OSRS 1–99 Construction Guide

Construction is trained by building furniture inside your player-owned house while it is in building mode. You buy a starter house for just 1,000 coins from any estate agent — the one in Falador is the easiest to reach, and there are others in Varrock, Rimmington, