OSRS 1–99 Firemaking Guide

Firemaking is simple: you use a tinderbox on a log to light a fire, and you gain experience the instant the fire catches. Each tier of log grants a fixed amount of XP regardless of your level — normal logs 40, oak 60, willow 90, maple 135, yew 202.5, magic 303.8 and redwood 350 — so burning a higher-tier log is always more experience per action. There is no swing-and-miss XP here; you are paid per successful light, and the only thing that varies is how often a log fails to catch on the first attempt, which becomes a non-issue once your level comfortably exceeds the log's requirement. Because the XP per log is fixed, the entire skill comes down to two choices: which log you burn, and how fast you can light them — there is no hidden depth beyond that.

Two quirks shape how you actually train. First, you cannot light a fire on a tile that already has one, so the standard pattern is to burn logs in a moving line — light, step, light, step — rather than standing in one place. Burning a whole inventory means walking a short trail of fires and then returning to the bank for more. Second, lighting is governed by a fixed tick cycle: with clean clicks you can light a fresh log every 4 game ticks, which is 2.4 seconds, setting a theoretical ceiling of about 1,500 logs an hour. In practice the rate tables assume around 1,485 logs an hour to account for banking and the occasional misclick. That tick rhythm, combined with stepping between tiles, is the whole skill of fast Firemaking — everything beyond log choice is about hitting that 4-tick cadence cleanly.

A small detail worth knowing: when a fire burns out it leaves a pile of ashes on the ground. Ashes are a cheap Herblore secondary, so most players ignore them, but ironmen training Herblore sometimes scoop them up. Firemaking is not the most useful skill in the game, yet the level does unlock a handful of perks worth the grind for some players: high-level fire pits can permanently light certain dark caves or strip the chilling effect near the God Wars Dungeon, and at 99 the cape becomes an inextinguishable light source. For most accounts, though, the real motivations are the quest requirements Firemaking gates and simply adding another 99 to the cape rack.

The tool list for Firemaking is refreshingly short. To burn logs you need exactly one item: a tinderbox. That is the entire kit for both the fastest and the AFK routes — everything else you carry is just the logs themselves and, if you are banking, your bank PIN. Because there is no tool progression that changes your burn speed, you never have to upgrade anything to light fires faster; your only levers are the log tier and how tightly you click.

For the low levels, the single best speed upgrade is a firelighter. Applying a firelighter to a log makes it light successfully on the first attempt every time and grants an extra +10 Firemaking XP per log — a large bonus when a normal log is only worth 40, effectively boosting early XP by a quarter. The cheapest option is usually the red firelighter, and buying a few hundred off the Grand Exchange to blast through the first thirty-odd levels is well worth the small cost. These coloured logs (logs with a firelighter applied) are guaranteed lights, which is why the wiki rates them as the fastest experience for levels 1–30. Check current prices in our GE Price Tracker before you stock up, since firelighter prices drift with demand.

The Wintertodt is the one method that needs more equipment, because there you chop bruma roots rather than burn shop-bought logs. You bring an axe for chopping: importantly, if your Woodcutting is 50 or above, a humble steel axe chops bruma roots at exactly the same rate as a rune axe, so there is no reason to risk anything more valuable; if your Woodcutting is under 50, simply use the best axe you can wield. You also want food and four pieces of warm clothing, both covered in the Wintertodt section below. Two notable rewards double as light sources for dark content elsewhere in the game: the Bruma torch, earned at the Wintertodt, and the Firemaking cape at 99 — handy in places like dungeons where an unlit torch would leave you blind.

The Firemaking experience-boost set is the Pyromancer outfit, and it grants +2.5% Firemaking XP when all four pieces are worn together — hood, garb, robe and boots. Like every skilling outfit, the bonus is a free, permanent multiplier, and because it stacks across the entire journey to 99 it quietly saves you a meaningful number of logs and a chunk of gold. The boost applies to ordinary log-burning everywhere, not just at the place you earned it, so once you have the set you should wear it for every kind of Firemaking from then on.

