Pyramid Plunder is a Thieving minigame located in the far southern reaches of the desert in Sophanem. Although a dangerous minigame, it is one of the fastest methods of training Thieving. During the minigame, the player has five minutes to loot the pyramid in which the minigame takes place. Rewards range from pottery scarabs to the rare Pharaoh's sceptre.
Requirements
The player must have started Icthlarin's Little Helper quest and have access to the city of Sophanem in the desert. A Thieving level of 21 is required to play, but it is recommended to have at least 31 Thieving. Completion of the Contact! quest is strongly encouraged as it opens access to the nearby bank, and The Feud quest lowers the Magic carpet ride fee to get to Sophanem. A highly populated world for this game is World 64, a Michigan server.
Getting There
- Teleporting to Jalsavrah using the Pharaoh's Sceptre. This can be done before starting Icthlarin's Little Helper.
- Taking the magic carpet from Shantay Pass to Pollnivneach then to Sophanem. Players can get to the Shantay Pass quickly by:
- Using the Amulet of Glory teleport to Al Kharid.
- Using the Ring of duelling teleport to Al Kharid.
- Using the Broomstick teleport to the Sorceress's Garden in Al Kharid.
- Teleporting to a house in Pollnivneach then walking or taking the magic carpet to Sophanem.
- Using the Ring of slaying to teleport to Sumona in Pollnivneach, then taking the magic carpet to Sophanem.
- Teleporting using the Camulet and walking the remaining distance.
Equipment
The only truly necessary items are food if you are not planning to teleport after each round to bank and teleport back to the pyramid by using the Pharaoh's Sceptre, although the following may help:
NOTE: Due to recent energy updates, energy potions and/or spirit terrorbirds are no longer needed.
- High healing but light food such as tuna or lobster are good. If you do not want to take on extra weight from the items inside the tomb, food such as pies or wine or cakes are useful.
- 2-4 Super anti-poison potions (alternately, a prayer book and holy symbol).
- (Optional: Snake Charm obtained by from Ali the Snake Charmer in Pollnivneach, by putting 3 coins in his basket. This helps avoid damage but is not recommended if you want more thieving experience. This is only recommended for players who are new to Pyramid Plunder, though many players find it redundant as it lowers the experience you receive.)
- (Optional: Lockpicks for easier door opening, though not recommended if you want more thieving experience. Hair Clip, from King's Ransom quest, can also be used.)
- (Optional: A 1-click teleport for emergency escapes if hitpoints run low. Players with good armour, high defence, or plenty of food should not need this.)
- (Optional: A Regen bracelet combined with Rapid Heal boosts health regeneration to x4 the normal; this works well while wearing relatively light prayer boosting equipment.)
- (Optional: An Enhanced Excalibur can be worn as a way to compensate for food. The weapon's special attack heals the player 4 HP every 2 seconds, for a duration of 10 seconds.)
- Summoning a Magpie at level 47 summoning or summoning an Abyssal lurker (level 62 summoning) and using their respective special moves gives a temporary boost of 2 and 4 thieving levels respectively. Players should use the special in the last room. However, note that the special move will not allow temporary access to a pyramid level above the character's current thieving ability.
- Summoning a Spirit Terrorbird is also very helpful, as its special recharges running energy fairly fast, and it can hold 12 items.
- A void spinner, bunyip, titan or unicorn stallion can also prove beneficial, as they restore player's hitpoints whether with their special move, or with their primary effect.
The equipment is needed to withstand the damage from monsters and from poisoning without requiring bank trips. One full inventory of food and potions can last up to 3-5 games, depending on how much you consume the items. To save time, it is best to eat in between games. To get to level 99 by doing Plunder, you need roughly 3k lobsters and 500 antipoisons, though this varies from player to player.
- An optional way of getting faster experience is to not have any spaces in your backpack, and to not keep all of your gold artefacts, as clearing your backpack of the stone ones takes time.
- A good inventory, without summoning, is 4 super antipoison and the rest full with summer pies, these are great as they heal 22 per pie, as well as giving 20% of your run energy.
- The best items to wear are;
- Ring of life(for emergencies),
- Regen bracelet(to regain hp),
- Games necklace(for banking),
- Pharaoh's sceptre(to get back to the pyramid),
- Boots of lightness(to reduce weight)
- and a Spotted or Spottier cape(also to reduce weight).
- This method would mean not opening sarcophagi, as you have no armour and the sceptre has low combat stats, and also only opening chests when you are about to leave the room.
Guide
A player ready to start Pyramid Plunder
Travel to Sophanem. If you haven't played the game before, talk to Tarik outside the pyramid near the northern gates of the city. Then, attempt to enter the pyramid on one of its four sides. If the room is empty, leave and try another entrance. (Regardless of the entrance you used, you will always exit next to the northern entrance.) Inside one of the entrances, you will find the Guardian mummy. If you haven't played the game before, you must talk to it to gain access to the inner rooms. In later runs, you can start by simply right clicking the Guardian mummy and selecting the "Start Mini-game" option.
The Guardian mummy changes rooms every 15 minutes, so once you find the correct entrance you can keep using it for a number of trips before it changes.
The mummy may occasionally punch you as you try to enter the pyramid, which stuns you and does a little damage. This only happens at the entrance to the room containing the mummy.
As soon as you start the mini-game, a timer will start on your screen. You have five minutes to loot as much treasure from the pyramid as you can.
Once inside, you will find a room that contains the door through which you entered the room, a spear trap, urns, a golden chest, a sarcophagus, an exit door, and four doors leading to the next room, of which only one works. There are eight rooms in total, the first requiring 21 or higher thieving to enter. Each subsequent room requires ten more levels than the previous room, with the final room requiring 91 or higher thieving.
- Spear Trap - The entrance corridor to each room has a spear trap, which takes up two squares in each of the two walls. Click on either of the two closest squares to attempt to deactivate the trap. You will be hit with 1-4 damage if you fail, if you attempt to walk into the room without trying to deactivate it, or if you click on either of the farther squares.
- Urns - Each room has 13 urns. You can choose to steal from an urn or check it for snakes first. If you check for snakes, a snake will appear out of the urn and may then be charmed if you have a snake charm. Both checking and stealing from urns earn thieving experience, but charming does not. Unless charmed, a snake may bite for 1-4 damage and may also poison with damage of 3 (a very weak poison that wears off fast). Searching is much slower than stealing, and the rewards from urns are generally poorer than from the golden chest and sarcophagus. Rewards also get better the further you get into the pyramid.
Scarabs
- Grand Golden Chest - The centre of each room has a golden chest. The best loot is in these chests, but they occasionally contain level 98 Scarab swarms which hit extremely fast and will poison (hits 3 and is strong, so use an anti-poison potion to negate this). A swarm has 25 Hitpoints, however, so using a Dragon dagger along with the Protect from Melee prayer to negate damage will dispatch them quickly. The Pharaoh's Sceptre can only be obtained from the golden chest and the sarcophagus. Opening a chest is very fast, so it is worth checking all chests on the way to the highest level room. When searching for the door to the next level, a Scarab swarm will not do too much damage and could be ignored. A swarm triggered by an earlier player will just wait at the door the player exited to the next room, thereby showing you which door you should use (unless the doors have been reset after the player left the room).
A sarcophagus.
- Sarcophagus - Each room has a sarcophagus. There is fairly good loot in these, but opening these gains you Strength experience instead of Thieving. You may awaken a level 84 Mummy. Opening a sarcophagus takes a fair amount of time, which needs to be considered in your Pyramid Plunder strategy. If you plan to open both the sarcophagus and gold chest in a room but want to avoid fighting the monsters that may appear, always open the sarcophagus first. If you open the chest first and a scarab swarm appears, its attacks will interrupt your attempts to open the sarcophagus. This problem does not occur the other way round, even if a mummy appears: the chest opens so quickly that the mummy's attacks will not interrupt you.
Mummy!
- Exit Door - Each room has an exit door on each floor, allowing for fast exit from the entire pyramid but this can be interrupted by scarabs or a mummy.
