Free-to-play Runecrafting training

Runecrafting is a skill that has gained popularity in recent days, mainly due to the release of Runecrafting guild. In F2P worlds, runecrafting is straightforward to train, but it needs uses of resources and other skills, in some indirect ways. Runecrafting is only profitable at long run and a lot of cash and effort should be invested for training runecrafting efficiently.

Beginners
First thing to remember: Weight is vital to fast runecrafting. Second: Runecrafting would be disastrous to cash if used for power levelling. Below is a list of things a trainer should do before they can use runecrafting to make a living.

Rune Mysteries
Before starting to train runecrafting, the quest Rune Mysteries must be finished to gain access to the skill. A free air talisman is also given as gift from the quest, which can be useful for training Runecrafting afterward. A pickaxe is recommended to mine some essence just before the quest is completed. It would also be recommended to purchase a regular tiara, either from another player, the Grand Exchange, or crafted from silver bars (requires Crafting level 23 or higher and Smithing level 20 or higher if made from silver ore).

Mining Essence
Critical to training this skill is to have an ample supply of rune essence. This is the material which is used to create the magical runes used in this game. Upon completion of the Rune Mysteries quest, you have the option of being able to visit the Rune essence mine, where you can extract this substance.

There are two NPCs in a F2P world which will teleport you to this mine:


 * Aubury, located at the east side of Varrock just south of the east bank
 * Sedridor, located at the basement of the Wizard's Tower, near Draynor Village.

Of these, Aubury is the closest to a bank and is typically the NPC that most F2P users deal with when trying to mine essence.

Mining essence is a little bit different than mining normal ores, as you only have to click once on the essence stone to fill up your inventory, and multiple people can hit the same rock simultaneously. It is also something that can be done with a mining level of 1, but higher levels of experience will help you to extract the ore faster, as will more advanced pickaxes such as steel, mithril, adamant, and rune pickaxes. It is strongly recommended when extracting rune essence that you wield the pickaxe, as that gives you one extra slot in your inventory while hauling essence to the bank. Advanced pickaxes do, however, require higher levels of the Attack skill if you choose to wield them. Some runecrafters choose to simply have the pickaxe in their inventory and not train attack to remain a pure skiller as a play style, but that is a personal choice and it does involve more trips to the essence mine over time.

This can also be a useful way to train the lower levels of mining, as you don't have to compete with other players for rocks, and you can rise through the lower levels of mining rather quickly. For higher level miners, it becomes very tedious for training as it only yields 5 mining experience points per essence extracted, and is not recommended except to collect essence for personal use or to earn extra money from the sale of essence.

Grand Exchange
One alternative to mining your own rune essence is to simply purchase it from other players. Currently, rune essence can be purchased for coins per essence from the Grand Exchange, which is also the rate for a balanced trade when obtaining this item via a direct player to player trade. Keep in mind, you will need thousands of essence in order to get your runecrafting level high enough to start earning money from this skill, so it would be useful to have some alternative money making method in place if you chooses to use this method to obtain your essence.

The price of essence on the GE also can fluctuate dramatically from one day to the next, and over the course of weeks or months it can go up or down sometimes as much as 50% in either direction. It certainly would be useful to watch the price of essence as you train, and pay close attention to market swings so you can purchase the essence for a more reasonable price.

It is also worth watching the price of runes and to compare them to what your current runecrafting level is at. Due to the ability to craft multiple runes at higher levels, no single method of runecrafting training is necessarily the most profitable for all players based on your runecrafting level, the price of essence, and how much you can sell the runes for on the GE. This can also fluctuate from day to day even if your character doesn't advance to a new runecrafting level, so it is useful to watch the price of all runes to see which one would be the most profitable at the moment.

Tiaras
For beginning players, it is very useful to be able to bring as much rune essence as possible when crafting runes. One of the first things players ought to do when starting runecrafting is to purchase a tiara from either another player or from the Grand Exchange. These are produced in huge excess due to the relatively high number of crafting experience points gained from making this item. With the air talisman that is obtained from Duke Horacio, on the next trip to the air altar bring the talisman, the tiara, and extra essence (players are going to the altar anyway... might as well craft some runes). Click on the talisman first, and then click on the altar. When that happens, a player combines the talisman with the tiara, giving them 25 runecrafting experience points and a new item: an Air tiara.

