INTRO Hi, my name is De_Lille_D and I wrote this guide to help people decide how they should train. Please note that this guide will not consider aspects like how fun someone might find a certain method and how fast you get bored. I'm also assuming every items gats sold/bought immediatly and that you train just a sfast as anyone else (you can change this if you want to though). You have to decide for yourself which method your prefer, based on my math (don't worry it's all in a spreadsheet) and other factors like prices, if items sell well on the GE, fun (personal), ... Note: "best" = "most efficient" in this guide. UNDERSTANDING THIS IS CRUCIAL: 1) Most efficient is not the same as cheapest/fastest: Some people say the fastest method is the always best, some say the cheapest is. I say it's neither! It depends on how much money you can make per hour. For example: If you think spending less money is better, just compare smelting gold to smelting bronze from tin and copper you mine yourself. If you use bronze, it won't cost you anything, but it's not hard to see that you'll need a LOT of time to gather the 2 mill tin and copper and then to smelt the 2 mill bronze bars... The gold method on the other hand is expensive, but A LOT faster! Now imagine 2 players racing to 99, the 1st one who trains with bronze will probably still be mining the ores when the other person reaches 99. This second player will have time left to do something else. If he uses this time to make money, he'll make enough money to pay back what he spent. If he keeps on making money until the 1st person reaches 99, he will have made a lot of money. Now, let's compare: They both have the same exp and they both spent the same amount of time logged in, but the 1st player only has 2 Mill bronze bars, while the 2nd player have time to make way more money! 2) Break up the method: You should always break up the training process in sub methods and see which of those is more efficient. If you are making yew longs from yew logs and bow strings, you are actually using 2 methods: first you train by cutting the logs and then by stringing. Now, if one of the 2 methods is better than the other one (which is most likely), you're better using only the more efficient sub method. If the sub methods are almost equal, it's probably best to do both, because you'll save time buying supplies/selling products. 3)Time has value You noticed in the above example that 2nd players method was better because he had time left; this is because you can consider time as a normal resource, like cash or items. After all, if you don't have time, you can't make money; and if you have enough time, you can make almost any amount of money. Therefore, you can say time also has a price. If you can make 500k in an hour and you spend 50k to save you an hour training, that's a good choice, since you could use that extra hour to get 450k more than you would have with the other method. Now, how valuable is time? Well, that depends on the player, his stats and the way he makes money. If you are around 44 Runecrafting and you make nature runes, you make about 300k per hour. This means that every hour you invest in Runecrafting, will get you 300k. I will call this the "amount of money per hour", "money making rate" or simply "rate". This rate is extremely important when decidding how you play the games. The higher the rate, the better. Be carefull, this is an AVERAGE VALUE! If you go pking once and you get a dfs in 5 minutes, that doesn't mean your time is worth 201 Mill per hour (= amount of money you would make if you got a dfs every 5 minutes). Because for that to be true, you'd need to be able to repeat it. To determine how fast you make money, use your money making method for 1 "round" ( e.g.: a Runecraft trip) and measure long it takes. Divide the amount of money you made by the amount of hours you spent on it and you have your money making rate. If your money making method isn't constant, like GWD or pking, keep track of your profits and the time you spent, and after a while, your rate (= total profit/total amount of hours) will because almost constant. For monster hunting, you could also look up the important drop ratio's and calculate how much profit you make on average and divide that by the time of 1 trip. This rate can then be reduced to hypothetical gp/seconds rate: this say how much 1 second is worth for you. For someone who uses the Double Nats method, 1 second is worth 277 gp. This means for him, losing/gaining a minute, is the same as losing/gaining 16k! All of my calculations will include the money making rates, so you HAVE TO decide for yourself what fits you best. My default money making rate will be 1Mill/hour, because that's how much I value my time. I consider anything under 200k nooby, everything around 400k decent and everything above 1Mill really good. COMMON (MONEY MAKING) RATES: - Runecrafting nats (level 44 - 90): 300k/hour - Runecrafting double nats (level 91+): 1Mill/hour UNDERSTANDING THE SPREADHSHEETS: I will be using Google Docs Spreadsheets for the calculations, because that way it can automatically update prices! The spreadsheet will never be outdated, unless a new, better method is released. The spreadsheets will usually have 2 sheets: the first with the calculations and the second for importing prices. Normally you won't have to change the values on the 2nd sheet, but it can be helpful if you want to see what would happen if you changed the prices a little (prices fluctuate and this affects the outcome depending on the prices that day). To extract prices automatically, I'll be using the item number. You can find this number in the Grand Exchange website feature: search for an item, click on the link to see the price graph; the item number will be at the end of the web address. (e.g.: link to Abyssal whip page -> item number = 4151) The blue squares are the ones you HAVE to fill in. The grey squares are the data measured in-game: you can change these if you think the data doesn't apply to you, but should normally be left alone. The green column is the "ready" column: by removing the 1 in this column, you can remove it from the calculation. If you don't want to usea certain method, or think that it doesn't sell well enough to be used for a lot of training, you can turn that method off. The first row that says prices, will be used in the calculations. The second row are the current GE prices downloaded from the internet. These will not always be the same! If you want to experiment with the prices, you change the first price row and changes will be made to the 1st sheet, without losing the code for the GE prices. The first row could also be altered for other reasons. For example: broad bolts (unf) are 49 gp in GE (June 21), but they hardly sell; on the other hand, they cost 50 gp each at a slayer master and can be bought in large quantities, therefore I put in 50 as the price I calculate with, because it's not worth waiting around just for that 1 gp. If you want to add another item to the 2nd sheet, just fill in the item name and number (from GE website feature) at the right and copy the code from the other cells to the right (click on the price cell most to the right and drag down to the "ImportData"-cell in that column. Then, place your cursor on the lower right corner of the price cell and drag to the right). If you filled in the item number correctly, you should see the price appear. Unfortunately, you can only look up the price of 50 items with Google Docs, there won't be much room. I'll make extra columns telling you how many spaces you got left. SKILLS: [hide=Fletching - Partially done]Tip.It Guide: http://tip.it/runescape/?page=fletching_guide.htm Bolts: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... 1TFnAqlEzw Bows and Arrows: Crossbows and Darts: These spreadsheets will not include untradeable items, like blurite, or things no one will buy anyway, like ogre fletching. Extra Requirements: []list][*]Broad-Tipped Bolts (lvl 55): - Quest: Smoking Kills - Other: You need to buy the abilty to fletch these with Slayer points [*]Darts: - Quest: Tourist Trap Caution: When I say in the first column "make 10 adamant arrows" and the amount says 40, that means 40 sets of 10 = 400. [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] [hide=] [/hide] EXTRA: Here's the link to my price extracting spreadsheet which I use in all my other spreadsheets: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... vRX0HfY7Ug CONCLUSION: Now that you know how to train, why are you still reading this? Go get that exp!! You can help me out on this guide by: - pming me errors in the spreadsheets (don't post them) - discussing why some methods should be added (post here) - pointing out typos or misspelled item names (I only want the correct in-game name) - overall constructive criticism - providing me with in-game data (e.g.: how fast you can fletch yew logs into yew long(u)s) Thank you for reading and I hope you this guide helped you! CREDITS: Me : For writing the guide + maintaining the spreadsheets Jagex: For making an awesome game. Tip.It: For hosting some nice skill guides and forums.