Pure essence

See also Rune essence.

Pure essence is rune essence that can be crafted into any type of rune. Only members with level 30 mining or higher can mine it from the rune essence mines on member's worlds. Mining an essence gives players 5 mining experience each. However, this item can still be traded with free-to-play players.

Using Pure essence to make non Pure essence required runes (such as Air Runes) will not produce more runes than Rune essence.

History and update
At its release, Jagex claimed that pure essences were needed in order to prevent macro users from being able to make money from low-level accounts mining rune essence. It is highly disputed whether this goal was achieved. Effects included reduced profits in Runecrafting for runecrafters, but increased profits for member essence miners, including many macro users, as some switched to mining pure essence. It also made regular rune essence much harder to sell because all the high level runecrafters who used to buy it to make huge profits now had to buy pure essence instead. The pure essence update was one of the causes of the RWT credit card fraud problem, suggesting that the update had a reverse effect than originally intended.

The main problem was on the F2P economy however. Many low level legitimate players just starting out saw rune essence as a golden way to make money, as it was mined fast and was in high demand by member runecrafters. However, when pure essence was introduced thousands of F2Pers were left with one less method of making money. Additionally, non-members who had bought essence before the update lost money due to the drop in price of rune essence that could no longer create the high level runes they had intended it for. Members who had previously bought rune essence were saved this blow because all their essence was automatically converted into pure essence.

On December 10th 2007, many macro users disappeared from the game following a swift series of changes designed for just that purpose, which caused the price of pure essence to skyrocket from a low of 80 coins to more than 140 each.

The price has recently stabilized around coins each on Grand Exchange. The high price of the pure essence is such that it represents a popular money making exercise for members with no other outlet or ability to make money. Members with higher runecrafting levels are less likely to mine the pure essence, as the crafting of nature and other high level runes from the pure essence is still highly profitable. In addition, the use of pouches and Summoning monsters such as the Abyssal parasite and teleporting Familiars such as the Spirit Graahk can make the process more efficient and save the player money for other skills. It is possible for players with high level mining to mine upwards of 1000 pure essence an hour, resulting in an approximate coins per hour profit.

The most effective way of mining pure essence is to bring your pouches and fill them as you mine.However, some will argue that it is faster to get pure essence by buying it at the Runecrafting Guild for 1 token per ess.

Time taken to mine Pure Essence

 * The data contained here may be inaccurate. See the Talk page.

At 50.6 sec to get 28 Pure Essence, 50.6 sec x (1000/28) = 1807 seconds 1807 seconds = 30 minutes and 7 seconds So it takes 30 minutes and 7 seconds to get 1000 Pure Essence (plus the time taken to bank it)