From this point on, while players are crafting runes they can simply wear tiaras on their head. Players not only have an extra position in their inventory for bringing essence, but also have one fewer clicks to make when trying to enter into the air altar on subsequent trips. Other tiaras can also be made for other altars using their respective talismans. It should be noted that for every F2P talisman, players can also purchase the associated tiara for a much cheaper price on the Grand Exchange.

Prior to the release of the Runecrafting Guild, one of the more unusual training opportunities for runecrafting involved purchasing talismans and converting them into tiaras. Many talismans, particularly body talismans (dropped by guards at Falador and Varrock... a common low-level training target and close to banks) sold almost as junk and most people couldn't even give them away. Enterprising runecrafters could buy these talismans and convert them to tiaras for a slightly more expensive but substantially faster means of earning experience points in runecrafting. 14 tiaras and 14 body talismans give players a total of 525 experience point per trip, far more than the typical 210 experience points that a full load of body runes will bring to you. Even crafting earth runes with runecrafting gloves only gives players 364 experience, so this is even faster experience than runecrafting gloves.

Unfortunately, training runecrafting in this manner is very expensive as with the introduction of the Runecrafting Guild brought considerable demand for these talismans, and player's discovery of this training method. Body talismans current sell on the Grand Exchange for coins each and Body tiaras, if you can sell them at all, only sell for  coins. A load of 14 body talismans and 14 tiaras will cost you coins for each trip to the altar. Training in this manner from level 20 to level 50 (to enter the Runecrafting Guild) would require 185 trips and cost players coins. Some players do have this kind of money, so it isn't completely unreasonable to power level in this manner, but this is expensive and consumes a huge amount amount of cash reserves.

By way of comparison, training by traveling to the air altar and crafting only air runes (perhaps one of the best money making methods for F2P via this skill) will require 692 trips in order earn the experience from level 20 to level 50. This is about 4x more time that players will have to spend training Runecrafting. On the other hand, by training via the air altar, players will have produced at least 83,608 air runes from 19,376 rune essence. Assuming that players both purchased this rune essence and sold the air runes at the Grand Exchange at current market rates, this will have earned them coins by training via Runecrafting.

Altar hints
For players who are power-leveling air runes to earn money while also earning experience while Runecrafting, it is strongly recommended that they complete all of the tasks of the Lumbridge and Draynor Diary in order to obtain the Explorer's ring 3. It is also recommended that when runecrafting to remove all of their armour and equipment (put it in the bank) except for the tiara of the respective altar they are crafting at and the Explorer's ring. Other zero weight items like an Amulet of power could be worn if there is concern about some slightly more dangerous areas, such as traversing the wilderness to access the Mind altar.

Air rune
Air runes can be crafted once the Rune Mysteries quest has been completed, as these can be crafted at level 1. The air altar is located about half-way between Varrock and Edgeville.

Varrock west bank
Most beginning players who train Runecrafting are suggested to start at the Varrock west bank. This is located just to the south-east of the Grand Exchange and west of the city center at Varrock. Travel from this bank westward to a spot just a little bit to the south of the road leading to the Barbarian Village and enter the ruins of the Air altar. After crafting the air runes, return back toward Varrock, but make sure you stop and recharge your run energy from the musician that you will be passing on the way back. It is only necessary to recharge the run energy once during this circuit, and it is possible for players who are trying to power-level crafting air runes to only have to recharge their run energy twice for every three trips to the bank.

Edgeville
Edgeville is an alternative route for training Runecrafting, and certainly something that can be followed if trying to transition into making other types of runes such as Body runes or Mind runes. It is a bit further than Varrock, but the time to complete a circuit is fairly reasonable compared to other routes with other runes, even though the west Varrock bank is much closer in the case of air runes. The only annoying features of this route are dealing the the border guards when crossing the River Lum and that there is no musician to help recharge your run energy while completing a lap.

