[OSRS] Ultimate 1-99 Cooking Guide Runescape (Fastest/Cheapest/F2P/P2P/more!)

Welcome to my level 1-99 cooking guide.

This guide will cover every piece of information you need to know to be able to become a master of cooking. I’ll be showing the fastest way to 99, a range of alternative methods and a section directed towards ironmen.

What is Cooking?

Cooking is a skill available to both members and free to play players. To gain cooking xp, you create and prepare various types of food, ranging from raw meats, pies, pizzas, ales and more. As a regular account, all of the raw supplies to train your cooking can be bought off the grand exchange and you shouldn’t go out and collect the resources yourself.

Cooking is the 4th most common 99 that players have at the time of making this guide, only beaten by 3 combat skills, so it’s the most common skilling 99 in the game. Cooking is the fastest 99 you can get as a free to play player, and its also the cheapest buyable skill in terms of efficient methods, disregarding the slower profitable methods..

Why Train Cooking?

You need at least level 70 cooking to be able to get Barrows Gloves which requires full completion of the recipe for disaster. Level 70 is the highest requirement for every quest in the game, so you’ll need 70 in order to get your quest point cape.

You need level 95 cooking in order to complete all of the achievement diaries, where you need 95 to cook a summer pie for the elite Varrock diary.

Cooking is also a fairly important skill for ironmen depending on your play style. Particularly with ultimate ironmen, having 80 cooking is vital so you can cook the stacks of raw sharks that you gather from minnows.

The cooking skillcape has a perk where it makes you unable to burn any food no matter what. This can be utilized to make a lot of profit with foods that have a large margin between the raw and cooked counterpart.

Important Items & Information

So here’s all of the important information you need to know before starting your cooking training.

Cooking food on a range or oven gives you a slightly better chance of not burning your food when compared to cooking on a fire. The difference is very minimal though.

I highly recommend completing the Family Crest Quest to get the Cooking Gauntlets.

These gloves lower your burn rate by a lot when cooking food on a fire or range. For example, when you’re cooking lobsters, you stop burning them at level 74 cooking, but if you wear the cooking gauntlets, you stop burning them at level 64.

These are the closest fires and ranges to a bank, and you should use these in order to get the maximum possible xp rates.

Free-To-Play: Al-Kharid, Lumbridge Castle Range

The best way to cook in free to play is by using your own fire or other peoples fires from people training firemaking.

As a member, there’s 3 places where you don’t need to move.

Members: Myth’s Guild, Rogue’s Den, Mor-Ul-Rek Bank

If you’re looking to save money or make more money out of cooking, I strongly suggest getting 100% Hosidius house favour on Zeah to be able to use the Hosidius kitchen ranges, which are located slightly south of Kourend castle in the center.

Cooking here reduces the chance of burning food by 5%, and this can be increased to 10% if you complete the elite Kourend achievement diary. These ranges are a slight walk away from the bank chest, but if you consider how you’ll get more xp per hour with less burnt food, then it becomes a trade off worth using.

Best Pathway To 99

These methods have a good balance between cost, speed and click intensiveness. Surprisingly, these methods are also all available to free to play which makes them the best pathway for all players both free to play and members. There are faster methods that are very click intensive that I’ll show in the alternative section after this.

Level 1-15 Cooking – Buy 110 Raw Sardine

From level 1 youll be starting off by cooking sardines, which give 10 xp more than shrimps and still only require level 1.

To get to level 15 which unlocks the next method, you need to successfully cook 61 sardines, so to account for burning, you should buy at least 110 sardines. You should cook these at one of the cooking locations close to a bank that I showed earlier, and in total, to get from level 1 to 15 cooking, its only going to take you around 5 to 7 minutes.

Level 15-25 Cooking – Buy 110 Raw Trout

At level 15 you can start cooking Trout, and the next milestone is 25.

