OSRS 1-99 Herblore Guide
- Theoatrix
- 12 hours ago
- 11 min read
What's going on guys, my name's Theoatrix and welcome to my updated 1-99 Herblore guide. This guide will teach you everything you need to know to effectively level up your Herblore in OSRS.
Guide Outline
If you would prefer to watch a video-version of this guide, I have linked that below. Otherwise, continue scrolling to read the written-version of this guide.
Changes To Herblore
There's been a number of changes to the skill since my last guide…
Your herblore level now affects how many fights you can prepare for against Duke, where level 82 allows you to prepare for 4 battles.
A few weeks earlier, Jagex introduced surge potions, which are an essential for both PvM and PvP.
In 2024, Jagex added the mastering mixology minigame, which brought 2 new potions as well as a range of new herblore equipment.
The minigame gives the most xp for your herbs in the game, making it an excellent way for ironmen to train.
Why Train Herblore
So why should you train herblore? Well having more fights at duke, and the introduction of surge potions makes herblore almost an essential upgrade for your account.
Herblore is also required to be effective within the chambers of xeric raid. Its recommended to have at least level 78, but level 90 helps.
For ironmen, the skill introduces game changing unlocks for your account, allowing you to make the supplies for any encounter.
Vital Unlocks Include:
prayer potions
super restores
Saradomin brews.
On a regular account, herblore isn't entirely an essential skill, and it does require a fair bit of money to level up.
Level 99 Perks:
While wearing the skillcape you can mix grimy herbs into unfinished potions.
Wearing the skillcape bypasses the hard desert diary requirement when mixing potions in Nardah
Ability to search the cape for a pestle and mortar once per day.
How Herblore Works
To be able to train herblore, you need to have completed the Druidic Ritual quest. For this, you need raw bear, rat, beef and chicken meat. The quest is started in the druids circle in Taverley, and its a fairly short quest, taking under 10 minutes.
With druidic ritual out of the way, you can start cleaning herbs and making potions.
Most potions are made by firstly combining a clean herb with a vial of water, then you add a secondary ingredient to it to make the finished potion.
You don't get experience from mixing herbs into vials… the majority of the xp comes from finishing off the potion.
Every potion has a vastly different cost, and while it may seem efficient to make the best potion possible for the best xp rates, a lot of the time you'll end up spending far too much money.
Generally, you’ll lose the least amount of money by making potions that are traded commonly, like prayer potions and super restores, but the prices do change.
Knowing the cost is only really important for regular accounts, but for ironmen, I'll explain more about sourcing ingredients and herbs towards the end of this guide.
Useful Unlocks
Since the introduction of silver jewellery, the amulet of chemistry has been one way to save money on your herblore training. Wearing this gives a 5% chance to make a 4 dose potion instead of a 3 dose, essentially increasing the sale price of the potions you make. But after Jagex introduced mastering mixology, there's been a range of new items that are useful for training herblore.
You can now get an alchemists amulet from the mixology minigame, which stores up to 5000 charges of an amulet of chemistry, but instead has a boosted 15 percent chance to make a 4 dose potion. This can dramatically lower the cost of herblore, especially with the expensive potions.
The prescription goggles reward gives a 10% chance to save the secondary ingredient when making a potion, which again, can save you a lot of money in the long run. Pairing the alchemists amulet with the prescription goggles can greatly reduce the cost of training herblore.
Also from mastering mixology, you can get the reagent pouch, which you can start using with level 81 herblore. This holds 26 of each secondary ingredient, and is very useful on an ultimate ironman account. It also allows you to make 26 potions per inventory instead of 14.
You can also unlock potion storage, where you get an extra area of your bank to store unfinished and finished potions. Having this can potentially save you 248 bank spaces, if you include all the different potion dosages.
Pathways To 99
In this next section, I'd like to briefly go over the entire pathways to 99 herblore so you can see what it looks like. So shortly I'll start by talking about low level training, and more specifically, how to get your first 20 levels, then I'll get into the fastest ways to 99.
For the fastest, there are 2 different pathways I'm going to show - the fastest with and without tick manipulation.
Overall, the fastest methods involve making the best possible potions you can, and for the tick manipulation pathway, it goes up to the 1 tickable potions, then moves up from there.