Mind rune
Mind runes can be crafted upon reaching Runecrafting level 2 skills. The altar is located between the Goblin Village and the Black Knights' Fortress. To enter this altar, you need a mind talisman or a mind tiara, both of which can be purchased from the Grand Exchange or obtained and/or manufactured from monster drops.

Falador West Bank
Many new players crafting mind runes will start at the Falador west bank and travel through the north gate on their way to the mind altar. While there are several creatures along this route, none of them are aggressive. Along the route, there is a musician that is about a third of the way between Falador and the Mind altar (closer to Falador). It is recommended that you "listen" to the musician when going both directions to recharge your run energy, and generally run both directions to maximize the production of runes.

Falador West Bank via teleport
To travel more quickly, a player can use the Falador Teleport when travelling back to the west Falador bank. While this does cut quite a bit of time from the journey, it does cost a Law rune together with either 1 Water rune or 3 Air runes on each trip, and you can only craft 26 essence on each trip instead of a full load of 28. With this method of crafting mind runes, it is also suggested to listen to the musician on the journey northward to the altar.

While players can earn experience points faster using this method, F2P players can't craft Law runes, so you must either find those runes as monster drops or purchase them from other players. Law runes cost coins each, generally turning this into an unprofitable method of obtaining mind runes.

Edgeville
Another method for crafting mind runes is to use the bank in Edgeville and travel west along the edge of the wilderness ditch until you get to the point where the Black Knights' Fortress extends slightly into the wilderness. From here players have to cross the wilderness ditch, and run (it is not recommended to walk this route) to the other side of the fortress, which is where the mind altar can be found. From here, players have to retrace their steps to travel back to Edgeville. There is no musician along this route to recharge your running energy, so you must either walk or rest at some point along the route to recharge your energy.

In spite of the length of time it takes to travel from Edgeville to the mind altar, this was formerly the fastest method of travel for crafting mind runes without casting teleportation spells before the introduction of musicians, and a commonly used route for many F2P players, even with the original role that the wilderness served in player vs. player combat. Often there would be players camped in the wilderness just outside of the Mind altar location, or along the route between the Mind altar and Edgeville. As it only gets to level 5 wilderness along this route, the levels of the players engaged in player vs. player combat had to be matched fairly closely, however.

Edgeville via Barbarian Village
To shave off a few additional seconds in crafting mind runes, players can travel from Edgeville and through the wilderness, but to make the return trip from the mind altar players can teleport using the Skull sceptre to the Barbarian Village and then travel back to Edgeville. After five trips to the Barbarian Village, the sceptre will have to be re-assembled with its pieces, if a player has all of the parts in their bank account.

Considering the difficulty in obtaining all of the parts for this item, and that players have to kill creatures like Ankous and Catablepons in order to obtain those pieces, this is not really a very common method of gathering mind runes. Surprisingly, this method of runecrafting is even slower than simply using a teleport spell to Falador, so for the effort it is almost certainly is not worth doing. This method is being added in this list mainly to make it complete.

Water rune
Water runes can be crafted upon reaching Runecrafting level 5. Water runes are used in a great many spells, particularly on member worlds, and used for charging up the Enchanted water tiara. It is also a somewhat common rune for F2P players as well, so this can be a profitable rune to make. Due to perceived difficulty in traveling to the water altar, it is also a task that few players actually engage in.

Crafting a water rune is also a task for the Lumbridge and Draynor Diary, so knowing how to craft runes at this altar efficiently is also useful even for this task.

Draynor Village
Beginning runecrafters will likely be using Draynor Village for their initial crafting of water runes. The location of the water altar is about half-way between Draynor Village and Lumbridge, on the south-central end of the Lumbridge Swamp. There is a musician just outside of Draynor Village, but it is somewhat off of the shortest path between the Draynor bank and the altar. Using the musician or not is mainly a matter of choice, and ultimately takes up a similar amount of time in terms of running to the musician to recharge run energy faster, as opposed to simply resting when you have no run energy.