The catch is where it comes from: the Pyromancer pieces drop only from the Wintertodt, awarded through the Reward Cart after each subdue. That creates a pleasant self-reinforcing loop — train at the Wintertodt, earn the outfit piece by piece, and the completed outfit then speeds up the rest of your Firemaking forever. Duplicate pieces are not wasted either: you can exchange spare pieces with Ignisia for an extra supply crate or for burnt pages, so even unlucky rolls turn into more loot.

One common point of confusion is the matching warm gloves. They look like part of the set, but they do not count toward the 2.5% bonus — they only count as a piece of warm clothing inside the Wintertodt, helping with the cold. Another subtlety: the outfit boosts log-burning but does not boost the XP from cremating shade remains on a funeral pyre, because the game treats that minigame reward as a “reward” rather than “training,” and XP multipliers generally don't apply to reward gains. If you want to see how the Pyromancer set compares against every other XP outfit in the game, our Skilling Outfits guide lays them out side by side.

The first thirty levels take only a few minutes of real time, so don't overthink them. From level 1 you burn normal logs for 40 XP each — you only need around 61 logs to reach level 15, so most players simply burn the logs they already cut while leveling Woodcutting and never buy any at all. From level 15 switch to oak logs (60 XP), which carry you to 30 in roughly 183 logs, and from level 30 you can move on to willow logs (90 XP). None of this is expensive; willow logs in particular are nearly free on the Grand Exchange, and the total cost of these levels is a rounding error against the magic and redwood logs you'll burn later.

If you want the early grind to genuinely fly, apply a red firelighter to your logs as described in the gear section. The guaranteed first-try light removes the small chance of a failed attempt at low levels, and the +10 XP per log is proportionally huge down here — on a 40-XP normal log that is a 25% bump. The combination makes coloured logs the fastest 1–30 experience in the skill.

Location matters less at this stage than later, but a clean setup helps. A good low-level spot is the Varrock west bank: teleport to Varrock, pull a full inventory of logs, and burn a line of fires from the central fountain over to the bank, then repeat. The Grand Exchange works the same way, with the bonus that it is exactly where you'll want to be for the fast route from 45 onward, so settling in there early means you never have to relearn the rhythm. By the time you hit 30 you've spent only a handful of minutes and a few thousand coins, and the real decisions — speed versus AFK versus Wintertodt — begin.

The fastest experience in Firemaking comes from burning the highest-tier log you can afford, lit tick-perfectly. The progression in our method table is the standard fast route: switch up a tier as soon as you unlock it. Maple logs at 45 give around 200k XP/hr, yew logs at 60 around 300k XP/hr, magic logs at 75 around 380k XP/hr, and redwood logs at 90 around 430k XP/hr — the top sustained rate in the skill. Each step up the table is faster experience but a steeper gold cost per hour, with magic and redwood being the big-ticket logs. To put the back half in perspective, finishing the grind takes on the order of 13,600 magic logs across 75–90 and roughly 22,000 redwood logs across 90–99, which is why burning the full route to 99 runs well into the tens of millions of gold. Always plan your budget against your current level in our Firemaking calculator before committing.

The technique is what unlocks those rates, and it is more about footwork than anything else. At the eastern part of the Grand Exchange the bank sits one tile from open ground, so you can light a log, step onto a new tile, light the next, and keep a fire going every 4 ticks without ever stopping on an occupied square. Done cleanly this lets you burn logs in almost any formation rather than a single straight line. Keep noted logs in your inventory and un-note a fresh batch on a banker (standing a couple of tiles back) to keep your downtime to a minimum — that detail alone is the difference between a sloppy rate and the top of the band. An easier, slightly slower alternative is to burn a straight line of fires from east to west: the classic Varrock setup using Varrock Teleport and the west bank, or Camelot Teleport banking at Seers' Village. Both are far more relaxed if tick-perfect clicking isn't for you, at a modest XP cost.