These fastest methods are very expensive, where it costs over 200 mil without ticking, and close to 100 mil with tick manipulation, but its possible to get 99 in as little as 23 hours.
After showing the fastest methods, I'll talk about some cheap and fast methods, that are going to cost far far less than the fastest pathways.
In that category, I'll show the cheap and fast, which takes 33 hours at a cost of 30 mil… then the even cheaper potions for those looking to save more money but spend a little more time training. And the cheaper potions pathway takes 40 hours, and at a cost of 22 mil.
Then after that, I'll show the profitable herblore methods, and it is difficult to make money out of herblore while training, but there are some methods out there that are great money but don't necessarily give good xp.
Then I'll show the best afk training methods, and I'll explain how to maximise your afk times with herblore.
Low Level Training
Alright, so first up is the low level training section, and I initially planned to show a complete druidic ritual quest guide to get you started on herblore, but instead I'll leave it up to the goat to guide you, so Slayermusiqs quest guide is linked here.
After completing Druidic Ritual, the only things you can do are clean guams or make attack potions, where the latter is far quicker xp.
To make attack potions, you need to purchase guam potions unf, then you need eyes of newt, and you'll need 172 of each to reach level 20.
So to make potions, you should set your withdraw x option at the bank to 14.
Then you withdraw 14 unfinished potions and 14 eyes of newt, then you use them on each other, and press the spacebar or click to process your inventory.
You get 16.8 seconds of afk time to make all 14, then you open the bank, deposit your inventory, withdraw 14 of each, and repeat.
Attack potions are generally pretty decent xp at a low level, but at level 5 you unlock antipoison potions which can speed up your training.
You need 109 antipoisons to go from level 5 to 20, and at a cost of around 100k .
Although, you can also make strength potions once you reach level 12, and these are a bit faster than antipoison and also slightly cheaper to make.
Fastest Ways To 99
So those were the basics and low level processes for herblore, and now I'll show the fastest pathways to 99, split into the fastest with tick manipulation and the fastest without.
Starting with the absolute fastest, which is with tick manipulation. So on this pathway, you’ll basically be making the best potions you can all the way until you unlock the first 1 ticking potion, and for a potion to be able to be one ticked, it needs to have stackable ingredients.
So that first potion is unlocked at level 77 herblore, where 1 ticking stamina potions is going to bring in 530K xp per hour.
To 1 tick, you hold down your spacebar while making a potion every game tick, and in other words, its very click and focus intensive, so personally I wouldn't recommend 1 ticking unless you're racing for the max cape.
Its going to take only 23 hours to get 99 with this pathway, and at a cost of 130 mil.
One notable piece of info, is that when you reach level 98 herblore, you can start making extended super antifire potions which have a very low cost but are the fastest xp in the game, giving 800k xp per hour 1 ticking.
So instead, if you're just going for the fastest xp without sweating it out, you can do the best potions you can, without 1 ticking.
This ranges from attack potions, all the way to ancient brews, which are very expensive to make.
Overall, this pathway is going to take 27 hours at max efficiency, and will cost 430 million gp. But instead of making Ancient brews, you can make Saradomin brews to 99, which will lower the total cost to around 200 mil, with a fairly similar time spent.
I personally don’t recommend following this pathway, but it is the fastest without tick manipulation.
Cheap & Fast Methods
The general rule to save money on herblore training is to make potions that are in high demand and have high trade volumes…
Generally, super restores and ranging potions are your best bet for a mix between fast experience and lower cost, where this entire pathway is going to take around 33 hours, and at a cost of 30 mil.
So in comparison to the absolute fastest pathway, you're going to spend around an extra 5 hours training, but you’ll save 200 mil, so you're saving yourself over 40 mil gp per hour.
Prayer potions are the cheapest one on this list, where they still give over 200k xp per hour, with a gp per xp cost of only 4. As you can see, all of these are high demand potions, and your xp rates will still reach over 400k per hour when making ranging potions.
Now, if 100 mil cost is still too much for you, I have a pathway that's even cheaper. For this pathway, the majority of your training will be done with super restores until level 90 herblore, then from there, you can make super combat potions.
These are made with the regular super potions and a Torstol, which means you cant afk as long when making these since there's more ingredients, but you can still expect over 300k xp per hour, which is very fast.Â
Currently, making super combat potions is not profitable, but sometimes you do make a bit of money… however, as a whole, this pathway is going to take around 40 hours, at a cost of only 22 mil. So its considerably cheaper than all of the pathways I've shown, and is still a viable pathway with high xp rates.