Draynor Village via Cabbage Patch
The primary difference between this method and the previous one is that as soon as a player crafts the runes, they engage the Cabbage teleport and travel to the Cabbage Patch near Draynor. This act puts the player considerably closer to the bank in Draynor for the next trip to the altar.

Lumbridge
Several other fansites mention traveling to Lumbridge for training runecrafting from the water altar, and this method certainly should at least be explored as a possibility. Members can bank in the basement of Lumbridge Castle (after starting Recipe for Disaster quest) and even travel underground through the Lumbridge Caves, however on F2P worlds players must travel to the top floor of the castle in order to trade runes for essence from the bank and then travel south of Lumbridge through the graveyard. Navigating through Lumbridge Castle is tedious and the distance is just slightly further from the altar than it is from Draynor Village.

Lumbridge via Teleport
Similar in nature to crafting mind runes from Falador, Lumbridge can serve as a destination for traveling more quickly to craft runes. It is suggested that a player select either an Earth staff or an Air staff, based on which rune type is in more demand. Typically players will be using an Air staff. On F2P worlds, they need to climb to the top of Lumbridge Castle in order to deposit their runes and retrieve new essence. In addition, every half hour you also get a "home teleport", which can be used in the place of the law rune... saving them money and on that trip players can also bring 28 essence instead of the 26 essence that they must otherwise bring if teleport runes are brought. Also, it is very difficult to resist teleporting twice when doing this run... once from the altar and then again from the bank at the top of Lumbridge Castle that is required for the most efficient use of the time from using this method. For the extra 5 seconds per lap saved, it really doesn't seem to offer much of an advantage over simply using the Cabbage teleport from the Explorer's Ring.

Wizard's Tower
While not exactly a bank, players can travel to the basement of the Wizard's tower with a pickaxe, extract rune essence by teleporting to the Essence Mine via Sedridor, and then bring the essence to the Water altar for Runecrafting. While this technically trains both Mining and Runecrafting simultaneously, it is a tedious method of training. Instead of going to a bank, players simply let the runes stack up as they go back to the ess mine to extract some more essence. This implies that only 27 essence are going to be crafted on each trip to the mine, but on the other hand a player does not have to purchase any essence while performing this training cycle. No musician can be found along this route, so either walking or resting without a musician is necessary for prolonged training using this method.

Earth rune
Earth runes can be crafted upon reaching level 9 of Runecrafting. The altar is located south of Lumberyard near a yew tree, North-east of Varrock east entrance. Earth runes are profitable in long run and provide a good compromise between earning experience and earning money. The Earth altar is also located somewhat close to the Fist of Guthix minigame, where players might earn some Runecrafting gloves, craft 1000 runes, and then travel back to the mini game to earn some more tokens.

Varrock east bank
Nearly all F2P Runecrafting for Earth runes takes place from the Varrock east bank, and travel is through the east entrance of Varrock toward the Lumberyard. The return is by tracing those same steps back. Very repetitive and uneventful, although a few coins, body talismans, and bones can be collected on the return trip from players who are training combat skills against the Varrock guards at the entrance to the city, or from players power-leveling their woodcutting skills on the many trees outside of Varrock. A musician is located fairly close to the altar, and he is certainly on the route. It is recommended that you "listen" to the musician as you approach the altar, but not when you leave as you should have enough run energy to get back to the musician to complete the full circuit.

Varrock east bank via teleport
For those wanting to shave off a few more seconds for runs to the Earth altar, it is possible to cast the Varrock Teleport spell from inside of the Earth altar crafting area immediately after creating the Earth runes. Players need to have a stack of Law runes and Fire runes (for as many times as they care to run to the altar), an Air staff, and bring 26 essence for each trip (the number of open inventory spaces remaining after holding Law and Fire runes). This can be costly, as Law runes are not craftable by F2P players, so they must be either found by monster drops or purchased by players. It is one method, however, of "power leveling" Runecrafting in a manner that can be purchased rather than purely earned.

