OSRS 1–99 Cooking Guide

Every time you cook a raw item you roll a hidden check to see whether it comes out cooked or burnt. A burnt item is destroyed and gives no experience, so a high burn rate is wasted food and wasted money. The chance to burn depends on three things: your Cooking level, the item you are cooking, and where you cook it. As your level rises the burn rate steadily falls, and for every cookable item there is a level at which you stop burning it entirely — for example you stop burning tuna at level 63, lobster at 74 and swordfish at 80. From that point on, every raw fish becomes a cooked one with no waste, which is what turns some methods from a loss into a profit.

You can cook on a lit fire or on a cooking range. Ranges have a slightly lower burn rate than fires for most foods, and a handful of special ranges (covered below) lower it further still. The reason cooking experience is worth chasing is that the swing of the action gives nothing on its own — only a successful cook awards XP — so reducing burns at low levels is exactly the same as gaining XP faster.

Cooking is also a banking-bound skill: your XP per hour is set less by the cook itself and more by how fast you can refill an inventory of raw materials. That is why the best training spots are always the ones with a bank or a supply right next to the heat source — shaving seconds off each banking trip is where the rate comes from. A normal cook on a range takes four game ticks per item, so an inventory of 27 cooks itself over roughly a minute while you wait, and the banking is what eats your time between loads.

Finally, tick manipulation — interrupting the cooking animation by spam-clicking every game tick (a tick is 0.6 seconds) — bypasses the normal four-tick cook delay entirely, letting you cook one item every single tick instead. It is the engine behind the very fastest methods in the skill, and it roughly triples or quadruples the throughput of anything it works on. The downside is that it demands constant, perfectly-timed input, so the fastest methods are also the least relaxing. Understanding that single trade-off — speed versus effort — is most of what you need to choose a training plan, and it is why this guide presents both a tick-manipulation route and a click-and-relax route for getting to 99.

Location matters more in Cooking than in almost any other skill, because the right spot lowers both your burn rate and your banking time at once. The standout spots are:

• Hosidius Kitchen (Great Kourend) — the best general-purpose range in the game. It carries a roughly 5% lower burn rate than an ordinary range and sits right beside a bank. It needs the easy Kourend & Kebos Diary completed to use the ranges, and is the top pick all the way to high levels whenever you are not tick-manipulating. A full inventory of fish here takes only a little over a minute including banking.
• Myths' Guild — a range right next to a bank with no diary required, though you do need Dragon Slayer II for access. The short bank distance makes it one of the best 1-ticking ranges.
• Rogues' Den — a fire next to a banker with no requirements at all; the go-to spot for early karambwan ticking before you have unlocked anything else.
• Mor Ul Rek (inner city, needs the Fight Caves completed) — a stove next to a bank, another excellent 1-tick spot.

For pure AFK fish-cooking the Hosidius Kitchen is the safe default thanks to its lower burn. For tick-manipulation the priority flips to bank distance, so pick whichever bank-adjacent fire or range you can reach — the Hosidius Kitchen is actually not ideal for 1-ticking because the slightly longer walk to the bank costs you 10–20% of your rate and makes mistakes more likely.

A couple of other spots are worth a mention. The fire just south of the Lumbridge ladder is the classic beginner range, but it is only worth using at very low levels when trips are short and you want every successful cook to count. The Cooking Guild range (level 32, chef's hat required) is a clean bank-and-range combo near Varrock and is handy for wine and pie methods that need a sink as well. Whichever spot you pick, the principle never changes: minimise the gap between the bank and the heat, and for AFK fish prefer the lower-burn range. If you are cooking on a fire rather than a range, remember it can burn out, so a bucket of water or a fresh set of logs nearby saves a wasted trip.

