Flash Powder Factory

The Flash Powder Factory is a minigame that replaced the Rogues' Den. It was released on the 13 December 2011.

After the Imperial Guard took notice of the old Rogues' Den, Brian O'Richard shut down his maze and opened the doors to his Flash Powder Factory instead. Inside players can operate the factory, while dodging obstacles and the sneaky fingers of other players.

Agility, Thieving and Herblore experience can be gained from the Factory, and pieces of the old Rogues' Den rewards can also be found lying around.

All games at the factory take place on an instanced shard world - accessible from any server but actually taking place on another server.

Location
The Flash Powder Factory can be found inside the Rogues' Den, which is below the Toad and Chicken bar in Burthorpe.

Games are initiated by speaking to Brian O'Richard. Players are teleported to an instanced shard world, similar to Clan Citadels.

Requirements

 * 75
 * 75
 * 50
 * Stat boosting items CANNOT be used to gain access to the factory.
 * You CANNOT enter the factory with a familiar or pet.
 * Skull.PNG You CANNOT enter the factory while skulled. Skull.PNG

Playing the game
The aim of the game is to make flash powder. The first step is to collect the two reagents known simply as "A" and "B". These can be obtained from the reagent machines A and B, marked with blue and orange arrows on the minimap, respectively. These can also be located by checking the map where the world map icon usually appears. Each game take 15 minutes, wearing a Factory body or the full Rogue armour will grant you an extra 2 minutes per game.

To navigate the map, players must pass agility obstacles that separate each room. Some corridors, namely the diagonals and the ones coming from the centre room, also have 'pressure doors' at each end of them, which are sometimes locked, making navigation more difficult. Doors will lock or unlock when catalyst is taken from a machine in a room that it is joined to. Some doors may be opened by operating the nearby call buttons when they are blue - if the button is red it cannot yet be opened. If a player is trapped in a corridor by two locked doors, they have a few seconds to step through one of the doors before they get teleported out, ending the game early.

Once both the reagents have been obtained, they must be taken with catalytic powder to one of the four mixer machines, marked by the dark red arrows on the map, to make the flash powder and gain points. Players start with 6 catalytic powder, although more can be collected from the catalyst machine in the centre of the arena.

You will gain a minimum of 100 points for each flash powder made. Additional points can be obtained when making powder by having a bonus, provided by certain factors: Note that the bonus stacks additively - the individual bonuses will be added together to form the actual bonus.
 * Charge - charge can be obtained through an active charge machine, marked with an electricity bolt on the map. The machine will give a 10% bonus for 100 seconds. As a result of two active machines the maximum bonus is 20%.
 * Apparatus - determined by the number of refining apparatus in the inventory, a maximum of 6 can be held at one time for 15% bonus when making flash powder. Players will have three of these at the start of the game; more may be obtained by pickpocketing other players in the arena, but they may also be lost to other players who are pickpocketing. The number of apparatuses each player has will be displayed as a number of green bars above their head. It is not possible to pickpocket a player immediately after they have pickpocketed you, nor can you pickpocket one twice in a row. There is a slight delay in the ability to pickpocket if an attempt to do so fails. It is advised to click quickly to either escape pickpocketing or to pickpocket the other player before they can pickpocket you. A good way to get pickpocket victims is to click on a player immediately after they cross an obstacle. There is no period of immunity in the beginning of a game, so players can pickpocket or be pickpocketed immediately after spawning in the factory. Since pickpocketing only gives a small bonus, it is generally better to focus more on getting to the correct machines.
 * Residue - increases by 1% for every flash powder made.
 * Factory outfit - Wearing the full set gives an extra 10% bonus if the bonus by the above means is equivalent to a score of 120 or more when making the flash powder.

While traversing through obstacles you may come across Fallen rubble. Searching these may yield pieces of Rogue armour, catalytic powder, sets of apparatus or flash powder (valued at 105 points for an average batch; 121 points for a very nice batch). It is also possible to find nothing at all. It is assumed receiving a piece of Rogue Armour is considerably rare.

Experience Rates
The Flash Powder Factory awards very good agility experience per hour when played efficiently. Assuming a player always leaves after collecting 500 Brianpoints, games may be finished in as little as 5-6 minutes. This can yield up to 80k+ experience per hour in agility.

Rewards
Within the factory, the player will earn points referred to as Brianpoints. These are used to determine your score by counting points before 500 as .2 reward each, and points after as .05 reward each. The total score is rounded down. So, for example, 615 score turns into 500*.2 + 115*.05 = 105.75, rounded down to 105. This means, for maximal efficiency, you should leave when your score is about to reach 500.

The amount of time spent inside of the factory also awards a small amount of points. If you end the game with less than 5 minutes remaining, 20 additional reward points will be gained.

The following table shows reward points gained without points for time remaining:

These points can be used to buy rewards from Brian O'Richard. The rewards that can be bought are as follows.
 * Thieving experience - 120 xp per reward point
 * Agility experience - 95 xp per reward point
 * Factory outfit.
 * Factory mask - 2250 points - increases the chance of finding items in Fallen rubble.
 * Factory body - 3500 points - gives an extra 2 minutes in the game.
 * Factory legs - 2750 points - gives an extra 3 Catalytic powder on entering the game.
 * Factory gloves - 1750 points - increase the chance of successfully pickpocketing by 10%.
 * Factory boots - 1750 points - reduce the failure rate on obstacles.
 * Multitool - 35 points
 * Wearing 3 out of the 5 Factory set pieces gives a 1/10 chance to make 4 dose potions instead of 3. This effect even works with untradable potions, such as Extreme potions. It does not, however, work with Overloads.
 * Wearing the full Factory set gives experience for making unfinished potions, equal to the amount of cleaning the herb used.

Trivia

 * On the day of release players received the message "The instance you tried to join is full. Please try back later." This was due to a bug limiting the number of instances and the huge volume of players trying to access the minigame. Players on foreign servers did not have this problem.
 * Brian O'Richard opened this factory, here is a quote of what he said: "Depressed. My wonderful Rogues’ Den is full of cooks rather than thieves, using the everlasting fire to burn lobsters. It is hardly the purpose I had in mind for my wonderous cavern." (From Runescape "Behind the Scenes December" News)
 * If you switch your language on the main RuneScape page to something other than English, you will go to a shard world used only by the worlds of that language, meaning if you go to a Brazilian page, only 2 members worlds will feed into the shard world you'll be put in to play the game.
 * There currently seems to be a problem entering the game - some players who attempt to start the activity are given a connection lost message and sent back to the login screen.
 * There is currently a glitch that when reaching level 50 herblore, the congratulations message will say "You now have the agility level required to attempt the Flash Factory, located below the Toad and Chicken pub in Burthrope."