Profitable Methods
Alright, now for the profitable herblore methods, and it is difficult to make money with herblore if you want fast experience, but there are quite a few decent money makers while I'll show now.
Probably the best profitable herblore method that somewhat gives decent experience is partaking in mastering mixology, where its possible to get around 2 mil gp per hour at higher levels, where you trade in your reward points for Aldarium.
At mixology, its vital that you use herbs that are cost effective, and these are the 3 most cost effective herbs for each type of paste. Overall, getting to 99 herblore here is going to cost about 75 mil in herbs, but then if you exchange all those points for aldarium, you're going to see about 315 mil in profit.
Another profitable herblore method is simply cleaning herbs, which can be done afk or can be done spam clicking.
At just level 11 herblore, you can clean Tarromin, and by spam clicking, cleaning 10 thousand herbs per hour, you can expect to make over 700k in profit. AFK though, where you leave the game to automatically clean the herbs, its about 150k in profit per hour.
Torstols at level 75 are a similar profit margin currently, reaching over 800k per hour at high efficiency… however.. The most profitable herb to clean is the new Huasca herbs, where its possible to make 1.8 mil gp per hour, although you do need to be patient with the grand exchange.
The xp rates from cleaning herbs isnt great for how click intensive it is, but it is one of the faster profitable methods in the game.
And with clean herbs, you can then turn them into unfinished potions, which actually give zero experience when you make them, but can be highly profitable. Some players make unfinished potions on alt accounts to make money, and with Huasca potions, its about 800k profit per hour. Snapdragon potions are another common one, reaching 400k.
And the final profitable method for herblore is making divine potions with crystal dust after song of the elves. The most profitable one to make right now is divine super combat potions, netting over 1 mil gp per hour in profit if you exchange seeds for crystal shards. But this method requires a fair bit of starting capital, and also requires a high herblore level.
There's a range of ways to gather crystal shards yourself, but this is going to eat into your total profit per hour. Currently its only super combats that are profitable if you convert seeds to shards, but sometimes things like ranging potions also make a decent amount of cash.
AFK Training
Now, with herblore, it is possible to train AFK, and most of the skill is AFK if you're on a regular account.
In this section, I'll briefly explain the afk times for each method, and firstly, making a full inventory of 14 potions gives only 17 seconds of afk time. But, if you make potions that have stackable ingredients, you get 31 seconds of AFK, which is fairly decent. This includes potions like stamina's, and extended super antifire.
AFK cleaning a full inventory of herbs, where you just click once and let the game slowly process your inventory, lets you afk for 50 seconds at a time, but this isnt very worthwhile since it can be sped up 5 to 10 times by just clicking.
Making one inventory of 14 unfinished potions only lets you afk for 8.4 seconds, which is really not long at all.
Another afk herblore method is making tars, which I didn't really talk about in this video because they're very expensive and slow xp. But making 1 inventory of tars will let you afk for 46 seconds at a time.
In summary, the best afk herblore method is making potions with stackable ingredients.
Ironman Herblore
As an ironman, herblore works a little differently where you have to farm and gather the raw materials first before training. The mastering mixology minigame is an excellent way for ironmen to train their herblore since it gives the most herblore xp per herb in the game.
But with making regular potions, instead of making the best potions possible, ironmen should prioritize making potions that are useful to them, and making potions that have easy ingredients to obtain. So making the best possible potions for your level is not viable as an ironman.
Herbs are sourced from a range of activities in-game, including farming them as well as drops from PvM and bosses.
Secondary ingredients are sourced in a similar fashion, except it does vary from secondary to secondary. Farming is one way, but there are also shops that sell certain secondaries, and ironmen will usually have to spend a fair bit of time actually gathering the secondary ingredients.
To get started with herblore as an ironman, you can purchase vial of water packs and eyes of newt from shops around the game, then you can make attack potions to get your early levels.
From there, some easy potions to make include serum 207s, energy potions, prayer potions and super attack potions. Then once you reach level 60 herblore, you can start partaking in mastering mixology, which is going to be the most efficient way to level up.
For an in-depth mastering mixology guide, you can find one on my second channel "Theoatrix2".