Entry 3 - RS 99 Diaries

RUNESCAPE 99 DIARIES - ENTRY 3 - 12.2.2023

It happened. Runescape has dug its meat hooks into me again. You'll see in the stats update below how much more time I put in since my last update. I was kind of all over the place in what I focused on. However, none of the grind feels stale at this point which is a very good sign. I know that's going to start creeping in on me as I continue leveling up.

One skill I spent a little bit of time on was fletching. If I remember correctly that's a member-only skill, so I wasn't able to try it out when I played back in the day. So far it's a pretty satisfying XP cycle. I hung around Lumbridge farms slayin' chickens like Colonel Sanders to gather feathers for the arrows.

This lead me to my next XP obsession: Cooking. While I could have focused on just gathering feathers, I realized I had a bunch of potential for some quick cooking gains. So, I started grabbing the avian carcasses and started cooking en masse. But, I wasn't satisfied with cooking birds. I wanted to make pies. I don't know why, but it was always one of my favorite things to make in RS.

I started making meat pies by the dozen. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough capital to buy pie dishes in bulk, and it didn't look like there was a cooking store nearby where I could purchase them. I started taking them from the spawn locations at the Lumbridge and Varrock castles.

After doing this for a significant amount of time, I reached level 35 and entered the cooking guild in Varrock. I ran into a little situation with the cooking hat needed to get into the guild. I had one stashed in my bank after the first couple of days I was playing that I sold for some reason. I read that goblins drop them sometimes, so I went on a brief three-goblin killing spree before one was dropped (time to buy a lotto ticket?).

Finally, I got to spend some time in the glorious halls of the Cooking Guild. Out back there was a handy wheat field, so I went to town making pasty dough. I can't recall his name, but I kept doing the "tasks" for the pie man that lives in the Guild. After I gave him dozens of pies for pauper's wages, I realized that this wasn't an actual quest with an end goal, which was a disappointment.

But, this gave me an idea. I've never really messed with the grand exchange. So I looked up pie prices. My jaw dropped. Apple pies going for 500gp a pop. Nothing wild, and I know that "wealthy" Runescapers talk figures in the billions, not thousands. However, I only had about 10k to my name. Any revenue sources were gladly welcomed.

The only component I decided to purchase from the GE was pie dishes. At around 65gp per dish, this left plenty of room for profit. Plus, only one dish spawned at a time in the guild, so this would expedite the process.

Everything else I needed was readily available at the Guild, so I went to work. I'm still going strong, but I made around 58k gross by the time of this writing. Nothing much in the grand scheme of things but I was happy with it. The one downside to this strategy is that I wasn't progressing my cooking skills. Since raw pies sold for much more than cooked, I decided to go raw...er...sell raw instead.

For some reason, the process of creating the flour and pasty dough doesn't grant even a small amount of XP. It doesn't really make sense to me. Is crafting the components of your recipie not a part of cooking? Anyway, quite a bit of time was spent making money with no XP reward attached to it.

This is where I shifted strategy slightly. Instead of purchasing pie dishes, which cut into my profits, I started mining clay and crafting the dishes myself. That way, I'd at least be boosting two skills while chasing some cash.

The cycle I took for this was to mine in Varrock, head back to the Cooking guild to create the clay, then walk over to the Barbarian village to throw and fire them

I decided to take a little trip over to Karajma. One of the things I remember enjoying most about playing RS was lobster potting at Karajma. It...did not go well. I made the fatal flaw of not checking the required level to lobster pot. Of course, I was not a skilled enough fisher to do this, but I wanted to check out the island before going back to slinging pies.

This also proved to be a mistake. I wandered off to this desert region on the island and found myself on the receiving end of a poisonous spear and quickly perished, my first death of the 99 run.

But, no harm, no foul. I didn't lose much of value, and got to have a little chat with Death himself. Seems like a nice guy

Attack (23) - 6,737/7,028

Hitpoints (25) - 8,409/8,740

Mining (44)- 57,437/61,512

Stength (21) - 5,349/5624

Agility (1) - 15/83

Smithing (34)- 21,716/22,406

Defense (20) - 4,548/5,018

Fishing (22) - 5,630/6,291

Ranged (21) - 5,048/5,624

Thieving (1) - 48/83

Cooking (36) - 26,192/27,473