Urns

Urns are a type of pot made using the Crafting skill. They are used for gaining bonus experience when training skills. They were first mentioned in the February 2011 Behind the Scenes article and released on 15 February 2011. Urns are available for six different skills: Cooking, Fishing, Mining, Prayer, Smithing, and Woodcutting.

Creating urns
To make an urn, a player must have soft clay in his inventory. Next, the player must find a pottery wheel to mold the clay on. The player will then be asked to select the type of urn to be made from a drop down menu. This produces an unfired, or (unf), urn. The types of urns that players can craft depends on the player's Crafting level. Urns that require a higher Crafting level to create will catch scraps from higher level training activities. The Assist System can be used to craft urns that are above a player's Crafting level. Alternatively, a no rune, or (nr), urn can be bought from other players.

Once a player has an urn (unf), he can use it with a pottery oven to make an urn (nr). Players must then add a rune to the urn in order to make a rune, or (r), urn which can be used to gain bonus experience. Each urn uses the following runes to be activated:
 * Cooking - Fire rune
 * Fishing - Water rune
 * Mining - Earth rune
 * Prayer - Air rune
 * Smithing - Fire rune
 * Woodcutting - Earth rune

To attach a rune to an urn, you must have the Crafting level required to make the specific urn. For example, to add a rune to a decorated cooking urn (nr), you must have at least 81 Crafting. The assist system can be used for attaching runes to urns, which allows players with any Crafting level to use any type of urn. Elemental staves cannot be used in place of runes to activate urns.

Note: Only urns with the no rune (nr) designation are tradeable.

Usage
Urns are very simple to use. All a player must do is keep the urn in his inventory while training. For every five normal experience points gained, one bonus experience point is added to the urn. Once the urn has been filled to capacity, it can be teleported to Ernie. (Note: in order to teleport the urn, you must have the Crafting level required to make the urn. Players can buy an urn from the Grand Exchange and get an assist to add a rune to activate the urn, but will NOT be able to teleport the urn to Ernie once the urn has been filled, unless the player also gets an assist to teleport the urn.) After teleporting an urn, the player receives the experience held by the urn. Thus, having a suitable urn in inventory while training a skill results in a 20% higher experience gain. Urns differ in the skill for which they collect bonus experience, their capacity, and restrictions on the quality of resources from which they can collect scraps.

Only "base" experience from skill training counts towards filling an urn. For example, if you were to mine two ores at once using Varrock armour, only the experience from the first ore would count towards filling the urn. The second ore does not count towards bonus experience in the urn. This also means that other "bonus" experience boosts given (such as from a Penance horn or Sacred clay item, or a special experience gain such as a minigame reward or Genie Lamp) does not count towards filling the urn. For example, cutting magic logs with a sacred clay hatchet will grant bonus experience toward filling the urn for the base 250 experience earned, but nothing for the extra 250 experience rewarded from the hatchet's bonus experience.

Prayer urns give a 20% bonus to the experience gained from Demonic ashes. They operate differently in that you do not receive ashes as a drop when killing a demon with a suitable urn in your inventory; instead, all the experience you would have gained from scattering the ashes plus a 20% bonus are directly added to the urn, and the Prayer experience so collected is awarded to the player's character once the full urn is teleported away. This eliminates having to collect the ashes and scattering them by yourself, and allows training Prayer by killing Demons from a safe spot without having to leave the safe spot to collect ashes. Killing demons is the only way of filling prayer urns. Scattering ashes by yourself, such as ashes that were obtained as drops or by trade, has no effect on urns and receives no bonus.

You will need to finish the urn that you have started filling before you can fill another of the same skill type. You may have multiple urns from various skills, however; for example, you could start filling a cracked fishing urn while you are still filling a cracked mining urn. You may only have 10 non-empty urns in one skill type at a time (these are urns with any number of scraps in them: a pot with one scrap in, all the way to a pot that is completely full). If a player has two or more urns of the same type in inventory and one gets full, leftovers of the first urn will be automatically begin being added to the second urn. Once the maximum number of urns is reached in total (inventory plus bank), you must teleport at least one of them away (only full urns may be teleported) before you may begin filling another. There is very little advantage to be gained from stockpiling full urns - the only use is to speed the completion of a daily challenge that requires urns to be teleported. Unfired urns, urns without runes, and empty urns with runes do not count towards this total.

When using the Assist system, any suitable urns held by the assisted are filled, but none of the assister.

It seems that Urns are generally under-used, especially considering how quickly they can be made. If the time spent crafting the urns was instead used skilling, and assuming all of the crafted urns were used, in most if not all cases less exp would be gained.

Calculation of the materials required
All urns give a 20% bonus on the experience required to fill them. Therefore, you can use the following to calculate the required amount of the material gathered in order to fill the urn:
 * Material needed

$$\mbox{Material needed} = \frac{5 \times \mbox{urn exp}}{\mbox{unit exp}}$$

For example: A yew log gives 175 experience and a strong woodcutting urn gives 1662.5 experience. The formula calculates that 47.5 logs are required, so the urn will be full after 48 logs are cut. (If a second woodcutting urn is present in the inventory, the remaining half a log worth of experience will be transferred to the new urn.)

The contribution of each unit material toward filling the urn can also be calculated. The following can be used to estimate the percentage contribution of filling the urn per unit material:
 * Percentage filled

$$\mbox{Percentage per material} = \frac{20\times \mbox{unit exp}}{\mbox{urn exp}}$$

Example continued: $$\frac{20\times 175}{1662.5} \approx 2.1\%$$, so each log will fill the urn by about 2.1%.

For the prayer urns the formula is a bit different, since the bonus exp including the unit exp is awarded when the urn is teleported. In this case the "urn exp" above should just be the bonus experience, i.e. one sixth of the experience awarded when teleporting the urn.
 * Prayer urns

Activities that do not fill urns

 * Gold bar smelting
 * Artisan's Workshop
 * Clan Citadel skill plots
 * Brewing
 * Churning
 * Bowl dishes
 * Shooting Star
 * Lava Flow Mine
 * Chopping Ivy

Trivia

 * When you "Check Level" of an urn that is exactly half full, the message shown is "This (urn type) is half full, or is it half empty?" as opposed to "This (urn type) is 50% full." a reference to the common optimist/pessimist comparison, "Is the glass half empty or half full?"
 * Previously, teleporting urns did not require corresponding crafting level to make or add runes to them. However, this was changed with the Evolution of Combat, but the requirement can be boosted or assisted.

Urns