The single best burn-reduction item is the Cooking gauntlets, an enchantment on the gauntlets rewarded from the Family Crest quest. Worn in the gloves slot, they let you stop burning certain fish much earlier than normal. They are confirmed by Jagex to work on lobster, swordfish, monkfish, shark and anglerfish — and only those. Importantly they do not help with tuna or with karambwan, so they are a high-end fish tool, not a universal one. For anyone cooking those five fish, the gauntlets are effectively required for good rates; expect a great deal more burning without them. You obtain them by taking your steel gauntlets to Caleb in Catherby; if they are ever lost on death, Dimintheis in south-east Varrock re-issues them free.

The other big convenience unlock is the Cooking Guild, in the three-storey windmill north-west of Varrock. It opens at level 32 and you must be wearing a chef's hat (or a cooking cape/hood, max cape, or Varrock armour 3 or 4) to enter. Inside is a range, a bank and a sink all together — a tidy one-stop spot for wines and pies. Finally, the ultimate burn-killer is the Cooking cape: at level 99 it lets you never burn any food again while equipped, on every food in the game, which retires the gauntlets entirely. Until then, levelling up is itself the main burn reduction — there is no consumable that lowers burn, so the path to clean cooking is simply gaining levels and wearing the right gloves.

It is worth being clear about what the gauntlets do not do, because it catches people out. They have no effect on tuna, on karambwan, or on any pie or drink — only the five fish listed above. So if your plan is wine or karambwan, the gauntlets are irrelevant and you should not waste a quest on them for that reason alone. If your plan is high-end fish for profit, they are close to mandatory: cooking sharks or anglerfish without gauntlets means burning a meaningful share of an expensive raw fish, which can flip a profitable method into a loss. The order of operations for a fish-cooker is therefore simple — do Family Crest, equip the gauntlets, cook at the Hosidius Kitchen, and only then start feeding sharks into the range.

The early levels disappear almost instantly. From level 1 cook whatever cheap raw fish you can get hold of — shrimps and anchovies first, then trout at 15 (around 130k XP/hr), salmon at 25 (around 140k XP/hr) and tuna at 30 (around 150k XP/hr). Burn rates are high down here, so when you buy raw fish in bulk, get roughly two-and-a-half times more than the cooked total you actually need, to cover the ones you destroy on the way up. Cook at any convenient range — the Cooking Guild opens at 32 if you have a chef's hat, otherwise a city range or the Rogues' Den fire works fine.

The reason 35 is the target is that it unlocks jugs of wine — the fastest method in the game that does not need tick manipulation. By the time you are cooking tuna you are already near 150k XP/hr, so the whole 1–35 stretch is only a handful of inventories and a few minutes of real time. If you intend to tick-manipulate instead, you can skip fish entirely: 1-ticking poison karambwan works from level 1 with no requirement, and gets you to 30 in under ten minutes (more on both methods below). Either way, treat 1–35 as a quick on-ramp — do not waste money over-buying low-level fish when the real methods are a few levels away.

If you would rather not spend anything at this stage, low-level pies and stews are an option even on members worlds, and Ironmen will simply cook the fish they are already catching. But for a bought account the fastest sensible plan is to grab a few hundred trout, salmon and tuna, cook them at the Cooking Guild or a city range, and roll straight into wines the moment you reach 35. Remember that there is no boost item or potion that lowers burn at these levels — only your Cooking level does — so the early grind really is just about getting through to the method that matters.

From level 35, fermenting jugs of wine is the fastest method that needs no tick manipulation — just steady clicking at a bank. You make wine by using grapes on a jug of water; each successful jug gives 200 Cooking XP, which is a lot per action. Wine takes 12 seconds to ferment, but as long as you keep making more the timer keeps resetting, so in practice you fill an inventory, bank, and repeat while previous batches finish off-screen. The moment you stop, all unfermented wine in your inventory and bank ferments at once and you collect the XP.

Rates start at roughly 300k XP/hr at level 35 and climb to around 470–490k XP/hr. The ramp is driven by the fail rate: every wine that fails to ferment turns into a useless jug of bad wine, and wines stop failing entirely at level 68. Below 68 it pays to deliberately let your wines ferment from time to time so you actually level up and fail less often; from 68 onward the method runs at full speed with zero waste. The full run to 99 needs roughly 65,000 grapes and 65,000 jugs of water, and after selling the finished wine back you can expect to lose only about 3–4m coins in total — making this one of the cheapest fast 99s in the game, at around 30 hours. It is fully available in free-to-play too. Use the Cooking calculator to size your exact grape and jug count for your remaining levels.

