Completed Goals

Big news today.

First of all, I completed half of the goal I mentioned in my last post:



Dragon Full Helm: 15,600,000 gp

This fulfills a long standing dream I've had since I started: Full Dragon Armor. As usual, it was up 1 million from when I last checked the price. Typical. But I still like it, and that's all that matters.

Next, I've finally acquired something I had been hunting for a while:



Full Lumberjack!

The Woodcutting bonus is small, but every little bit helps. I found some advice on the forums to stay to the easy path and avoid encounters (fewer combats means faster trips, faster trips means more trips, more trips means more chances to get it).

I am still working on the Firemaking cape, and I'm still doing Shades of Mort'ton in order to get it. My current plan is to use the money to train up Construction, and to do Summoning when I have the charms for it. I currently have a bunch right now, so I'll be doing some soon. As of this moment, I have 500 Sacred Oil (4), and I'm cutting the logs for them now.

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Other News: They opened up a new cavern in the Dwarven Mines under Ice Mountain called the Living Rock Caverns. New monsters with ok drops from what I've seen so far. In my Full Dragon, they don't hit me often, but they are quite easy to hit. Doing this I managed to get an Attack level, a Strength level and a Combat level.

I'm now 110 Combat level.

With this new cavern, they introduced new fish which require a high Fishing level. The lowest of these are Cavefish, which require an 85 Fishing. I spent the night before I went fishing Monkfish in order to get the level for it.

I don't know how they are as food yet, as I'm not currently working on combat and haven't even cooked any of the one's I've acquired so far.

The new Dwarf quest (Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf) is also done, keeping me eligiable to wear my Quest cape...even though I'm still wearing my cooking cape. This opened up a new area with monsters that drop a new handheld cannon and the long awaited Dragon Pickaxe. I haven't been to the cavern yet (I'm assuming it's going to be busy for a while), nor have I price checked handheld cannons or pickaxes. I'm assuming they're going to be expensive, so it'll be a bit before I got one of either.

The Cost of 69 Smithing

First things first:

I replanted my 4 fruit trees in an effort to help my Farming skill...which wasn't quite enough for 2 levels. This forced me to hit the Vinesweeper minigame again. In spite of the rabbits and the idiots stealing xp from me, it only took me about 2 hours to get to 53.

This opened the way for me to get Back to My Roots out of the way. This quest isn't really hard, but it's best to use a guide to keep you from getting lost in the jade vine maze. The final fight would have undoubtedly been easier if I had access to a dragon hatchet, but my rune axe worked alright anyways.

News Flash: Pking worlds are here. Big deal. On to the next subject.

Now I've decided to get the nasty requirement out of the way: Smithing. I need 14 levels in all, which will meet the qualifications for two different quests (both of which have other requirements). I could mine, but I decide to buy ores instead, since I need 6160 Mithril ores and 24,640 coal. The price tag for all of this? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million gp.

First thing I do is sell those yew logs. I don't need them right now, and I can always get more somewhat easily. Then I head off to do...yep, you guessed it: fish.

I fish about 1k lobs, and when I head off to sell them I noticed a bit of a side-effect of the recent Pking activity: food prices are skyrocketing. This is good for me, but it's not going to last. I'm all too familiar with the process: something new hits Runescape, prices of related items go way up untill they stop selling altogether. It is at this point that prices will then plummet back to their origional value. I switch over to sharks, in an effort to cash in quickly before the bottom drops out.

This happens a couple of days later, and I spend some time with fish on the Grand Exchange that won't even sell at minimum price. Not to worry, I have a back-up plan: I pop off to cut some yews. I only cut a few hundred before the fish sell, so I head to the GE to turn my gold into coal.

It's not long before the whole fish market crashes, and I'm relagated to wood cutting to buy the last 5k coal. A friend of mine lent me his dragon hatchet, which did help speed up the process. I only needed to cut about 2k yew logs at this point.

With the logs cut, I spend the money on the last of my coal. I finally did a price check on the ores (although I didn't think to get a screen shot).

The final cost of 69 Smithing for me? 5.2 million gold pieces.

I hate Woodcutting

Boring, boring, BOOOOOOOORING!!!!!

