Runescape Passive Money-Making Guide (OSRS)

Welcome to my Passive Money Making Guide for Old School Runescape.

This article takes you through a variety of methods that run off timers, allowing you to do these every few hours, every day, or at times every week.

For a nicer reading experience, I have categorised these methods into different skilling categories, and within each one, they will be ranked from lowest to highest requirement.

Farming

So, starting off with Farming, and due to the nature of the skill being on a Global Timer and usually taking hours to complete a patch, there is lots of money to be made passively.

Method 1: Willow Trees

At only 30 Farming, you can plant Willow Trees

among the five different tree patches in Runescape.

The cool thing about growing your own Willow tree is that they are the only tree that you can obtain Branches from. After checking the health of a grown Willow tree, your tree starts creating Branches, starting at 0, and every 5 minutes, it generates 1 branch with a maximum of 7 in on tree. So, a cool money maker comes out of that.

Every – at least – 35 minutes, you can take your secateurs to a grown Willow tree, use it on it, and harvest 41 000 for all 5 tree patches. It takes about 2 – 3 minutes to harvest all of them, giving an effective profit of at least 800 000 per hour.

Method 2: Herb Runs

Farming Herbs is a great way to passively make some cash every 90 minutes.

To get the most money out of Herb Farming, you should be using Ultra Compost, which you can buy off the Grand Exchange.

You should also use Magic Secateurs, which are rewarded from Fairytale Part 1.

With Farming, the number of Herbs you get only slightly changes, depending on your Farming level. What changes the most is how often your plants will die.

At low Farming levels, the best seeds to plant for money are Toadflax seeds and Avantoe seeds.

Once you are above level 70, and there is a lower chance of your crops dying, you can start planting more expensive seeds like Ranarr seeds and Snap-Dragon seeds.

As you can probably gather, the profit per run varies a lot with your Farming level and RNG. On average, a low level Herb Run will get you about 50 000 per 6 patch Herb Run. Whereas, with a higher Farming level, you can expect 80 000 – over 100 000 per full run.

Method 3: Cactus Patch

With the addition of the Farming Guild, there are now two Cactus Patches in Runescape – one in Al Kharid, and one in Tier 1 of the Farming Guild, which requires 60% Hosidus House Favour.

Also, with the Farming Guild came the new Potato Cacti seeds, which require 64 Farming to plant. Regular Cactus Farming requires 55 Farming, and once the Cactus is fully grown, you can pick the Potato Cacti or Spines off of it.

These will fully regrow every 75 minutes. Taking the rewards from your Cactus plant also varies with your Farming level.

For Potato Cacti, you can expect 10 at a lower level, and up to 20 at a higher level, which is a massive profit. Spines will give half of that amount. So, 5 at a lower level and 10 at a higher level.

Since both the Potato Cacti and the Spines are used in Payments for Farming, they are in high demand, making them almost 1000 each.

I have mentioned this in guides before. But, to make the most money out of Cacti, you should integrate them into your Herb or tree Runs. So, you do not lose much time with banking.

Diary Rewards

The next section I will be covering is Diary Rewards,

and all of these Diaries I am going to talk about reset every 24 hours at exactly the same time – 12:00am UTC.

Method 4: Western Provinces Diary

After doing the Western Provinces Achievement Diary, Rantz the Fat Ogre will give you free Ogre Arrows daily.

With Easy, you will not get a lot. But, for Elite, you get about 30 000 for under 1 minute of your time.

The fastest way to get to Rantz is using the AKS Fairy Ring Code.

Method 5: Varrock Diary

The next area is the Varrock Diary, and with the Elite, this is probably the most profitable method in the entire article.

Zaff, in Varrock, offers Battlestaves in his Barrel at a discounted price. Since Battlestaves have a pretty high Alch value, you can resell the staves to the Grand Exchange for over a 1000 profit per staff.

Being something you can do every day, you can easily implement this into your tree runs when you are going past the Varrock Tree patch.

Each day, you can get 20 000 – 170 000 in profit, which ranges from 140 000 – 1 200 000 per week.

Method 6: Kandarin Diary

Next up is the Kandarin Diary,

and on the daily, you can exchange noted Flax for noted Bowstring, getting about 50 GP profit per one.

The person you need to talk to is located in the Flax Fields, which is decently close to the Fruit tree patch and Herb patch at Catherby.

The Hard and Elite perk is comparable to another Herb patch in a Herb run.

