Kourend
So back when I was planning my route this League I thought I was smart. I knew Construction would be a problem skill, it's very expensive to train traditionally and very slow otherwise. Doubly so since Leagues don't allow trading. Knowing this going in I made Construction a priority for a solve.
Looking over the relics it became obvious that there were very few which gave Construction a really solid solution. In fact the only one that truly touches Construction is Butler's Bell. This lets you get planks completely free, and construction XP completely passively. Even while you're offline! Naturally this makes it very attractive, since it also solves a few other things too.
However, it's up against Transmutation. Transmutation is such a completely bonkers relic that I really could not pass it up. It solves Farming, Prayer, Herblore, Magic, and money-making. Just too good. This left my Areas to solve Construction. In this area I lucked out!
I already planned to take Kourend for its versatile content and access to many Farming patches, but it also gives me access to one of the towns available for Mahogany Homes. This is a more laid back Construction minigame that sees you running around various towns fixing up furniture. It uses fewer planks so it's cheaper, and it's pretty quick. It's made even quicker when you consider that I didn't plan to take any other regions that contain Mahogany homes contracts, meaning I would only have to worry about the one city which I have a very solid teleport for.
My plan was solid. Well it was, until...
Kandarin
In the last League Kandarin was the least picked Area. It's got pretty much nothing going on. Meanwhile, the content that is there is old and bad. Knowing this the devs decided to give it one of the best Echo Items available this time around: The Shadowflame Quadrant.
The Shadowflame Quadrant and its companion offhand, The Devil's Element, are a pair of mage-focused items, a staff and an offhand. They're designed to severely enhance an elemental mage build, which I happen to be going for. Between them they do the following:
- +21% Magic Strength
- Casts two spells instead of one when attacking with elemental spells, the second attack deals 40% damage.
- Applies a target's elemental weakness regardless of the element you attack with.
- Adds a 30% weakness to all elements to any target you attack.
Elemental weaknesses are a flat percentage increase to accuracy and damage, meaning that these effects amount to +30% accuracy and +120% damage. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. You are dealing 2.2x damage to literally any target!! Well that's assuming I'm calculating the Magic Strength properly, but at the very LEAST it's 1.82x just from the elemental stuff.
Putting the Mental in Elemental.
So once I considered the absolutely incredible violence that Kandarin holds I thought maybe it'd be a good idea to pick there for my last area. However Kandarin doesn't just have shit content and awesome magic power, it also has Ardougne.
Ardougne is the capital of Kandarin, and the location of some Mahogany Homes contracts. The contracts there are quite annoying and cramped, and they're spread far apart. On top of that there's only one good teleport into Ardougne and it'd require me to use another inventory space, reducing my overall efficiency. I figure (through loose guesswork) it'd probably result in a 20% reduction in XP/Hr, adding 3-4 hours to the 20 hour Mahogany Homes grind. Naturally that's completely untennable What is there to be done about this?
Spending 8 Hours Trying To Save 4 Hours
So I got this idea in my head that I could make a ton of money passively and spend it all on Construction. You see construction is super fast, it's just expensive. If you've got gold to throw around you can train at millions of XP per hour even without the Leagues boosts. So in the League, if I could just get the money, I could get Construction to 50M XP in about an hour. That one hour however would take a lot of hours to prepare for.
The fastest way to train construction is with Magic Stones. They cost 975,000gp each and result in 1000xp each. In Leagues that's multiplied by 16 so it's 16000xp per stone, or 60.93 gp/xp. Maxing a skill in Runescape takes 13,000,000 xp, but in Leagues you get points for getting up to 50,000,000 xp. So that's what I'm aiming for. Demonic Thrones, made of 25 Magic Stones each, require 99 Construction so I'll max the old fashioned way (Mahogany Homes) and then grab the remaining 37,000,000 xp through magic stones. That comes out to a nice affordable 2,254,687,500gp. Uh oh!!!
Jesus Christ
So that's a lot of fucking money. We're gonna need to work this out.
First of all, Magic Stones are crazy expensive. Let's look at something a little more affordable. Marble Blocks cost 33% as much as Magic Stones but give 50% of the XP, so that's a bit better! 325,000gp per block at 8000 xp comes out to 40.625 gp/xp, or 1,503,125,000gp to 50 million. That's a bit better! It's at least less than the maximum cash stack!
