Pay-to-play Crafting training

This guide will help you train Crafting in various different ways. It will guide you from level 1 to 99. This guide is for members and free-to-play.

Levels 1 through 8
Starting at level 1, it is easier to start with the F2P quests related to crafting: Sheep Shearer and Goblin Diplomacy. This alone will give you 350 experience points with no pre-requisites. Spinning up to about 200 pieces of wool is also worthwhile, which will give you an additional 550 experience points, getting you to level 8, where you can do other tasks. Bank the wool for future purposes, such as crafting amulets, or to complete the Sheep Shearer quest.

Levels 8 through 39
Mine or purchase about 1000 pieces of clay. Clay can be mined at level 1 mining skill, but it is much slower to mine clay at level 1 and a bronze pickaxe than at higher levels of mining.

Remember that you need to mix the mined clay with water to make soft clay. This can be done fastest by purchasing 14 buckets from a general store. There is a well almost immediately next to a bank in Edgeville where you can fill the buckets with water, making 14 pieces of soft clay with one click, and re-filling the buckets with just one other click. Travel between the bank and the well can be done by running, where you will come close to making 1000 pieces of soft clay before you run out of stamina.

Travel between the bank in Edgeville afterward and the Barbarian Village to make the pottery, and at level 8 you can make bowls.... the highest level experience for pottery that you can do as F2P. After making about 1000 bowls, you will have earned about 33,000 more experience points.

Levels 16 through 38
Once you reach crafting level 16, you can make unstrung symbols for 50 experience points. If you have smithing level 20 ( achievement diary medium task requires smithing level 36), you can buy silver ores at the  Grand Exchange, then smelt them in  Al Kharid for 14 smithing experience points. This is more economical than clay bowls as  silver ores and  silver bars cost near the same price as  soft clay, but the final product is worth much more. Plus you can gain hard to achieve smithing experience if you smelt silver ores to bars just before making the unstrung symbols.

The speed per load is quick since the furnace in Al Kharid is close to the bank. Making symbols from bars is very fast, so if speed is the priority, buy the silver bars at the Grand Exchange and craft the symbols in Al Kharid. You can purchase the mould at the  crafting store there for 5 coins.

From crafting level 16 to 40 takes 690 unstrung symbols.

Levels 28 through 52
Purchase or obtain about 2000 cowhides. The easiest way to get this many is to slaughter cows in various places near Lumbridge. Several cows are located near the Gnomecopters, and there is a bank deposit box located at the same spot to rapidly store in the bank all of the items you are acquiring. It is wise to also store the raw beef and bones that drop from the cows in order to either train Prayer and Cooking or sell on the Grand Exchange for cash that will be much needed later on.

Cows can be easily slaughtered by a player with combat level 3 skills, as long as they are in iron armour and have Iron weapons. This is also a very good method of training low level combat skills (ranging, mage, and melee).

Travel to Al-Kharid and turn the cowhides into hard leather. You will need about 6,000 coins at this point to pay the Tanner, which is located just north of the smelting furnace. The hard leather can be turned into Hardleather body armour, giving 35 experience point for each one that is made. 2000 hardleather body pieces of armour will yield 70,000 experience points, easily getting you to level 52 crafting if you have followed this suggested training outline so far.

Levels 40 through 60
Once you have reached level 16 crafting, level 20 mining, and level 20 smithing, you can begin making silver jewellery from silver ore. While you can find silver in several places in the game, it is much easier to obtain the silver from the Crafting Guild, which you can enter beginning at level 40 in crafting skill.

In order to get to level 60, you need to mine about 2000 chunks of silver ore, assuming you are already at about level 50 following the above training methods.

There are several options that are available to you, although you should keep in mind that all forms of silver jewellery are massively over produced compared to the demand for these items by players, and when sold on the Grand Exchange they will only sell at or very close to the hard floor price on the exchange. It may be preferred instead to sell these items, if you wish to get some money for them more quickly is to try and sell them to a general store a few of them at a time. Some players may simply wish to treat this as junk for junk trading.

Two kinds of items can be made by F2P crafters with silver:


 * Unstrung symbols (50 experience points each/level 18 crafting)
 * Tiaras (52.5 experience points each/level 23 crafting)

The unstrung symbols will sell for slightly more money than the tiaras, but neither one really recovers the value of the silver ore.