A practical tip on the early levels: buy your grapes and jugs in big batches, since you will be reordering constantly, and consider banking at the Grand Exchange itself so you can restock without travelling. Below level 68 the bad-wine failures feel wasteful, but the grapes are cheap and the lost XP is small, so it is rarely worth grinding fish first just to skip the failure window — the wine method is faster end-to-end even with the early fails. Once you cross 68 the method is at its full ceiling and stays there to 99, with no further unlocks to chase. Wine is the answer for the vast majority of players who want a fast 99 without learning tick manipulation, and it is the method we would point almost anyone to first.

With tick manipulation, 1-tick karambwan is the fastest Cooking experience in the game — up to roughly 900k+ XP/hr at high levels. The technique is to use a raw karambwan on a fire or range every single game tick, holding the spacebar (or your keybind) to skip the confirmation menu, so you cook one karambwan every 0.6 seconds with no delay between them. Each one is worth 190 XP, which is why stacking them tick-perfect produces such an extreme rate.

The path comes in two stages. From level 1–30 you 1-tick poison karambwan — cooking the poison version has no Cooking requirement, so you can start at level 1 and tear through to 30 in well under ten minutes (around 500 raw karambwan, a small loss of a few hundred thousand coins from the early burns). At level 30 you switch to proper cooked karambwan, already pushing well over 450k XP/hr right at the unlock and scaling up from there. Our method table lists this 1-tick line from level 30 with a band that reflects the high-level ceiling. The whole run to 99 takes around 75,000 raw karambwan and can be done in as little as ~14 hours.

The catch is consistency: a single mistimed tick stalls you and breaks the rhythm, so most players run a metronome — either the RuneLite metronome plugin or a 100 BPM track — to keep the 0.6-second beat. It is the fastest route to 99 but easily the most demanding, and it is hard to sustain for long sessions. If perfect clicking is not for you, jugs of wine get you almost as fast for a fraction of the effort and the same kind of cheap supply cost.

One detail that trips people up: there is no Cooking requirement to cook the poison karambwan, only the regular cooked one needs level 30, so the 1–30 phase is genuinely doable from a fresh account. The poison version is worthless as food, but at this stage you are buying levels, not meals, so the loss on the early burns is just the cost of the fast start. From 30 onwards every karambwan you cook is also a high-tier shark-equivalent heal, which is why Ironmen who fish their own karambwan get both Cooking XP and a stockpile of one of the best foods in the game for combat. Supply-wise the karambwan come from Karamja, so on a bought account you simply order them on the Grand Exchange in bulk; the raw price is the main cost of the method, and unlike wine you do not recover much by selling the cooked result.

If you would rather train Cooking in the background while you work, study or watch something, cook full inventories of regular fish. You withdraw 27 raw fish, use one on the range, choose “cook all”, and the game works steadily through the whole inventory — about 67 seconds of hands-off AFK per load before you need to bank and reload. It is the most relaxed way to train the skill, and with the right fish it makes money rather than costing it.

The headline AFK options are monkfish (level 62, around 165k XP/hr), sharks (level 80, around 280k XP/hr) and anglerfish (level 84, around 315k XP/hr). All three benefit from the Cooking gauntlets, so wear them and cook at the Hosidius Kitchen to minimise burning — with both, sharks stop burning at 94 and monkfish stop at 90 (or earlier). Sharks in particular give strong experience and a profit going from 80 to 99, making them the best blend of speed, money and AFK comfort once you have the level. None of these touch the raw speed of wine or karambwan, but that is the trade: you give up XP/hr in exchange for being able to walk away from the screen for a minute at a time. For comfort, keep a bucket of water handy if you are using a fire and it goes out, though ranges never need relighting.