One worthwhile money-saver sits near the end: at level 92 you can finish the grind on rosewood logs instead of redwoods, which saves several million gold at the cost of roughly four extra hours of play. It is the right call if you are gold-constrained rather than time-constrained. And if you would rather not click constantly for hours, jump to the campfire section below — you trade a large slice of XP per hour for the freedom to look away from the screen entirely, which for many players is the better deal over a long grind.

There is a faster but fiddly way to handle the very first levels: creating pyre logs. By using sacred oil on a log you turn it into a pyre log — the special logs used to cremate shade remains in the Shades of Mort'ton minigame — and crucially you can make a pyre log of any tier from level 1, even logs you could never normally burn at your level. With 1-tick manipulation, which means holding down spacebar (or the “1” key) and rapidly applying oil, this becomes the fastest Firemaking experience available up to level 30, at roughly 92k XP/hr using redwood or rosewood pyre logs. That comfortably beats burning ordinary logs over the same level range.

The requirements are the reason most players skip it. You must have completed the Shades of Mort'ton quest to obtain sacred oil in the first place, and the method demands both tidy banking and a steady 1-tick rhythm that takes practice to hold. Without the tick manipulation the rate collapses to under 30k XP/hr, at which point it is really a money-making method rather than a training one. It is included here because it is technically the fastest possible opening to a 99, and because the pyre logs you produce hold genuine resale value to players running the Shades of Mort'ton minigame.

If you do try it, stick to redwood or rosewood pyre logs: they give the highest experience per log and, more importantly, they have reliable demand from shade-runners, whereas the cheaper pyre-log tiers can be slow or difficult to sell on the Grand Exchange. For everyone not chasing maximum efficiency on a fresh account, burning cheap normal, oak and willow logs to 30 is far simpler and barely slower in absolute time, since those levels pass in minutes either way.

If you would rather not babysit the screen, burn logs on a Forester's campfire — often just called a bonfire. You light one log on the ground, then use a second log on that fire to build the campfire, and from then on you add logs to the existing fire rather than lighting fresh ones each time. The trade-off is baked into the design: a campfire gives the same experience per log as normal burning, but you process far fewer logs per hour, so the XP/hr is much lower while the method is dramatically more AFK. You are paying for your attention back, not for cheaper levels.

How AFK it is depends on how you tend it. Left to run completely on its own, a campfire chews through around 665 logs an hour automatically, which is the truly hands-off rate. If you actively tend it by holding spacebar to keep feeding logs, that climbs to roughly 975 logs an hour. The mechanic underneath is that the first log added to a fresh campfire takes 6 ticks to burn and each following log takes 9 ticks, which is why it is slower than the 4-tick cadence of lighting fires yourself. Either way, you can load an inventory and look away for a long stretch — an inventory of logs buys you well over a minute of doing nothing, so it pairs perfectly with work, watching something, or training a second account.

The only requirement for a good campfire spot is being able to light a fire right next to a bank. The popular choices are the Grand Exchange, the Rogues' Den, and the Crafting Guild, all of which let you restock without a walk. The Forestry update is what introduced the Forester's campfire as a first-class AFK training option, and it is available to free players as well, so even F2P accounts can train Firemaking with near-zero attention if they prefer. Choose your log tier exactly as you would for active burning — the same per-log XP applies — and simply accept the lower hourly rate as the price of being able to walk away.

The Wintertodt is Firemaking's skilling boss and the only profitable way to train the skill. Its sole requirement is level 50 Firemaking — nothing else — which makes it an early-game staple for ironmen, because it showers you with supplies (seeds, ores, herbs, gems, fish and more) while you level. Rates in our method table scale with your Firemaking level: about 161k XP/hr at level 50, around 226k at level 70, and up to 320k XP/hr near 99. That is slower than burning the best logs actively, but it costs nothing, it pays you back in loot, and the effort level is low — an appealing combination if you don't want to click tick-perfectly for hours.