I've been passively making money by transmuting runes, so let's have a look at that. I can seel blood runes for 220gp each, so I'd need to sell 6,832,386 blood runes to get the necessary money. I can buy fire runes for dirt cheap and transmute them up. Each transmutation spell transmutes 10 runes and takes 1.2 seconds to cast. That's 819,886 seconds for a full stack, and I need to transmute them by 7 stages so that's 5,739,202 seconds.
That's 1,594 hours. 66 days of transmuting later and I'll have the gold I need! The League finishes in 42 days on the 10th of June, so I cannot make the money this way by the laws of time. That's not even factoring in the time it would take to sell 6.8 million, for each one I would have to click a single time. Ouch.
We need something better. Another thing that Transmutation can work its magic on is the humble ore. A single Runite ore sells for 2,240gp, more than 10x as much as a blood rune! That means I'd only need 671,037 runite ore. Iron ore is the fastest to mine, I can net exactly 6,000 per hour due to its 100% mining success rate at 99 mining. 671,037 ore at 6000 per hour is 112 hours of mining. Oh. I'd then have to spend about 89 hours transmuting the ore up to Runite. Oh.
I mean it's doable, but I would have to spend 10% of the rest of my League afking Iron ore. If only there was a way to buy ores instead of mining them!
You Can Buy Ores
So you can buy ores. There's a fun little shop in the city of Mor Ul Rek, beneath the Brimhaven volcano, that will sell you any type of ore you like! From Copper to Runite you can buy and sell ores here, perfect! Unfortunately these ores aare bought and sold in Tokkul, not gold.
Tokkul is a special currency used by the Tzhaar, the rock people that live in Mor Ul Rek. Luckily I've got a decent amount of Tokkul, about 333,000, already. I can buy Runite ore for Tokkul and then sell it for gold in Mistrock. Easy.
Runite ore costs 4,160 Tokkul, so I'll need a paltry 2,791,513,920 Tokkul. A little out of my budget, but I can use the rune trick here. I'll buy cheap ores and then transmute them into runite. Easy!
I mean yeah it's easy, but it's too easy. If I'm going to commit to this I want to make sure I'm being efficient about it. What I need is a program that compares every starting ore and finishing ore and calculates how much time it'd take to buy and transmute up to the target amount of gold.
So I Made That Program
It took me 4-5 hours, from the hour of 2am onwards, to finish the program. It started off with innocent intentions but only got messier as it went on. The general idea is that I would input the list of ores and their prices and the program would loop through every possible pair of ores to see which pair takes the least time to reach the target amount of ores.
It counts the number of transmutation operations, the number of buy and sell clicks, and the amount of time it'd take to transmute the stacks of ore. Over the course of development I ran into a fair few issues.
At first I was simulating an OreStack object, that I would loop over to increase the TransmutationIndex and thus simulate the transmutation. I then realised that I was being silly because you can just divide the number of ores by 10, round down, then multiply by the number of transmute steps required. Very simple.
It turns out floating point numbers break down very quickly. At around 1 billion Tokkul it stopped properly tracking the decimal points which resulted in the program buying more ores than it could afford, and thus accruing negative amounts of Tokkul. I hacked together a solution by switching the necessary variables to be double precision numbers.
The next issue was an honest to god integer overflow. The first I've ever actually dealt with. It was incredibly foreseeable, given that the required Tokkul was way above the 32 bit signed integer limit of 2.147 billion, but I only considered the gold target (2,000,000,000 is what I was looking at), and figured the calculations wouldn't run over by enough to cause an issue. Obviously I was wrong, and had to switch a few things out to be unsigned integers. It's not a robust solution but it got me where I needed to go.
I then had issues calculating the buy/sell clicks. I was omitting the final sell amount because I figured you already have all the ore, you don't need to sell it again. This was silly of me because obviously you still need to sell all the ore one last time for gp. :P
It turned out I also had an issue where the loop would run an additional time which was also adding to the total buy clicks. Put in a break statement (entirely defeating the point of a do-while loop lol) and that fixed it.
Finally, the problem I never solved. I realised that, after selling the penultimate amount of ore, the program had more than the required amount of Tokkul for the ores needed. I was correcting for this somewhat by not allowing it to buy more than the required amount of ore but it was still leaving tons of Tokkul after finishing the simulation. What I needed to do was figure out when the next loop would give enough Tokkul to buy enough ore, then figure out how many ores to sell and how many to keep in order to buy the perfect amount of ores. I found this quite difficult.
I spent about half an hour trying to do it with Maths. I used to be good at that, you see. I don't know if I'm just out of practise or if the problem is harder than it seems but I could not work out the equations to figure out how many to sell and how many to keep. Included below is the work I did trying desperately to figure that out.
