Trollheim herb patch

Once a player is able to "clamber onto the windswept roof of the Troll Stronghold," the herb patch there can be a valuable source of experience and income for players that can exploit its advantage over the other four herb patches in RuneScape - any herb planted there will always yield and never die. After completion of My Arm's Big Adventure, My Arm the mountain troll will watch over an herb patch that a player can use for free. My Arm will ensure that the patch will not become diseased.

Getting There

The two best ways to arrive at the rooftop patch are

Teleport to Trollheim (the quest My Arm's Big Adventure needed) descend the hill to the west. Continue west and north through an area filled with aggressive trolls and into the stronghold. Run south through the stronghold, to a door, and then north to a ladder. Climb it to get to the patch. This takes approximately 1 minute 24 seconds.

A less click-heavy alternative to this route is to use a slayer ring or the fairy ring code AJR to the Fremennik Slayer Dungeon entrance - head north and then east to the secret door - enter the door, go to the other end of the troll jail, go up the stairs, go up the next stairs, and then proceed to patch - this route is slightly longer, approximately 1 minute 36 seconds, but does not require runes.

The patch is certainly remote, and to help out, the attendant leprechaun goes beyond normal leprechaun services by offering garden supplies and plant cure as well.

Making the Most of the Patch

To utilize the patch at its highest potential, a player should acquire the Scroll of Life as a reward from Daemonheim. It costs 10,000 tokens, and requires level 25 in both Farming and Dungeoneering. This reward returns a seed from harvesting a patch 10% of the time. (It also returns a random herb seed from a dead patch 5% of the time, but this is not a problem on top of Trollheim). Since one can expect an average of 6.8 herbs per seed, without any fails here, one can additionally expect an extra seed every ten plantings creating pure profit.

Obviously the best seed to use is the very expensive Torstol seed. At the time of this writing the seed costs over a quarter of a million gold pieces, additionally at the current prices for clean torstol leaves, one needs to cultivate 6.5 leaves EACH seed just to break even, any dead patches means a large loss, making Torstal a very risky crop to grow. But not in Trollheim. By hedging an investment with the Scroll of Life and only growing Torstol in the patch, one can be assured to break even every harvest until good things happen: that is, a large harvest or recuperating a seed.

Using current prices - Torstol seed - 261,400 gp, Clean Torstol - 40,517 gp - assume 10 seeds are planted with an expected yield of 68 leaves. Normally one would expect a profit of a modest 141,156 gold pieces total - however with an expected recuperated seed that profit jumps to 402,556 gp - or an average of 40,000 per planting which at the moment is a 25% improvement over snapdragon production. On top of the monetary gain, in such a scenario, no matter what else was being planted in the other plots, a player can count on an average of 17,261 farming xp for planting and harvesting the run of ten seeds, from this single wonderful plot.

These figures are simply the expected average and over time would not sway too much from the norm. However, occasionally good fortune arrives. In a test run of ten seeds, for example, with many other crops growing around RuneScape, and many other opportunities for the scroll of life bonus to operate, three seeds were recuperated and on the tenth run 11 leaves were harvested. This meant that, on top of normal profits and xp, 3 free seeds and a bonus of four leaves amounted to close to a million gp profit in two days of plantings.

A farming level of 85 is required to plant and cultivate torstol, however it is possible for players as low as 82 with the boost from a garden pie. Hint: bring a whole pie (for the two bites), as sometimes the bonus wears off while harvesting/planting and it's a long way to a bank.

Incidentally, for lower-level farmers, similar though not as large, profits can be made with other herbs - here is a breakdown.

 *This chart calculates 6.8 leaves per seed times ten seeds divided by the cost of ten seeds, finally adding the cost of a recuperated seed.

Or, (Price of Herb x 68) - (Cost of Seed x 9)