I hate it. I always have and I always will. Still, I need it. Since it's cheaper than Smithing, I decided to spend a bit doing it. I've spent close to a week to get to 71, which was all I needed to do Grim Tales. Another quest point, and a snazzy new helmet (which isn't as good as my dragon medium helm). It only took me another day to get to 72, which is all the Woodcutting I need to do to get my quest cape. I've also amassed about 2.3k yew logs. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with those yet, though.

I also did the penguin hide and seek, which got me another 2 points of Farming. But since I still need 2 more levels, I decided to plant all the tree seeds I got from Woodcutting (a willow, a maple, 3 apple trees, a banana tree, 2 orange trees and 2 curry trees). I should get a lot of xp from these after I check the ones growing now, and the one's I'll plant tomorrow. Maybe 2 levels, but I doubt it. Time (which is a major factor in Farming unfortunately) will tell.

That's 261 quest points, with 6 quests left to do!

Chapter 3: Episode 12-Deforestation in progress

My Woodcutting skill is seriously hurting (compared to the rest of my requirements, anyways), so I felt the need to work on it a bit. But before I do (yep, you guessed it), I'm going to get a bit of a jump start by nailing a few quests.

One that comes to mind immedately is the Saving Scratch Uglogwee part of Recipe for Disaster. While looking into that, I realize there's a second part of RFD that I qualify for: Saving the Dwarf. I'm currently in Lumbridge, so I grab everything I need from across the river and my bank and set out to do them at the same time.

Once I've got everything, I teleport to Castle Wars and go and see Rantz again. He gives me a bit of a run around, but I've got my Jubbly pretty quickly. I then teleport to Falador, get the recipe for "Asgoldenian Ale" and I walk up to the White Wolf Mountain shortcut. 4 beers later, I've got a rock cake. I'm wearing my ice gloves, so that saves me a trip to the other mountain. I just use the home teleport spell, use both items on their respective people, and Quest Complete X 2: 2 Quest Points, 2500 Cooking, 1000 Slayer, 1500 Woodcutting, Ranged, and Crafting XP (30 Slayer, 33 Ranged)

I then set off to the willow trees around the lake north of Lumbridge Castle, and I cut and burn willows. While I'm not keeping track of numbers, quite a few willow logs go up in flames. I manage to take my Woodcutting from 42 to 50 and my Firemaking from 35 to 49. I also got 2 more birds nests, with a banana tree seed (which conveniently enough, I can plant!).

I start looking towards Tears of Guthix, and see that I need a bullseye lantern. Since I'm only 2 crafting levels away from making those, I head over to Ardougne to steal some silver bars for crafting. I need 258 bars to get 49 crafting by making tiaras.

The silver stall takes too long to respawn, so I teleport to Falador and try my luck at the Crafting Guild. The silver is unoccupied and I set to the task of mining the silver. I get the silver mined, and smith the bars and make tiaras, which gets me almost to 49. I had some diamonds, which I cut to get me the rest of the way.

I can now do Tears of Guthix, and it's an extremely fast and simple quest. Quest Complete: 1 Quest Point, 1k Crafting, access to the Tears of Guthix cave.


I can now go in and get some free XP. This will go to my lowest skill, which right now is Summoning. While I have no idea exactly how much XP i got, I did get 35 tears. This gets me to 7 Summoning.

This leaves me with 7 more requirements to meet, most of which are only a couple of levels away.

Chapter 2-Episode 3: Transportation Solved (Part 1)

I've grown dramatically tired of walking, and not having the patience to wait until I've trained my teleports, I decide I need to gain access to the Fairy Rings. This involves two quests (one of which I've already been planning on doing. Before I can even think about fairy rings, I need to gain access to Zanaris.

For the Lost City quest, I need a 31 Crafting and a 36 Woodcutting. For the Crafting, I decide to make oil lanterns. From 27, it'll take at least 99 to get me to 31. I head from Varrock to the mines and mine 112 iron, which I then smelt in Lumbridge and smith into the frames in Varrock. The glass, however, is somewhat more of a problem.

I don't have nearly enough buckets to effectively make glass. The best sand pit is in Yannelle, so I head there (via Castle Wars) to see if there is a general store in town. There isn't (of course, that would be too easy), but there is a general store in Port Kazzard...which has the deposit boxes for the Fishing Trawler minigame very close by. So I take a little walk north, buy 4 inventories (well, 27 anyways) of buckets, depositing them in the bank after each load. I then return to Yannelle and fill the buckets from the nearby bank.