Aubury's Rune Shop
This is similar to the method of training by crafting water runes from the Wizard's Tower, with the bonus that a bank happens to be along the path. By equipping a pickaxe, a player can mine the essence first, teleport out of the essence mine, travel to the Earth altar, travel to the bank in Varrock, and then head back to the mines for more essence. This is a rather effective way to combine both mining essence and crafting runes simultaneously, although the added weight from the pickaxe does tend to eat away at the run energy faster. In theory, it would be faster to simply mine the essence and bring it to the bank in Varrock, and then do the Runecrafting later. Still, for an impatient player it might be suggested to use this method as it does provide some more variety while doing Runecrafting. Also, by using this method of crafting runes, the products of the runecrafting (the runes) is nearly pure profit if sold as the player has already put the effort in to extract the essence as well.

It should be noted that the time to complete this circuit is highly dependent upon the Mining level of the player, which is substantially different for somebody with a high level skills in Mining compared to that of a beginning miner.

Fist of Guthix
Added mainly to complete this list rather than a common place where players train Runecrafting. The Fist of Guthix bank is the only other even remotely close bank to the Earth altar. It does involve travel into a level 7 wilderness, so it is possible that some Revenants could attack a player before entering into the Fist of Guthix area (which is a safe area from Revenant attacks). Alternating between the Fist of Guthix area and the Varrock east bank could compliment each other, where after a run to the Earth alter and crafting 1000 runes, a player can begin another series of rounds within the Fist of Guthix game to earn some Runecrafting gloves. While slightly out of the way, it is also suggested that if using this route to listen to the Musician a little bit to the south of the altar after crafting the Earth runes.

Fire rune
Fire runes can be crafted upon reaching Runecrafting level 14. The altar is located west of Duel arena and to the north-east of Al-Kharid. A great many training guides suggest that crafting fire runes is the best and only way to train F2P Runecrafting, but such recommendations are usually based upon skills and options available only to members. It is noteworthy that, per essence, Fire runes do give you more experience than any other elemental rune and if you are trying to minimize the amount of essence that you are using that creating fire runes is perhaps a good training route. A significant problem with Fire runes is that it has the fewest number of multiple runes that can be crafted for any elemental rune, and historically the price paid for Fire runes on the Grand Exchange has been dismal as well. Typically, training the Runecrafting skill through the creation of making Fire runes will be a money losing proposition when done by F2P players.

Al-Kharid
Most beginning Runecrafters will start in Al-Kharid when starting to craft Fire runes. A musician can be found about half-way along the route to help recharge run energy, allowing a player to otherwise run continuously while making fire runes except for when you are listening to the musician. As Al-Kharid is also useful for several other manufacturing skills such as Smithing, Crafting, Cooking, Fishing, and even Mining (at the Al-Kharid Chasm Mine to the north), players wanting to have a little bit of variety while training can be done from this location. The bank is usually crowded and there are plenty of opportunities to socialize as well.

Dueling Arena
Making fire runes from the Dueling Arena is more for the "serious" Runecrafter that is intent on trying to increase their Runecrafting skills. While technically closer to the Fire alter, it isn't nearly as straight forward to get there as from Al-Kharid and there isn't a musician available along the route to recharge run energy. As a result, it actually takes longer to complete a circuit from the Dueling Arena than it does to travel from Al-Kharid. In addition, an annoying warning screen shows up as you leave the Dueling Arena unless you have participated in several duels and have the Doomsayer help you to turn off the warning.

Body rune
Body runes are the most advanced and highest level runes that can be crafted by F2P players, which is at level 20 Runecrafting. The altar is located west of long hall in Barbarian village, just to the south of the Monastery and east of the Dwarven Mine entrance. Body runes give the best experience among all the runes without use of runecrafting gloves, and has similar trip distance as crafting Earth runes. Because Body runes are sold at a very low price and are nearly useless, many players suggest that crafting Body runes is not worth the effort.

