guides say to bring the nature pouch, but that really isn't necessary either, as the attacking ghasts didn't hit me for more than 2hp, and very infrequently when they did. At level 49, I was catching them so fast I didn't have time to bait or smoke the nets, so leave that struff, and catch one more per trip.

Take advantage of this before others catch on and the market corrects itself. If you are looking for a purely speculative way to make cash, you might try your hand at just buying swamp lizards and selling them in a few hours or a day. The price is still rising, but the bottom could fall out at any time.

Welcome to Runescape Investor

I have seen a lot of blogs out there related to other MMORPGs, but none specifically related to Runescape and more specifically none related to making money in RS.

My goal is to provide free investment advice (and hopefully some economics lessons), to the average RS player who is tired of grinding for cash. I will primarily focus on P2P ways to increase your cash flow, but there be a few things that F2P players can use thrown in. By following my advice in a timely manner (the early bird gets the worm), you should start to see your wealth increase much faster.

Some of my suggestions will take time, but the focus will be on things you can get done in 10-15 minutes a day, with either a short trip to the Grand Exchange, bank window, or other easy to access location. I assure you, my suggestions beat the pants off mindless grinding at yews or fishing lobsters.
*DISCLAIMER*

I really didn't need to throw this in here, but I wanted to let people know that a lot of factors will affect your in-game wealth, and like the stock market, there aren't any guarantees. I will be personally testing each of the methods I promote, and will only blog the ones that work. If you are late to implement them though you might find that the market has changed.