- Entrance Door - The door from which you entered a room may also be used like the exit door. You must pass the spear trap again and can fail it. This door can be useful, however, if you are seeking to escape the attacks of scarab swarms or mummies. Their attacks will interrupt your attempts to leave by the exit door. However, the monsters will not follow you through the spear trap, so you are safe once you pass the trap. The monsters' attacks do not interrupt your attempt to pass the spear trap, since this is a single-click operation.
- Door - There are four doors per room which you can use to try to reach the next room. Only one of the doors actually connects to the next room, and the other three are dead ends. So, you must check each door until you find the correct one. You can fail to open a door, in which case you can try again. You receive some thieving experience for opening each door. The door to the next room changes periodically (each time any player on the current world begins a new game of Pyramid Plunder). The door thus remains the same for all players on the world for short periods of time. Hence, it is possible for a group of players to play together, quickly searching all the doors in a room. The other players can then follow the player who found the correct door.
Players should try and pass through all the doors to make it to the highest room they can use and then thieve everything in that room, for better rewards and experience. Experience increases from each thievable object further into the Pyramid.
A different way is to thieve about half of the urns from the second highest level room you can get to and thieving all of the urns in the final room. But if using this method, one should be careful that they do not use too much time on the second highest room and should therefore loot the urns without checking them for snakes first as this is quicker.
When in your final room, watch the time you have remaining. If time is about to run out and you haven't thieved everything in the room, leave off thieving the urns and thieve the chest (or both the sarcophagus and chest), for better rewards. If you still have time left after this, you can resume thieving the urns. (If a monster appears from the sarcophagus or chest, the Protection from Melee prayer, if you have it, makes it easy for you to thieve the remaining urns.)
Experience
This mini-game provides the fastest experience rates in RuneScape, recently updated it now gives greater experience rewards.
At 61 or higher thieving, 80,000 experience can be gained in an hour, and even more at higher levels, and at 91 or higher thieving, upwards of 150,000-220,000 experience per hour is possible. At 61 Thieving, you can get up to level 5 in the Pyramid. It is possible for a player to search the chests in all rooms, successfully search all urns in the highest level room as well as 6 urns at the previous level. A level 61 player will thus gain the following experience in 5 minutes:
- 840 (chests)
- 1200 (6 urns in level 5)
- 3900 (13 urns in level 6)
- 270 (opening doors to next level)
This adds up to 6210 every 5 minutes or to approximately 70000 experience in one hour as players have to refuel time to time in bank. Higher experience rates require players to search more urns at level 5 or to replace chest searching with searching more urns at level 5.
A similar strategy for a level 81+ Thief yields 112000 experience. As the longer path to level 7 will make it hard to process any urns at level 5, a more realistic experience rate is around 90000 experience in one hour.
The strategy should be to get to your "level" and then thieve everything in that room. If you have time, thieve some of the urns on the level below too.
A recommended inventory is:
- About 15 lobsters. A common mistake players make is buying sharks for the game, however, lobsters are just as effective if players avoid opening sarcophagi.
- 2-3 Super antipoisons or a holy symbol with a prayer book.
- An emergency one-click teleport, such as an Ectophial or a teletab.
- A Pharaoh's sceptre with at least one charge.
It is recommended that a player wears:
- A weapon. A Dragon dagger(p++) or an Abyssal whip is recommended.
- Weight-reducing garments, such as Boots of lightness, Penance gloves, Agile legs, Agile top and a spotted or Spottier cape.
- A Ring of duelling for a quick bank teleport.
- Any prayer boosting clothes.
One way to save time is to drink a dose of Super-Antipoison before starting the minigame at the mummy. This way, if a chest or urn is failed, there is no need to waste time drinking a dose because the antipoison protects long enough for at least one run.
With a Pharaoh's Sceptre fast bank trips are possible if a player combines a bank teleport with the sceptre teleport to the Pyramid. This gives the option of using lower grade food as the bank round trip can be very fast.