The loop is straightforward, and you are not fighting a boss in the usual sense — you are subduing it by keeping braziers burning. Light a brazier, chop bruma roots from the trees inside the arena, then burn those roots in the brazier; repair and relight it whenever the Wintertodt damages or douses it. Instead of a normal health bar you have a warmth meter in the top-left corner, and if it ever drops to 0% you are instantly knocked out and lose the round's progress, so managing warmth is the whole survival game. You restore warmth by eating any food that heals at least 4 hitpoints — a bite of cake restores 35% — or by drinking a dose of rejuvenation potion, which you can brew inside the activity itself for 30% warmth a dose without ever banking. You also naturally regenerate a little warmth over time, with each piece of warm clothing speeding that up. The 2024 rework changed the old system so that your Hitpoints level no longer affects the damage you take; everything now runs through that warmth meter.

The Wintertodt has a handful of attacks to react to. Its constant cold chips at your warmth, scaling with how many braziers are lit and the boss's remaining health. It will periodically break a brazier, and if you don't step one tile away before repairing it you take a chunk of cold damage. It throws a snowfall attack into a 3x3 area that you simply walk out of, and there are safe tiles where the snow can't reach you. It douses braziers, which deals no direct damage but lets the cold hit harder until you relight them. And it damages the pyromancer, who must be healed once downed before that brazier can be relit. None of these are dangerous once you know them, but ignoring them drains warmth fast.

To prepare, bring an axe, plenty of food, and four pieces of warm clothing to cut the cold damage — the free clue hunter outfit qualifies on any account, holiday-event clothing works too, and each warm piece also speeds warmth regeneration. Inside the starting area you can grab a free tinderbox, knife and hammer. A frequent question is whether to fletch the bruma roots into kindling: fletching earns more points but significantly lowers your XP rate, so the rule of thumb is to only fletch if you would otherwise fall short of the 500-point threshold for the end-of-round experience bonus — otherwise burn the roots raw. Play on the fast official worlds for roughly 4-minute games, and you can even squeeze extra XP into the downtime between rounds by burning logs, fletching darts, or making jugs of wine. Beyond Firemaking, the Wintertodt grants passive Woodcutting XP from chopping roots, plus Fletching, Construction (with a player-owned house) and Herblore (after Druidic Ritual) experience — and it is the only source of the Phoenix skilling pet.

Be honest with yourself before chasing gold here: ordinary log-burning loses money. You buy the logs and the experience comes free, so every burning method in the table has a negative gp/xp — you train Firemaking despite the cost, not for profit. Burning the full route to 99 on the best logs costs tens of millions of gold, and the campfire route costs the same in logs since the per-log price is identical. There are really only two ways the skill puts gold back in your pocket.

The first and main one is the Wintertodt. Each subdue rewards a supply crate whose contents scale with your other skills — a high Farming level pulls better seeds, high Mining pulls better ores, high Fishing pulls better fish, and so on — so the same activity is worth more to a developed account. Crates can also roll valuable uniques, including the dragon axe, the dragon harpoon, pages for the tome of fire, and the Phoenix pet. Across a 50-to-99 grind those supplies add up to real gold and an enormous pile of free ironman materials, which is exactly why it is the recommended members method for anyone who isn't purely rushing the level.

The second is creating pyre logs for resale. Made with sacred oil after the Shades of Mort'ton quest, redwood and rosewood pyre logs have steady demand from players running that minigame, so producing them can turn a profit even though it is slow without tick manipulation. Outside of those two avenues, treat Firemaking as a cost to be minimized rather than a money-maker — pick the cheapest log tier that still gives reasonable XP, skip the priciest logs if you're on a budget, and always check live prices in our GE Price Tracker before committing a long session to one tier, since log prices shift over time.

