Runeology

A take on money making
No, it's not step-by-step

When playing RuneScape, chatting to friends and strangers, I often hear alot of ideas of how to make money. Likewise I also get alot of questions asking me "how do you make money?", "omg how do you get so rich?" and etc.

Here I will try to provide you with my thinking of the term money - because it is not just a number, it's a whole unit on its own!

Table of contents

1. What is money?
2. How to make money then?
   1. Gambling it up
3. Summing it up

1. What is money?

Before even considering how to make money, the most relevant part has got to be to define what money is. By defining what it is, I'm not talking about defining it as "a common tradeable good used to measure every single items value in to avoid having to trade sharks for monkfish" - I want to define money as something a little more abstract.

You should have heard of the expression that says "time is money", and this is almost as close as we can get. Rember this: time is money.

2. How to make money then?
As stated above, time is money, this is truly a valuable thing to remember. To give an example, player A wants to make a huge profit (please do not consider any of the in game XP in any of these calculations, this article is focusing on money making only). He decides to make yew longbows and alch them for profit. Because he is intending to make money, his plans will be the following:

1. Cut 1k yew logs
2. Collect 1k flax
3. Spin 1k flax
4. Mine 1k essence
5. Runecraft 1k essence into nature runes
6. Fletch it all into 1k bows
7. Alch 1k bows for a total profit of 768,000gp.

As said, time is money. The important thing to work out here is not that he is making 768,000gp over the entire process, but rather: how much money will Player A make over a defined time, for simplicity we'll use per hour.

I have got to admit, I have not actually done this test myself. I have tried cutting yews before, and they are very slow (yes, granted I'm low woodcutting), lets be kind here and assume that it'll take 1.5 hours to cut 1k yew logs. Next he needs to collect 1k flax; let's assume that this will take 1 hour. Next he will need to spin it all into flax, assuming this will take him 1 hour as well. The next step is mining 1k essence, this is a rather fast process and again let's stay kind and assume it will take him 0.5 hours. The runecrafting all depends on his runecrafting level, but assuming he's a mainstream RuneScape player, it will take him just about 0.5 hours. The fletching will take him just about 0.75 hours, and the alching is about 1 hour as well.

So summing it up:

• 1.5 hours to cut 1k yew logs
• 1.0 hour to collect 1k flax
• 1.0 hour to spin 1k flax
• 0.5 hours to mine 1k essence
• 0.5 hours to runecraft 1k essence into nature runes
• 0.75 hours to fletch it all into 1k bows
• 1.0 hour to alch 1k bows

This will all take him 5.25 hours to make 768,000gp, which is a gp/hour rate of just about 146,000gp/hour. Overall this process looks great! He won't loose any money at all, only gain; so what's so wrong with it?

Assuming again that player A is only after the money, he should pick whichever of these processes will actually earn him the most profit per hour (this is if we only look at this particular example, of course there are other potential ways of making money, like mining and etc).

At the moment yew logs are going for 396gp each in the Grand Exchange, assuming it will take 1.5 hours to cut 1k logs that's a gp/hour rate of 264,000gp/hour - already here we have a rate that's almost twice as much as doing the entire process! To take another of these processes as an example. Spinning the 1k flax into bowstrings. Bowstrings currently sell for 168gp each in the GE. One thing we have to remember here is though, that by looking at the profit for each process individually we have to take account for the cost of the flax as well, as a loss. Flax sells for 84gp each at the time of writing. So per flax spun into a bow string, player A is making 84gp profit. Assuming still that it will take him 1 hour to spin 1k flax into bow strings, that is a gp/hour rate of 84,000gp/hour - which is less than the entire process - from this we can draw the conclusion, that if you want to make money, spinning flax is not a good way of doing it!

Note: Please note that all of the above (except for the prices of the items on the GE) are estimates, the times may not represent how long it does actually take, and this is to show you how you can use very simple math to work out what will be your best way of making money, not to show you which way is the best.

2.1 Gambling it up
All of the above showed how to make money with what I like to refer to as a "stable" way. Stable because you can, if you have the right data, perform math on it and come up with a quite accurate gp/hour rate. There is also another way of money which includes alot of luck. Here I am talking of depending on monster drops, or player killing. However these methods usually comes with both risks of dying, and just risks of comming out with negative profit (ie. loosing money).

Personally I really like this way of making money - however I have never tried to make X amount of gp using this method. As stated, this is gambling, you never know what you will get from it - and before trying any of this, it is crucial that you prepare yourself for the worst case scenario; What happens if you die and loose everything you brought with you? These are all things you will need to be prepared of before you try it, and personally I think this is something you should do for fun. Of course when you do get lucky it is great and everything is just awesome, but this is gambling and you will have to expect the worst situation to come up, sooner or later.

When I need a large amount of money, I normally work out how long it will take me through my stable way of making money and think of whether or not I think that is possible. I will also do gambling ways, but I will not depend on them in any way, and when I go I am prepared to die with what I bring, even though that sometimes adds up to several millions.

Summing it up

Making money is a science on its own, and there's many many ways of doing it. Here I have presented you with my take on it, how I think when I consider how to make money. Please note though that this article has only focused on the money making aspects of the game, and in a real situation you would add in experience as another factor, but - that is also a time factor, and in the end that is the true message of this entire article: You can (almost) convert everything to time, and that is the true unit if you want to progress.

I hope this article may have helped some - and feel free to comment on it.