Lobsters and swordfish are the lower-level entries into AFK fish cooking — lobster stops burning at 74 and swordfish at 80 with gauntlets — but they give less XP per item than monkfish or sharks, so most players treat them as a stepping stone rather than a long-term grind. The genuinely strong AFK plan is to cook whatever the highest fish you can reach without heavy burning is: monkfish in the 60s and 70s, then sharks from 80, then anglerfish from 84 if you have them. Because each “cook all” runs unattended, this is the method to pick when you are doing something else — on a second monitor, between work tasks, or while watching a stream — and it is the only family of methods here that reliably puts coins into your pocket while it trains.

Several cooking methods actually make money, which is rare for a buyable skill where you normally pay for XP. The trick is to cook a fish at a level where you no longer burn it, so every cheaper raw fish becomes a more valuable cooked one and the spread is your profit. The classic examples:

• Tuna — stops burning at level 63. Cooking tuna from 63 to 99 is a slow ~150k XP/hr grind (close to 90 hours), but it turns a steady profit and needs no gauntlets, since gauntlets do not affect tuna anyway. A good choice if you value money and AFK over speed.
• Monkfish — stops burning at 90 normally, earlier with gauntlets at the Hosidius Kitchen. A profitable middle-ground at ~165k XP/hr.
• Sharks — over 250k XP/hr in our table (~280k) and profitable from 80 to 99, the best mix of speed and money once you can cook them. You will burn a fair few when you first unlock them at 80, but the run still profits overall.

Profit on each of these swings with the live Grand Exchange, because it is entirely a function of the raw-versus-cooked price gap. A method that profits today can flip to a loss if the cooked price drops or the raw price spikes, so always check the current spread on the GE price tracker before you commit thousands of fish to it. Cooking is one of the few skills where the “cost” column in our table can genuinely be negative.

The catch with all of the profitable fish is speed: they are slow compared with wine or karambwan, so you are effectively trading time for money. Cooking tuna from 63 to 99 is the slowest of the lot at close to 90 hours, but it is also the most reliable earner and needs nothing but raw tuna and a range. If your goal is a fast 99 you should ignore these methods entirely and make wine; if your goal is to bank some coins while you idle towards 99 over many sessions, the profitable fish are exactly the right call. Most accounts end up doing a bit of both — wine when they want to push levels, sharks when they want to AFK — and our method table lets you compare the XP/hr and cost of each side by side so the choice is yours rather than a guess.

One of the more underrated high-XP methods is the Bake Pie spell on the Lunar spellbook. It requires 65 Magic and the Lunar Diplomacy quest to access the spellbook, and it cooks raw pies with magic instead of a range. Two advantages make it strong: it cooks faster than the four ticks a range takes (about a third quicker), and pies baked this way never burn, so there is zero wastage at any level — you do not need a single level of burn reduction.

At 47 Cooking, baking fish pies gives over 300k XP/hr and is often the most profitable pie of the lot. At level 95 you can bake summer pies for a peak of around 490k XP/hr — faster than jugs of wine, which makes it an excellent way to finish off the final stretch (95 to 99 in roughly 9 hours). Ingredients can be a little fiddly to source in bulk, since each pie needs a raw pie assembled from a pie dish, flour and fillings, but at GE prices most pies break even or turn a small profit. Bake Pie is also reasonably AFK, giving at least 40 seconds of cooking per inventory cycle, so it is a rare method that is fast, near-AFK and burn-free all at once. It does, however, cost Magic runes and tie up your spellbook, so weigh it against simply pushing wine.

For an Ironman, Cooking is less about raw speed and more about not having to gather every single ingredient by hand — and it is a necessity, because cooked food is your healing for every boss and Slayer task. Early on, simply cook the fish you catch while training Fishing; that comfortably covers your own food needs up to around level 20. From 20, the Mess Hall (the “Servery”) on Great Kourend becomes a standout, because you can buy ingredients on the spot rather than farming them: you make servery meat pies there using only what the Servery sells. At 65 the Servery unlocks pineapple pizzas for over 200k XP/hr — one of the best self-sufficient Cooking methods in the game.