You’ll need to cook 78 trouts successfully, so again you’ll need around 110 to get there and will take 5 to 7 minutes to cook them all. If you don’t have a lot of money, or want to train for free, you can make your way to barbarian village and find a world where there’s a player dropping the fish they catch from fly fishing. Right next to the fishing spot is a fire that you can cook the raw trouts and then drop them and pick up more.

Level 25-35 Cooking – Buy 250 Raw Salmon

At level 25 you can cook salmon, and you can also pick them up at barbarian village and do the same thing.

The next goal is level 35, and you’ll need to cook 182 salmon, so you should buy at least 250 raw salmon to get there including burns. This should take around 10 minutes, so in total, getting from level 1 to 35, you’ll need to buy 110 trout and sardines, and 250 salmon, and in total it should only take you 20 to 30 minutes.

Level 35-99 Cooking – Buy 66,000 Grapes & Jugs of Water

At level 35, you unlock one of the best methods in the game, and that is cooking wines, which require you to use grapes on jugs of water, and then after 12 seconds or 20 gameticks, they ferment, giving you 200 xp each.

Wines can be cooked at any bank, you don’t need a range or a fire. Below level 68 cooking, a number of the wines you make will become bad jugs of wine, not granting you any experience. With that, your exp rates start off at around 200k per hour at level 35, and once you reach level 68, your xp rates can reach around 480k per hour, even higher if youre extremely focused.

Over the last few years, the price of grapes has gone down a LOT. To get from level 35 to 99 cooking, you need to successfully make 65 thousand and 61 wines. To get to 68, which is the point where you stop failing them, you need 2914 wines made, so accounting for the ones you fail, youll need around 4000 wines. So in total from 35 to 99, youll need approximately 66 thousand grapes and jugs of water.

When I made my previous guide, grapes were around 250 coins each, but at this time theyre only 48 each, which has reduced the cost of cooking by a mile. Currently, theyre around 0.4gp per xp, and if you made 66 thousand wines which accounts for the ones youll fail, it will only cost you 4.29 mil. This method gives the best balance between cost, speed and clicking, with a really high xp rate and quite a low cost.

Alternative Training Methods

Aside from my recommended best pathway, there are faster methods in the game, and also methods that cost less money, so that leads me onto the next section, the alternative training methods.

Barbarian Fishing

Barbarian fishing is a method that almost every player does to get to 99 fishing. While youre barbarian fishing, you can use a knife on the leaping fish to get a small amount of cooking experience. If you were to cut the fish you catch all the way through to 99 fishing, youll receive approximately 1 million cooking xp, which is enough to get you to level 72 without having to really train the skill traditionally. This method is very worth mentioning since if youre going for the max cape, you will save a few hours of time if you do this since it removes the need for low level cooking.

Karambwans

At level 30 cooking, with the completion of the Tai Bwo Wannai Trio quest, you can cook karambwans which are the fastest training method in the game. Cooking them regularly with afking is not very fast, but you can reach up to 1 million xp per hour if you 1tick cook them. To 1tick them, you need to hold down the space bar or number 2 button on your keyboard, and use a raw karambwan on a fire or range on every gametick so every 0.6 seconds. It will take you a bit of getting used to the timing, but once you do it for a few minutes, you’ll easily get the hang of it.. At level 30, you’ll burn a lot of them, and you stop burning them at level 99 cooking, but with the hosidius kitchen, you stop at level 93, and with the elite Kourend diary 10%, you stop burning at level 89. Cooking Gauntlets do not work with karambwans, so there’s no way you can reduce that further. These are however profitable to cook, there’s around a 150 gp margin between raw and cooked karambwans at this point in time. If you account for burning, you’ll start to break even at level 70 cooking, so before level 70 you’ll be losing money, then gradually above 70 you’ll profit. So basically this method is great to do above level 70 if you’re okay with very intensive clicking and want to get 99 as fast as possible. From level 70 to 99 cooking, if you are cooking at the Hosidius kitchen, you can expect to make a profit of around 9 mil. If you start at level 30 when you unlock them, and go all the way to 99, you can expect to make around 4 mil, but your xp rates will be lower for a while when you’re burning a lot of them. On the screen right now are also the quantities needed from level 80 and 30.