In order to turn an unstrung symbol into a Holy symbol, you need a ball of wool and then taking it to the Monastery to have Brother Jered bless it... which requires a prayer level of at least 31 in order to enter the 2nd floor of the Monastery. Generally speaking, it isn't worth the hassle or the effort you put into it except for making a small number for a clan or for personal use.

Tiaras, on the other hand, have value with Runecrafting and can be used with some alternative forms of earning runecrafting experience rapidly. Even with this value, production of tiaras in the game far outstrip demand in the form of their use in Runecrafting, even though most runecrafters will likely have multiple tiaras in their bank. The introduction of the Runecrafting Guild in August 2008, unfortunately, also dropped the demand for tiaras even further and increased the cost of the talismans as well as made it much more complex to use tiara enchanting for runecrafting experience.

Levels 50 to 99
From this point on, crafting gold jewellery is the most effective method of training crafting without getting bogged down into the training grind too hard. Almost all forms of jewellery give large amounts of crafting experience, and training in this way can rapidly advance your levels. The largest problem with this sort of training is that obtaining the gemstones can be difficult or very expensive. With the introduction of the Grand Exchange, this is much easier to become involved with, however.

While you can make your own gold bars by mining and smelting gold ore, it really isn't worth the effort in F2P training. By far and away it is much better to mine the gold ore and sell it on the Grand Exchange, and then buying the gold bar with the money you just earned. The reason for this is the Goldsmithing gauntlets make earning smithing experience so efficient for members that there is a huge surplus of gold bars that all of the jewellery manufacturing in F2P worlds won't ever be able to use everything that is made... or for members to use the gold bars either.

Another issue to consider is that uncut gemstones are worth far more on the Grand Exchange than cut gemstones. For some players, this is a method of rapidly earning crafting experience by purchasing large numbers of uncut gemstones on the Grand Exchange and then selling the cut gemstones. Unfortunately it is also a method of rapidly losing huge amounts of money in the process of doing this.

A common mistake for many beginning crafters is to make gold rings and gold necklaces from bars of gold. A careful review would show that this gives you less experience than crafting even silver bars, and certainly not worth your time. Stick to jewellery that uses gemstones if you want to make it worthwhile.

A trade-off exists between amulets and necklaces in general. Amulets give you more experience points than necklaces, but are worth less if you try to sell them. On the other hand, the experience level required in order to manufacture amulets is much higher, making it easier to sell them as fewer players are capable of making items at that level.

The best place to sell almost all forms of gold jewellery is at Grum's Gold Exchange in Port Sarim. The only items that are for sale here are items that are manufactured by other players, so you are competing with other players that are also selling items here. Grum also has the advantage of buying items for a price that is actually higher than the High Level Alchemy mage spell will provide, giving an additional reason to sell these items in this fashion. Whenever the game has a System update, Grum always has his stock reset to 0.... which is a good time to unload any gold jewelry that you have been working on.

It is also useful to world hop going from one world's version of Grum's Exchange to the next, as different players have sometimes sold different kinds of jewellery... and you can make more money by selling just a few pieces of jewellery on each world before moving onto the next world hop. Grum does gradually drop the player stock down, but it is very slow compared to other stores in the game. It goes down about 1 item every minute or so for all items in the player stock. It is also useful to have several different kinds of jewellery to offer to Grum (he does take noted jewellery) so you can be more successful in trying to sell at least something on each hop.

Jewellery will also sell on the Grand Exchange, but it is usually quite slow. About the only F2P crafting item that will sell rapidly on the Grand Exchange is an Amulet of power, but that requires level 70 crafting and level 57 magic to enchant the amulet. It should also be noted that the high alchemy value of jewelry actually goes down when it is enchanted, and typically most enchanted amulets are worth less enchanted than unenchanted.

At level 70 with the Diamond Amulet, you can craft every item that is available to a F2P crafter in the game. Higher levels of crafting mainly give bragging rights and no additional benefits to F2P players. Making ruby amulets from level 60 to level 70 requires 5,500 bars of gold and cut rubies.

Going from level 70 to level 99 making diamond amulets requires 124,000 bars of gold and diamonds. Almost nobody has ever done this, and usually most crafters at this point make a variety of different items, or make things to deal with needs of players they are working with. Hopefully you are hooked enough on crafting at this point that you might want to try becoming a member, where the variety of items you can craft is much richer and additional things you can make at much higher levels including much faster methods of earning experience.