Pure essence

See also Rune essence.

Pure essence is rune essence that can be crafted into any type of rune. Only level 30 Mining members can mine it from the rune essence mines on a pay-to-play member's world. However, this item can still be traded with free-to-play players.

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 they 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 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 65 gold coins to more than 130 each.