The table below lists the various thieving options and the reward associated with it. Note that the experience from checking and searching adds up when both steps are performed. When the check step is ignored, players get more damage, but can use the check and charm time to search more urns yielding more overall thieving experience.
| Min Thief | Level | Check Urn | Search Urn | Gold Chest1 | Sarcophagus2 | Door | Trap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | 1 | 20 | 40 | 40 | 0 | 20 | 10 |
| 31 | 2 | 30 | 60 | 60 | 0 | 30 | 10 |
| 41 | 3 | 50 | 100 | 100 | 0 | 50 | 10 |
| 51 | 4 | 75 | 140 | 140 | 0 | 70 | 10 |
| 61 | 5 | 100 | 300 | 300 | 0 | 100 | 10 |
| 71 | 6 | 150 | 450 | 450 | 0 | 150 | 10 |
| 81 | 7 | 225 | 675 | 675 | 0 | 225 | 10 |
| 91 | 8 | 275 | 825 | 825 | 0 | N/A | 10 |
1 - No experience is gained from a chest if a Scarab swarm is found.
2 - The sarcophagi do not give Thieving experience, but give Strength instead. If you are only interested in thieving experience, it is advised not to open these because 1) they slow you down and 2) the mummies can attack you or any other players passing by.
Checking urns takes a fairly long time, so for faster experience it often is better to simply search all urns. The time saved can be used to search all urns at a lower room.
Pyramid Plunder is enhanced by having other people in the room to give clues about which doors to open. A Pyramid Plunder Guild operates on World 64. Unfortunately a world that is too busy can work against you, because the dead ends behind doors change every time a player begins a new game.
Rewards
A player using the Sceptre's teleport.
When you loot the urns, sarcophagi and chests you will find various trinkets that you can trade in for Coins at Simon Templeton at the Agility Pyramid not far from Sophanem. Players can use a crack in the wall behind the bank to get to Simon Templeton even faster. Fastest of all, if you have a Pharaoh's Sceptre its Jaleustrophos teleport brings you right to Simon. To really speed your ability to cash in artefacts, there is an optional reward after you've done Dealing with Scabaras that will allow you to bring Simon Templeton noted artifacts. However, he will not accept noted gold artifacts because of the possibility of forgeries or some such reason. This does make it worthwhile to bank in between games if you can bank in Sophanem to at least save up all the stone artifacts.
Below is a table showing what each item is worth in coins.
| Type | Ivory | Pottery | Stone | Gold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comb | 50 | X | X | X |
| Seal | X | X | 150 | 750 |
| Scarab | X | 75 | 175 | 1000 |
| Statuette | X | 100 | 200 | 1250 |
You may also find a Pharaoh's Sceptre in one of the Grand Gold Chests or Sarcophagi. Immediately after finding a Pharaoh's Sceptre, all players are expelled from the pyramid and all the chests, urns and sarcophagi are reset and a new sceptre is placed in one at random.
This has been changed since it was first made, now upon a player receiving a sceptre from a chest or sarcophagus, that player will be expelled from the pyramid, but other players will remain inside. The players left inside the pyramid will see a mummy standing beside the chest in all rooms who shouts at the players.
Tips
- Scarab swarms will only target the player who triggered them. They will ignore other players, allowing players to safely pass them without getting attacked.
- Mummies usually will first target the player who triggered them but can attack other players, too. This can occur when the triggering player leaves the room or when the other player is of a lower combat level.
- Sometimes you may open all four doors in the room, only to find all of them are dead ends. This can happen when another player on the world starts the game, as the door connections are changed when this occurs. Just go back and recheck the other doors in the room and you will find the correct one. (The doors will still be open, but you can recheck them anyway.)
- Players who have completed Contact! can use the bank located at the north east corner of Sophanem (below the ladder). This can be used instead of teleporting back & forth from a bank.
Trivia
- When talking to Tarik for the first time before you start the game, your character says "Bah! I laugh in the face of danger!" This is a reference to the Disney movie The Lion King.
- When examining the Grand Gold Chest, it will say "Anyone lost an ark?" This is an allusion to the biblical Ark of the Covenant which held the 10 Commandments from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Also, when examining it when it's looted you will receive the message "Phew, no evil ghosts in there". This is an allusion to the same movie.
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