Trouble Brewing, a members' minigame, is another Ironman favourite at around 200k XP/hr, and it doubles up by giving Fletching as well while you process the scrapey-tree bark on the hopper. Fishing and cooking your own karambwan is a reliable partial method too, though you would need roughly 75,000 of them for a full 99, so most use it to cover a chunk of the journey rather than all of it. For Ultimate Ironmen specifically, making jugs of wine from the grapes and jugs available in the Recipe for Disaster reward room — with a sink right there to fill water, and the Humidify spell to speed that up — costs barely 100k coins to 99. It is slower than the mainscape wine route only because of the supply-gathering time, but it asks almost nothing of your bank.

Good news for free players: the jug of wine method is fully available in free-to-play, which means the fastest no-tick route to 99 works on a free account exactly as it does for members — around 300k XP/hr at level 35 ramping to 470–490k once wines stop failing at 68. That alone makes Cooking one of the better skills to push as F2P, since you reach the same XP ceiling without membership. At low levels, redberry pies, meat pies and stews are fast, cheap fillers before wines come online at 35.

If you want to spend as little as possible, a budgeted free-to-play pathway can actually finish 99 at a profit — over 5m by some current pricing — rather than the small loss the pure wine route takes. Free-to-play Ironmen, who cannot buy supplies on the GE at all, can instead fish and cook trout and salmon at Barbarian Village: catch them with a fishing rod and cook them on the fire right beside the river, netting roughly 40k Cooking XP/hr (more with 3-tick fishing). It is slow, but it is entirely self-supplied and needs no membership and no coins. For most free players, though, the answer is simple: bank grapes and jugs of water, and make wine.

Worth knowing if you also train Fishing: Barbarian Fishing passively trains Cooking on the side. When you catch leaping fish at Otto's Grotto and cut them up for their roe and offcuts, the cutting action gives a small amount of Cooking (and Strength and Agility) experience along the way. You are not actively cooking anything — it is a free trickle that comes bundled with the fishing.

The rate depends on your Fishing level and whether you are 3-ticking. Training Fishing the normal AFK way gives roughly 5k–9k Cooking XP/hr; if you 3-tick the fishing for higher Fishing rates, the Cooking trickle rises to around 9k–16k XP/hr. It is nowhere near a primary training method, but over a full Fishing grind it adds up: going from 58 all the way to 99 Fishing while cutting every fish nets you roughly 1.6 million Cooking XP for free. If you are planning a long Barbarian Fishing session anyway, factor that passive Cooking into your overall plan — it may cover a surprising chunk of your early-to-mid Cooking levels without a single trip to the bank.

A few quests and milestones are worth planning around. The Family Crest quest gives the Cooking gauntlets, the burn-reduction item every serious fish-cooker wants, so do it before grinding high-end fish. Lunar Diplomacy unlocks the Bake Pie spell. Cook's Assistant is the tiny starter quest most accounts knock out first. Several diaries help too: the easy Kourend & Kebos Diary opens the low-burn Hosidius ranges, and the elite version pushes anglerfish to stop burning as low as 87 when cooked there.

Cooking is also a gateway for wider goals. You need 70 Cooking for Barrows gloves (the best general-purpose gloves in the game), and 70 is also the highest Cooking requirement for the Quest Cape. 95 Cooking is required for the Achievement Diary Cape. So even if XP itself is not your aim, you will likely want Cooking into the 70s or 90s for these account milestones.

As for the chase pet, every skill shares Rocky the raccoon — there is a small chance to receive him on any successful cook, with the odds scaling to your level and the XP of the action, so the high-XP-per-action methods like wine and karambwan give you the most rolls per hour. Reach 99 and the Cooking cape caps everything off, letting you never burn food again. For how Cooking sits alongside your other skills and the outfits that support them, see the Skilling Outfits guide, and browse the full OSRS guides hub for the rest of the skills.