One use of body runes is for mage pures than can make use of combination of earth and body runes, along with water staff, to train magic without hitpoint increase. Even so, the demand for body runes is rather low on the Grand Exchange and often a player can't sell them regardless of the price. Nearly a lifetime supply of body runes, as used by a typical player, can be crafted by a player in a relatively short period of time.

Edgeville
The only realistic method of crafting Body runes is to travel between Edgeville and the Body altar. The purpose of having a combat level requirement for this training method is mainly to avoid having the barbarians from the Barbarian Village attack you as you travel past on you way to and from this altar. You may still be able to simply run away from these barbarians even at a low combat level, but training combat skills first will get rid of this minor annoyance. The trickiest part of this route is trying to find a path around the barrier between Edgeville and the Monastery, and to get through the walls of Edgeville that can be a bit of a maze. There is no musician that can be found along this route.

Runecrafting gloves
Many may wonder why level 30 is often mentioned to stop the original methods. This is because of the runecrafting gloves the minigame Fist of Guthix gives as reward, which come in 3 variety: Air, Water and Earth, doubling experience for 1000 essence crafted using the specific kind of altar. They altogether give 10000, 12000 and 13000 experience upon full use. Each of them costs 75 Fist of Guthix tokens to buy, and any player can only keep one of each kind in the inventory. Below are some explanations about different kinds of gloves:

Air runecrafting gloves
This kind of gloves can be worn at 10 runecrafting, giving 10 experience per essence crafted. Air runecrafting gloves can be best utilised for a runecrafter in air running process, but cannot be used for assisters. The power levelling cost is very large even with this gloves, which is depended on the offer price for noting the rune essence for runners, and their runecrafting level for crafting multiple air runes. Below is a table for power levelling cost for runecrafter in air running:

The result renders being a runecrafter in air running is unwise unless with these gloves. The specified offer price loss is added with the Air runes part of Multiple Runes calculator with the results tabulated clearly in here.. For example, if the runecrafter has 37 crafting and his offer price is 3000 coins, the net loss per essence would be 12 =, rendering a power levelling loss of  gp per XP.

Water runecrafting gloves
This kind of gloves can be worn at 20 runecrafting, giving 12 experience per essence crafted. Generally speaking, water runecrafting gloves should not be bought because water runecrafting trip is not as efficient as earth runecrafting trip.

Earth runecrafting gloves
This kind of gloves can be worn at 30 runecrafting, giving 13 experience per essence crafted. This is the ideal method to train runecrafting normally, provided that the experience per essence is highest among all the methods and loss is minimal.

Runecrafting guild
This guild requires minimum level of 50 to get in, achieved at 101,333 experience. The main feature of the guild, The Great Orb Project, allows quick earning of rune essence and instant crafting. Runecrafting gloves may also be used in the game, though it will be difficult to use gloves if you do not manage inventory space wisely.

Runecrafting gloves of all three kinds can be brought to enhance the experience gained while crafting, and Explorer's ring 2 and 3 gives a slight advantage on crafting elemental runes, causing crafting fire runes slightly better, in case of 50-50 playing with the player playing the last 3 rounds.

According to the order of altars in the minigame, at mind altar and body altar no essence should be crafted, and some essence can be saved on air, water and earth altar. Be careful of inventory space, one should craft fire runes if excess essences are available.

You can buy Runecrafting altar tabs with the points you get from the minigame. This can make runecrafting much faster as they teleport you right outside the altar. It works good with body altar tabs. Take the same amount of varrock teleports and Body altar teletabs, this will provide fast Runecrafting experience.

Weight consideration and Musician position
Difference between 0kg and 1kg is not important in some conditions like water runecrafting trips, but vital in others like earth runecrafting trips. However, some trips is easily available to musicians, who can rapidly replentish energy, causing the weight possible to be larger for keeping running. For absense of musician it is adviced to have zero weight but a few kilograms is acceptable for presense of musician.

Multiple runes
A detailed table about crafting multiple runes can be seen here, and a calculator for profit by crafting multiple runes can be found here.