Method 7: Ardougne Elite

Another huge perk of the Elite Kandarin Diary is 84 Buckets of Sand delivered directly to your bank daily.

To get the sand, all you need to do is log in that day. However, the number of sand won’t stack up if you stay offline for a few days.

Each day equates to about 5000 profit per day, and in a while year, that is 1 800 000 just for logging in.

The diary requirements are decently high of course, being an Elite Diary. But, that is a great perk for those higher level players or for Ironmen for Glassblowing.

Minigames

Next, I would like to talk about Minigames, and in my opinion, there are 2 Minigames worth doing every now and then for passive money.

Method 8: Miscellania

Managing Miscellania is a great low effort way to make over 100 000 per day, depending on your RNG and the prices of rewards.

After the Throne of Miscellania Quest, you can allocate 10 workers to work, and after the Royal trouble Quest, that goes to 15 workers. At this current point in time, the most profitable selection is 10 workers at the Coal activity, and 5 on Teak and Mahogany.

These change pretty often with changes on the Grand Exchange. So, at the end of the article, I have linked a spreadsheet that shows you the best allocations. You should allocate 10 workers to the Green box, and 5 to the Orange box.

To allocate workers and collect your rewards, you need to go to the first level of the Miscellania Castle, right next to the CIP Fairy Ring.

You firstly need to gain 100% approval rating. The fastest way to get approval is by raking the patches right next to the Castle entry.

Once you are at 100%, and you have money in your Coffer, you are set to earn money.

Each day, your approval rating goes down 2.5% without or 1% with Royal Trouble.

To maximise your profits each day, you can come to Miscellania, rake one of the patches and your approval will go back to 100%.

Alternatively, you can wait a full week and then once your approval goes down to 93%, you can ‘rake’ your way back to 100% for a slightly lesser profit.

At all times, I recommend keeping at least 2 000 000 in the Coffers per week. If you think you are going to take a long break from Runescape, I recommend putting up to and over 5 000 000 into the Coffers so you can let it earn for you while you are gone. Each day, it takes 50 000 or 75 000 from the Coffer with or without Royal Trouble. But, that will be converted into rewards that you will profit form. To learn more about the Managing Miscellania Minigame, I have put some longer video links at the end of this article. In the near future, I will be making a guide for it as well.

Nightmare Zone

The next Minigame is the Nightmare Zone, and with any leftover points after obtaining your Imbueables, you can get 15 Herb Boxes on the daily.

Each box gives an average loot of 9500, and they also cost 9500 Nightmare Zone Points to buy. That makes it a profit of almost 150 000 per day. This is a money maker that I strongly recommend doing only if you AFK at the Nightmare Zone for Combat XP, or if you have done it in the past. If you have not, it does take some time to get enough points to sustain a week, month or year doing this method, and there are probably better uses for your time if you are not here AFKing.

Miscellaneous Methods

Now, moving into some Miscellaneous Methods

Method 9: Flipping Items

First is Item Flipping. By finding large margins on the Grand Exchange through buying and selling one of an item, you can set a big buy amount at the low price and sell at the higher price.

My favourite resource when it comes to flipping is using the OSBuddy free Grand Exchange website. It shows the average buy and average sell price of current people playing the game.

It also shows the trading quantities on the Grand Exchange as a small graph in the bottom right.

For more passive income, look for items with low trade volumes, since offers in those take a long time to fulfill, and also have very large margins.

Method 10: Fletching Cape

The second miscellaneous method has a really high requirement of level 99 Fletching.

Every day, you can take 3 Mithril Grapples out of your Fletching cape, and that is worth 3600 a day for about 10 seconds of your time. In a year, those Mithril Grapples will add up to over 3 900 Grapples, and that will be a profit of 1 200 000 a year.

Guide Summary

So, overall, in my opinion, these are the best passive dailies. I am not saying that the other ones are not worth your time. But, these are the ones that you should try to do as often as possible. To get the most money out of Farming, Herb Runs and Potato Cacti are great passive incomes. Any Varrock Diary is great for money. But, try to aim for the best one you can do. I recommend at least the Hard Western Provinces Diary with Rantz, and the Elite Kandarin Diary because the lower tiers do not give much money. I also recommend consistently doing the Throne of Miscelania, especially if you are someone paying with in-game money for a bond. In my opinion, Herb Boxes are really only great if you AFK at the Nightmare Zone.