The final obstacle I need to overcome is soda ash. Without teleports, gathering this isn't an easy task, so I head to the GE to see if I can buy any. It's well over 200 gp each, so I decide it would be easier to gather it myself. I head over to Karajima where I'll gather seaweed on the shores and bank it in Tz-haar (I burn it into soda ash on one of the sulphur vents in the city). I then make the glass in the lava forge.

To get the blowpipe, I head to Entrana, since I can't remember exactly which store sells them. I hate going to Entrana because you can't take any weapons or armor (although a knife is just dandy), which means I have to bank everything. I teleport back to Varrock and assemble the lamps. Now for the fun part: I have to fill them with oil. I need 112 swamp tar, and picking those up will be a chore.

It doesn't take as long as I thought it would, but actually filling the lamps does. All in all it takes about an hour and a half to fill 112 oil lanterns. I take them and put all but 2 on the GE to see how long it takes to sell them all (4:20, 5/4).

I now need 4 levels of Woodcutting, so I decide to cut and fletch my way at least to iron arrows (15 Fletching). I home teleport and grab a knife from the kitchen. I intend to stay close to the Lumbridge general store so I can quickly unload my inventory of fletched bows (which are of no particular use to anyone).

I get to 15, and make arrowshafts untill I hit my Woodcutting level (I'll need them for iron arrows). Cutting regular logs isn't the most efficient way to train Woodcutting, but it's the only way I can train Fletching at the moment. But since my Woodcutting is still low, it doesn't take all that long. I have my requirements for the quest, and well over 2k arrowshafts. Arrows are good Fletching and Smithing experience, and better arrows will help with range (I really do not want to spend all that money on a dwarf cannon).

I set off on the quest with only my woodcutting axe, a knife and enough runes for exactly 100 casts of the Water Bolt spell (I got about 100 chaos from a maze random!). I head to the swamp and talk to the warrior (and he's a real hoot), find the tree and chop at it. The leprecaun gives me the information I need and I head to Port Sarim (banking my axe on the way).

I head to the cave, and find a bronze axe after killing my first zombie (first time ever, and I've done that quest 3 or 4 times). I make a mad dash towards the rear of the cave and face the Spirit. It doesn't go very well, and I get killed and lose all my runes. It's not a huge loss (as my lamps all sold), but I've discovered an important thing: You can't hide from the nature spirit anymore.

I head back to the GE to buy some more runes, and I return to Entrana (this time, with the rest of the sharks I bought for Dragon Slayer). While it's not pretty, I get it done. I make 1 staff to start with and set up autocast so I can finish up most of my runes before I head back to finish the quest. Quest Complete: 3 Quest Points, Access to Zanaris.

Zanaris is a cook's dream. You have pretty much everything that you can't grow yourself, all within a short distance walk of both a bank and a stove. Since I usually carry a Dramen staff with me everywhere I go, I make sure I have a lot of them (if you die, you automatically lose it). After I'm done, I head back to Entrana with my remaining runes and only 2 of my remaining sharks (I would have done this earlier but I had probably 15 sharks left, and I didn't want to waste them just to make room). I cut a full inventory of sticks, and then teleport back (after a 14 minute layover on the home teleport) and make them into staves.

Now that I have access to Zanaris and Dramen staves, I'm ready to shift into the next phase of my transportation plan.

Chapter 1-Episode 12: The Final Grind

This stands to be my last power levelling session in a free world, and I have some high goals to meet before I pay my membership (actually, I have some time to kill before payday). My list of things to do include:

Buy a rune platebody
30 Woodcutting (9 levels)
38 Fishing (8 levels)
35 Cooking (1 level)
27 Runecrafting (26 levels)

I'm also going to need about 20k-30k gp to buy food, potions, and other supplies for the fight. So I need a lot of levels, and about 70k gp. I make a base plan:

I will cut and burn oaks until 30 Woodcutting. I will then fly fish until level 38 (buying feathers, as I'm getting more and more concerned with my Hit Point experience level), and cook trout until I get 35 Cooking. I will sell the rest of the fish. I will then mine rune essence in Varrock (in lots of 500) and make the best runes I can until I get 27 Runecrafting. I will save these runes for when I train magic. Finally I will manufacture steel bars to get the money I need for the plate and the quest supplies.

