Crafting in OSRS is a skill, when looked at through the lens of efficiency, that engenders tedium. The prevailing wisdom, especially for ironmen, is to farm giant seaweed, mine sandstone, and spend the hundreds of hours required for glassblowing to achieve levels.
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Don’t Do This
Instead, appreciate the three big aspects of crafting that make it a skill you do not want to spend time focusing on;
- First, crafting is a skill that’s designed to level passively. Mining, for instance, gives an account access to silver, gold ores, and gems which can be processed and crafted into jewelry over time for XP. Slayer often sends the player off to kill dragons, which drop hides that can be crafted into armor for XP and alchables.
Thieving can yield gems through stalls and chests, such as the Dorgeshun training method, showing yet another method of training crafting through other skills.
Varrock’s diary rewards include daily purchases of Battlestaves, which can be crafted into elemental battlestaves of the player’s choosing, resulting in thousands of daily XP alongside a healthy amount of GP in profit.
And even when considering glassblowing for the sake of obtaining unpowered orbs, Hand in the Sand can allow you to aquire 83 buckets of sand per day for free instantly. These add up, and open up yet another passive form of banked crafting XP that requires no strict time investment.
Actively attempting to level crafting means that you’re forgoing the passive options that allow you to grow your account healthily at the same time.
- Second, Crafting is a skill that frontloads extreme convenience early, and backloads minor upgrades late.
In other words, the early teleport and stat upgrades you get early in the form of Strength Amulets, Games Necklaces, and Dueling Rings can all be accessed at or before level 50. An easy level to achieve through passive methods and questing.
In combat terms, it’s important to look at the math:
The Amulet of Strength, accessible at 50 crafting (pre-enchant), will give the player +10 strength.
The next upgrade in the necklace slot is the Power Amulet, accessible at 70 crafting, which provides the player with +6 to all defences and accuracies, but lowers the strength bonus from +10 to +6 in comparison to the Strength Amulet.
Strictly speaking, this is a direct DPS downgrade anywhere that involves melee combat. The accuracy bonuses, even alongside a small prayer bonus, never increase DPS over a flat +10 strength bonus. That’s 20 crafting levels which, again, can be passively leveled, for an extremely minor ranged upgrade from the amulet of accuracy and a downgraded melee performance.
This principle is true for the Amulet of Glory, craftable pre-enchant at 80 crafting: it loses in melee DPS to the amulet of strength, although its defenses, accuracy, and prayer bonus make it a more versatile item for general use cases.
The general idea here being that late game crafting eventually adds up into small DPS increases and more use cases, but nothing worth investing hundreds of hours into non-passively. Your amulet of strengths, accuracies, and powers, which can be obtained through non-crafting methods, anyway, will either suffice or be your best option until you reach end-game content, where Fury ammys and Zenyte jewelry take over.
- Third, it’s just so unfun to actively train;
There is a reason that the OSRS dev team, given all of the changes they’ve made to firemaking, woodcutting, and runecrafting, have barely touched crafting as a skill, only introducing giant seaweed as a viable active training method as one notable example: it’s already designed around passivity.
Taking hundreds of hours out of your gameplay so that you can force your bank to take in 50 thousand unpowered orbs you’re never going to use isn’t going to result in a better gameplay experience, even if it ends in a necklace, ring, or bracelet upgrade. Instead, it’ll result in burnout for minimal (if any) DPS increases.
On the other hand, saving up gems from mining ores and stars, crafting armor from dragon hunting, and making Battlestaves for massive daily profits is, indeed, fun. And just as importantly, these things grow your account in ways that will be useful later on, as opposed to giving your bank glassblowing equipment that, again, you’ll never use.
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Crafting is an extremely useful skill, and in the late game, after years of an account’s lifespan, it’s undoubtedly required for smooth sailing during raids and high-level bossing. But for 95% of the playerbase, the levels required to gain the benefits of crafting does not warrant sacrificing other parts of your account to actively arrive there.
Don’t become a slave to glassblowing; do everything in your power to level crafting passively.