This is REAL Maths, done by a FAKE Mathematician.
I certainly made at least one mistake while working on this because I found myself in a situation where the amount I needed to sell was negative, I think. I can't really defend it I just did it bad.
After heroically giving up on that I decided I'd just do it on the day, and had a look at the data.
| Operation | TIcks | Seconds | Hours | Clicks | Cycles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adamantite --> Runite | 416752 | 250051.2 | 69.45866667 | 4167462 | 11 |
| Mithril --> Runite | 475388 | 285232.8 | 79.23133333 | 2376908 | 5 |
| Coal --> Runite | 605688 | 363412.8 | 100.948 | 2018920 | 3 |
| Tin --> Runite | 1003860 | 602316 | 167.31 | 2007716 | 2 |
| Iron --> Runite | 1342848 | 805708.8 | 223.808 | 3357108 | 3 |
| Iron --> Adamantite | 7060698 | 4236418.8 | 1176.783 | 23535636 | 5 |
| Coal --> Adamantite | 7373540 | 4424124 | 1228.923333 | 36867602 | 10 |
| Tin --> Adamantite | 9947088 | 5968252.8 | 1657.848 | 24867716 | 3 |
| Tin --> Mithril | 11929272 | 7157563.2 | 1988.212 | 39764232 | 3 |
| Iron --> Mithril | 13980312 | 8388187.2 | 2330.052 | 69901468 | 9 |
| Tin --> Coal | 32732852 | 19639711.2 | 5455.475333 | 163664260 | 5 |
| Tin --> Iron | 107153438 | 64292062.8 | 17858.90633 | 1071534224 | 16 |
So there are a couple of notable things from this data. You'll notice that there are a few combination missing, for example Iron to Coal. This is because transmuting Iron into Coal actually reduces the value. Obviously you can increase the value by transmuting it further, but that one step is a reduction in price. You can see the transmutation table on the osrs wiki here, I leave the other unprofitable combinations as an exercise to the reader.
It makes sense that the slowest way to get to the required amount is going from Tin to Iron, it's the least value gain for the highest number of ores bought. Similarly the least number of cycles (but not the fastest) is going from Tin to Runite. It's the most value gained in a single cycle.
What surprised me is that Adamantite to Runite is actually the fastest way to get to the required amount of ores. It surprised me because that was actually my first instinct. I figured it's a huge value jump and you're buying the least amount of ore possible. I'd be happy about being right if I didn't waste 5 hours figuring it out :P
Not as easy to see here is that the least number of clicks is also Tin to Runite, a fact that isn't as intuitive to me. I'd've expected it to be Adamantite to Runite. I have a feeling it's because of the aforementioned overbuying issue. 4 million clicks is still a lot but at the time my plan was to get prices for buying 5 and 10 ore at a time to see if that would take an alright amount of time.
Realisation and Fallout
I'm quite pleased with how the program turned out all things considered. If I could solve that maths problem it'd be lovely, or I'm sure I could do some ugly recursive thing instead. Data in hand I decided I'd go to Mor Ul Rek and buy my first load of Adamantite Ore and compare it to the logged outputs from my program, to make sure everything was matching up.
I was grabbing my Tokkul out when it struck me that ores don't stack like runes do. My entire world fell down around me as I realised that oh my god you can't buy stacks of runes. I can only buy 27 at a fucking time and I have to run to the bank every time fuckkkkkk.
27 ore at a time over 4 million buy clicks means 74,000 bank trips. If they took 10 seconds each (beyond optimistic) that's 200 hours of banking. Also I do not want to do bank trips the whole point was this is meant to be passive!!!!
Whole plan down the fucking drain. Hours wasted, if you consider time spent working on something you enjoyed and are proud of wasted. Which I might, if pressed.
Beyond this absolutely fatal flaw was a further fatal flaw: the shop only stocked 2 Adamantite Ore. In Leagues shop stocks are unlimited but it means that I can only buy 2 ore with one click. Basically, I had to click 2 million times. That's too many times.
So. What now?
Bringing In An Expert
Well what about just mining the ores? The maths hasn't changed, it's 112 hours of mining and 89 hours of transmuting. However there's a trick, I can transmute while I mine! That cuts it down to just the 112 hours of mining, pretty much!
Except, hold on just a moment. That's still 112 hours that I'm not playing the game I want to play, and I've transformed 112 hours of AFK mining into 112 hours of constantly banking to get more ores to transmute, and switching ores when the stack is done. Suddenly I've turned this into a 100 hour active grind!!
