The Drop function allows a player to remove an item from their inventory, causing it to appear on the ground at the player's feet. When an item is dropped it will make a sound that is different between some items. The object will remain on the ground for three minutes, during which time it is recoverable by the player who dropped it. After 1 minute, the object becomes visible to other players if it is tradeable. It appears as a red dot on the minimap to any player who is able to pick it up. A lot of popular lures abuse this drop function in order to trick players into thinking they have more time before items appear for everyone than is actually the case.
Functions
Dropping objects is used to free up space within a player's inventory or to get rid of objects that are unwanted. Occasionally during quests an object will have to be dropped in order to progress. Usually it is useless and players always keep items in their inventory.
Ordinarily, an item is dropped via the right-click option of the item in your inventory. Certain items such as Leaping salmon, Gatestones, etc. have a drop option as left click instead. It can also be dropped by dragging it from your inventory to the 3D World HUD or by using the Action bar. Dropping via the Action bar or dragging it from your inventory does not interrupt ongoing actions, unlike the other 2 methods.
Dropped items will remain on the ground for 300 game ticks (3 minutes or 180 seconds), after which they will disappear. Dropped items are invisible to other players for the first 100 game ticks (1 minute or 60 seconds), after which time, anyone will be able to see (and take) the item if it is tradeable.
Dropping all of an item
It is possible to drop all of a single item fairly easily by first adding the item to your action bar. As long as the action bar is open, a player can rapidly drop items by clicking the item on the action bar or by pressing the key that the slot, where the item is, is bound to. This is only useful when training skills like fishing, mining, or other skills where you might want to drop the same item a lot of times.
Note: Certain items such as all types of logs cannot be dropped using the action bar due to having multiple options on the right click menu.
Dropping high value items
When attempting to drop an item or stack of items valued at over 500,000 coins, the player will be met with a warning dialogue stating that, "The item you are about to drop has a high value." The player can either confirm the drop, at which point the item will be dropped, or cancel the drop, and the item will remain in the player's inventory.
Items valued over 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) coins cannot be dropped at all.
Destroy
The drop function is replaced by the destroy function for some non-tradeable items, usually holiday items or items requiring a specific skill or quest, etc. The destroy function is similar to the drop; it likewise removes the item from the inventory, but unlike drop, the item does not appear on the game screen and cannot be recovered. Because of this, when a player attempts to destroy an item, he or she will always get a warning message, with very few exceptions, of course. The message usually lists possible ways to recover the item as well.
Drop trading
Prior to the unbalanced trade removal update in January 2008, dropping was frequently used to transfer items between a player's multiple accounts, in breach of the Rules of RuneScape.[1] The player would first log on one account, drop a valuable item, and then log into another account to pick the item up; this is now possible again. But if a player has a trade limit and drops over that amount (ex. if a player with a 50k trade limit drops 100k) other players won't see it.