Firemaking is fully trainable in free-to-play, and the route is the simple log ladder: normal logs to 15, oak to 30, willow to 45, maple to 60, then yew logs from 60 all the way to 99. Yews are the free-to-play ceiling — magic and redwood logs both require members to burn — so the entire back half of an F2P 99 is one long stretch of yew burning. Going 1 to 99 this way is roughly 44 hours of active play, switching to each newly unlocked log type as soon as you can.

The techniques are identical to members. Burn at the eastern Grand Exchange, stepping between tiles for the fastest tick-perfect rate, or burn a relaxed straight line at Varrock if you'd rather not click on a strict rhythm. Forestry's Forester's campfire is available to free players too, giving F2P an AFK option at the same experience per log — slower per hour, but you can look away, which is a genuine quality-of-life win on a long yew grind.

What free players miss out on is everything members-only, and it's worth being clear about the gap. There is no Wintertodt, so F2P gets no profit, no supply loot, and no Pyromancer outfit (meaning no +2.5% boost). Pyre logs are off the table since Shades of Mort'ton is a members quest, and the higher magic and redwood logs can't be burned at all. None of that stops a free player from reaching 99 — the yew route gets there cleanly — but if you plan to push past yews or want the profitable, more relaxed Wintertodt path, a membership is effectively required.

A handful of quests hand out Firemaking experience, and stacking them gives low-level accounts a useful head start. The Giant Dwarf gives 1,500 XP and needs 16 Firemaking; Enlightened Journey gives 4,000 and needs 20; Heroes' Quest gives 1,575 (no Firemaking requirement, but stiff other stats); Enakhra's Lament gives 7,000 and needs 45; and the big one, Making Friends with My Arm, gives a hefty 40,000 Firemaking XP and needs 66. Completing all of them is worth around 54,000 XP — not enough to skip much of the grind, but a meaningful jump for a fresh account and a natural early goal on the way to the level requirements those quests demand.

The unlock that opens the most doors is Shades of Mort'ton, the quest that enables sacred oil and therefore the pyre-log methods — both the fastest 1–30 opening and a small money-maker. The Pyromancer outfit from the Wintertodt is the key permanent unlock for the +2.5% experience boost, and the same boss also yields the Bruma torch (a light source) and the tome of fire, a magic book that boosts fire spells — useful well outside of Firemaking itself.

There is no single giant lump of quest Firemaking XP that reshapes the whole route the way some skills have, so the path to 99 stays almost entirely method-based: pick your route, pick your logs, and grind. The quests are best treated as an early bonus and as gateways to the methods and rewards above rather than as a shortcut to the cape.

A few habits make the grind noticeably smoother. Use a firelighter for the low levels — the guaranteed first-try light plus +10 XP per log is pure free speed when logs are cheap. At the eastern Grand Exchange, take the time to learn the step-between-tiles rhythm and keep noted logs to un-note at the banker; that single trick is the difference between a casual rate and the top of the table. If constant clicking starts to wear on you, switch to a campfire for an AFK stretch — identical XP per log, far less attention — and come back to active burning only when you can fully focus. Many players alternate: tryhard burning when they can concentrate, campfire when they can't.

For members, the Wintertodt is worth a visit even if you aren't going for 99, purely for the supplies and the Pyromancer outfit that speeds up everything afterward. Inside it, remember not to fletch bruma roots unless you'd otherwise miss the 500-point bonus, watch your warmth meter rather than your hitpoints, and step away from braziers before repairing them. Brewing rejuvenation potions on the spot saves banking trips and keeps your warmth topped up cheaply.

Finally, the prizes for grinding it out. The Phoenix skilling pet drops only from the Wintertodt, so dedicated boss players have by far the best shot at it — another reason ironmen favour that route. And at level 99, the Firemaking cape can be bought from Ignatius Vulcan just south of Seers' Village for 99,000 coins; it acts as an inextinguishable light source and counts as warm clothing at the Wintertodt, making it a genuinely useful cape rather than a pure flex. Plan your remaining XP and exact log costs any time in our Firemaking calculator, and explore the rest of our tools and skill guides from the guides hub.