It became clear quite quickly that I was out of my depth, but luckily I have an ace in the hole. You see I have somehow convinced one other person who plays Runescape to feel obligated to talk to me, his name is Drumzorz.
The man, the myth, the legend.
Drumzorz is a funny, warm, and kind-hearted man but none of that matters because he plays Runescape. I was telling him about my woes with the ore-buying method when we got to talking about other potential money-makers with Transmutation. Transmutation can transmute a whole ton of things, after all!
Looking at the list there are actually not that many options for selling. Lots of useful transmutations, but very few gold producers. There are two main options left to be explored: Fish and Gems.
We looked at fish first. Transmutation lets you upgrade certain raw fish into other raw fish. The most expensive one that I have the option to sell is the raw shark. A shark sells for 161 coins, so I'd need approximately 9,300,000 sharks. 161 is less than 2240, the roll rate for fishing is the same as mining with my relics, and fish have a much lower catch rate than ores have in mining, so at this point we can already write off fish. However, let's carry out the maths.
Fishing in Runescape is weird, so it's annoying to calculate. Pretty much all spots have a weighted chance to give one of two fish types. This means that the catch chance is kind of fuzzy and it's going to give imprecise transmute times because you're catching fish of different tiers. I'm going to assume that we're catching the highest tier fish available at the spot.
Baiting shrimp/anchovies is the only fishing activity, to my knowledge, that has a 100% success rate (like Iron ore does), and those are low tier fish. Fly fishing for trout/salmon has a pretty high chance at ~84%, and they're much higher tier fish, so let's have a look at them too.
At a 100% catch rate I'd catch 6000 fish per hour, at 84% that's about 5040. To catch the 9,300,000 fish required that's 1,550-1850 hours of fishing, or 64-77 days. That's already longer than I have in the League, not even accounting for sleeping. However we have yet to consider the Transmutation. Assuming that, out of shrimp and anchovies, I always catch anchovies (which is impossibly generous) then I'd have to transmute 9,300,000 fish up by 11 steps. 11 steps of 9,300,000 fish each taking 0.12 seconds (1.2 seconds for 10) means I'd have to do 3,410 hours of transamuting. Even if I could transmute while fishing (which I can't due to a bug), it's more transmuting than there is fishing available. 142 days of it, 100 more days than there are days in the League. The fly fishing isn't much better either. Assuming that I get all Salmon, that's 6 transmutation steps. That's 1,860 hours of transmuting. Not viable even without considering the time lost when fishing spots move, cost of bait, and time spent clicking to sell.
We also looked at Karambwans. Raw Karambwans are a tier below sharks and sell for about half as much. What is surprising is that they have a very respectable catch rate, 62.89%. That's high enough to speed up the progress due to less transmutation, but we don't even have to do the maths for that here. Likely due to their status as combo food cooked karambwans actually have a sell price of 187 coins, higher than the shark. Unlike the shark, which has a fishing chance of approximately 16%, we can fish Karambwans at a good rate directly and use Hotfoot to cook them automatically!
If you're keyed in to the maths here you know this is non-viable already, but let's look quickly. 1,500,000,000gp at 187 per fish comes out to 8,021,390 fish. 8,021,390 fish at 3,773 fish per hour is 2,125 hours of fishing. About 88 days. Well it turns out that's more fishing than before, but no transmuting so it saves time overall. Still completely non-viable but we did successfully improve on the method!
So at this point we have one last option: gems. Drumz suggested a plan. With the Karamja Easy Diary completed you can sell Unstrung Dragonstone Amulets to a specific general store for 10,575gp. We can afk mine the gems from gem rocks in the very same town, and afk mine the gold for the amulets. The price is 4.7x better than Runite ore, and we have two mining steps and two processing steps each taking 2 ticks, so we're already at 4x the time spent. That means we have 1.4 ticks per item to spend on banking and travel for processing. The best furnace and anvil that don't cost money are 6 ticks from a bank, so that's 12 ticks per inventory but we can process 13 amulets or 27 gems per inentory so we still have some ticks left over for banking and inefficiencies. Okay let's calculate exactly how many ticks it's like to take and how profitable that will be!
Actually wait a minute, what the fuck are we doing? This is even less AFK than the mining! Plus this doesn't even account for the fact that mining gold and gems has a less than 100% success rate. This method is almost certainly slower and also more intensive than anything else we've looked at so far. Into the bin!!