The woodcutting, fishing and cooking go way faster than I expected, so I have plenty of time to devote to runecrafting and making money. I sell the fish, and only get about 6k for all of them, so I still have a ways to go yet. I head to Arbury's shop to start mining essence. I start off with 200, since that will get me to 9 Runecrafting. Making earth runes will bring me back to Varrock, so I can mine more essence then.

I finally get to 14, and start planning the runes I'm going to make to get to 27 Runecrafting. I plan on using these runes to train Magic after I do the Dragon Slayer quest, so I decide to make 500 mind runes. These will be the main rune of all my spellcasting until at least 17 Magic, so I want a lot of these. I mine 250 essence (since I make 2 mind runes per essence at this level), and start crafting.

Once I get the 500 mind runes made, I set a goal of 300 essence worth of all the elemental runes. The number is arbitrary for the most part: I just want to ensure I have enough elemental runes to be able to use up most of the mind runes, with a bit of a reserve stockpile. I set off to Varrock to get started. I start with mining 300 essence for earth runes. I craft those, then mine 600 essence for the water and fire runes. I wait until last to make the air runes in order to get my runecrafting skill higher, because once it's past 22 I get 3 air runes per essence. By the time I get to the air runes, my Runecrafting level is 26. Making 73 essence into air runes will give me my goal, but I'm going to want a lot of airs so I mine 200 essence (which will give me 600 more). It doesn't take long to finish those, which gives me a 27 Runecrafting (and close to 28).

Now there's still a little matter of a rune platebody that I need to buy, and decide that mining has always worked out best for me as far as making cash, so I head over to the Grand Exchange to buy some coal. My plan is the same as it was the last time: mine enough iron to use up the coal making steel bars while mining the bits of silver as they are available, sell, and buy more coal. Here's the financial report:

Starting cash: 13,325 gp
1st run: 35 steel bars, 13 silver bars = 23,403 gp (bought 120 coal)
2nd run: 60 steel bars, 23 silver bars = 40,031 gp (bought 200 coal, 5k left over)
3rd run: 100 steel bars, 0 silver bars, 1 sapphire, 5 cut sapphires = 66,958 gp

This is more than enough for a rune platebody. I have 26k left for other quest related expenses, with plenty of room for rapid capital expansion (making my money grow).

Tomorrow is payday. Tomorrow is members. I can hardly wait!!!

Chapter 1-Episode 7: Legends don't walk

I'm finding that, thanks to the Grand Exchange, I'm making far more trips to Varrock these days than I did in my previous noobcarnations. Since I've sworn off Magic untill after Dragon Slayer, teleporting is a ways away for me. That leaves Lumbridge's favorite water ride: the log canoes. At a 12, it would take 3 canoe rides to get outside the Grand Exchange. At 27, it'll only take 2 from Lumbridge (I'm only using Lumby as a starting point because of the Home Tele spell). At 42, however, it's one trip. 42 is currently ideal, but I'm going to shoot for 27 right now.

The easiest way to power train woodcutting (especially in free worlds) is the "cut and burn" method. You take a wood cutting axe (equipped is ideal) and a tinderbox, and find a long, uninterrupted stretch of open ground (a road for example) with a lot of the trees you're cutting. You cut the trees until your inventory is full, then you use the tinderbox to set all the logs on fire in a straight line. After a while, you can find a rhythem that lets you light logs without initiating the "striking the tinderbox" animation. This lets you burn logs at an incredible rate.

While the Grand Exchange is a great area to use if you already have the logs to burn, if you're cutting and burning, there's no better place to go (especially at starting levels) than the east-west road between Falador and Port Sarim (just below the cabbage farm). Plenty of regular and oak trees, and more than enough area to clear your inventory (you can eventually work your way down to the Crafting Guild if you don't run back). This is where I'm going.

Woodcutting goal: 27
Logs cut: 93 regular logs/71 oak logs
Firemaking level: 24

I kind of laugh when I get to 21 Woodcutting as I head back to Lumbridge and discover that canoes are a Members only thing. Continuing to 27, while not pointless, is no longer a priority. Thus, I abandon my current goal.

Notes on woodcutting axes: don't run out and buy a new axe every time you can use it. Skip every other one to save money. The axes after bronze that I'd buy would be steel, mithril, and then rune. In fact, if you're starting from level 1, take a steel axe with you and drop the bronze one at 6 Woodcutting.