Tunas

For those players that want to save some money at a low level, you can cook tunas from level 35 cooking, and these are a great way to get to level 68 where you stop failing wines. From 35 to 68 cooking, youll profit around 50k from tunas, with an xp rate of up to 130k xp per hour. Youll need to successfully cook 5827 tunas, and if you account for burning, youll need at least 7000 raw tuna to get to your goal.

Sharks

At level 80 cooking, you can start cooking sharks which are another profitable way to level up, although with high burn rates at level 80, you’re not going to see much profit until you stop burning them. These are the levels you stop burning sharks. It goes as low as level 84 with the Hosidius kitchen and elite diary, but for most players level 89 will be the starting point. You can get around 250k cooking xp per hour with these and they’re quite afk at the same time. If you were to go from level 89 to 99 cooking solely with sharks, you’d make 7 mil. With that, you can do wines up until level 89, and then cooking sharks to 99 will turn your losses into a profit, while still maintaining a fairly fast xp rate.

Ironman Training Guide

Im going to start with some tips for low level training and obtaining fish, then ill be talking about the mess hall, karambwans and jugs of wine for training.

Low Level Cooking

As a low level, cooking is very conventional. Youll get the majority of your experience from cooking the fish you catch from low level fishing. Once you reach trout, you can utilize the fire in barbarian village to train with.

Theres a wide range of ways to get raw fish that doesn’t involve fishing them. Brine rats are a great example, they drop a range of noted fish consistently that really adds up. Ice trolls are another monster that drop a range of raw noted fish , particularly higher level ones, and also both Konar’s chest and Larrans Chest both have rolls of hundreds of raw fish.

Mess Hall

With 45% Hosidius house favour and at least 20 cooking, you can start training your cooking at the mess hall on Zeah. With level 20, your xp rates will be quite slow with the servery pies and stews, but at level 65 when you unlock pineapple pizzas, you can achieve up to and over 200k xp per hour with some focus. The method involves grabbing utensils and raw ingredients from the cupboards and preparing them into servery food that you put onto the tables for the NPCS in the hall. This method is fantastic for ultimate ironmen that have some spare inventory space since it doesn’t require you to store any food, and this method is also great for regular players that don’t have a lot of money.

Karambwans

Karambwans are another method great for ironmen since you can catch them conveniently by using the DKP fairy ring right next to the fishing spot. You need 65 fishing to catch them, and even at 65 the catch rate is decently fast. With the karambwans you can cook them by 1ticking for really fast cooking xp, or even just afk cook them if you’re not in the mood to 1tick. You can also buy karambwans from the fishing store in Tai Bwo Wannai village. He stocks 10 raw karambwans per world, and you can use a fire nearby to constantly train here. The thing is, this method uses quite a bit of money since you

Jugs of Wine

The final method I’m going to show for ironmen is jugs of wine. You can buy grapes and jugs from the Culinaromancers chest, and the chest is also a bank which makes it very easy to store them after you buy them. The number of grapes and jugs in stock increases depending on the number of sub-quests you’ve completed for the recipe for disaster quest, with a maximum of 10 after the entire quest is complete. If you account for the time spent buying and hopping worlds, you can reach xp rates of up to 130k cooking per hour. You can also get large stacks of grapes from various bosses. Vorkath, Zulrah, the Kalphite queen and Thermonuclear Smoke Devil all drop at least 100 noted grapes very commonly which amounts to a lot of cooking xp.

Overall, the fastest method for ironmen is mess hall if you account for the time needed to get the supplies with other methods. In saying that, it shouldn’t disregard the other methods since you’ll be getting xp in other skills at the same time.

So anyways, that sums up my level 1-99 cooking guide. Thank you for reading, and good luck on getting to 99 Cooking!