Well that's fucked, but what about just selling the cut dragonstone? They sell for 6,000gp each, and it skips half of the steps involved in unstrung amulets. Is that faster? Well gem rocks have an abysmal success rate of 27.73%, meaning I'd only be getting 1,664 per hour. That's not good enough. However, coincidentally, Kandarin gives me access to the Myths' Guild, where I can charge an amulet of glory. Wearing a charged amulet of glory increases this rate to 82.42%! It's a complete coincidence that Kandarin happens to enable the method needed for me to pick Kandarin. So what are the rates like?
1,500,000,000gp at 6,000 per dragonstone is 250,000 dragonstones. We can mine 4,945 gems per hour, meaning we would have to mine for about 50 hours. Gem rocks give a random gem, so the transmutation time is a bit uncertain. In the worst case we're looking at 58 hours of transmuting, but the most common gem would be opal which is a high tier gem (for the purposes of transmutation). If every gem was opal (impossible :P) then it'd only take 25 hours. So 25-58 hours of transmuting which can be rolled into the mining. The method breaks down when we get to the gem cutting. Each gem takes 2 ticks to cut. For 250,000 gems that's 83 hours of gem cutting.
So despite being promising, gem cutting is similarly non-AFK and more time consuming than selling runite. I'm out of ideas, Drumz is out of ideas, at this point we got sidetracked by discrepencies when calculating ore mine rates vs experimental data. I've spent eight hours at this point trying to avoid a 20 hour grind. I could have just been doing the construction!
What If I Just Do The Construction
So the problem with that is that I don't wanna. I fairly recently did a long Mahogany Homes grind in the main game and I don't really fancy getting locked in to it again. Ultimately though, I don't mind it that much. The real issue is that it's locking me out from my final area and thus all my PvM goals. So if I don't want to do it right now, what if I just went into Kandarin now and did it slowly over time?
Well as I mentioned before Kandarin will slow down the training method quite a bit but that's not too much of an issue overall. I can just pick away at it. Fortunately I was still talking to Drumz, and his infinite wisdom shed some light on the matter.
Kandarin is a serendipitous area, it turns out. It gives access to the demon butler, a construction NPC who will bring construction materials to your house at the price of some gp. This is the exact thing that enables crazy construction rates in the main game, and if I focus properly I can pull in about 1 million XP per hour. Sorry, that's in the main game. In Leagues it's SIXTEEN MILLION XP PER HOUR. This means that the actual construction part of the construction grind will take about 3.5 hours overall. The tough part is getting the materials in the first place.
I need 22,000 mahogany logs for this method, and I have to turn them into planks. I'd originally planned for 9,000 logs with Mahogany Homes. That's a big jump, I guess I'll have to get to woodcutting. If only I'd been afking that while working on that program all night! OH WAIT! I HAD BEEN! In my infinite wisdom I had already been AFKing woodcutting while figuring this whole thing out, a complete coincidence. I had 22k teak logs (the exact amount I'd need) ready to be transmuted into mahogany logs. Absolutely flawless.
Besides the whole planks thing. 22k planks is a lot of planks, and I'd have to ferry them to the sawmill 27 logs at a time. This clocks in at 815 inventories of logs, and at 20 seconds per run (estimate) that's about 5 hours of making planks. Not the worse, but quite tedious. If only Kandarin unlocked a nicer way to make planks, too bad it can't solve everything.
So when you unlock an area you auto-complete some of the quests relevant to it. One of those quests in Kandarin is Dragon Slayer II, a quest needed to access the Myths' Guild. Included in the requirements for Dragon Slayer II are Lunar Diplomacy and Dream Mentor, two quests that unlock spells on the Lunar Spellbook. Normally that'd be entirely useless, I don't have access to the Lunar altar in any of my regions so I can't use Lunar spells.
Kandarin includes the wizards' guild, where you buy the skill cape for Magic. This cape has the feature of being able to swap to any unlocked spellbook a few times a day. Even though I don't have access to the Lunar altar, I can still access Lunar spells through this cape! Why is that useful? Well, the Lunar Spellbook has the spell Plank Make, whick is a more afk method of making planks.
Through a confluence of factors Kandarin is actually the perfect construction solve, it provides literally everything I need to make this grind as quick and easy as possible. I didn't know all this, because I completely wrote off Kandarin as kind of garbage except for the echo items! The moral of the story is that you should waste all your time avoiding your problems instead of just facing them because maybe your friend will know something you don't and offer you a marginally more palatable solution. The end!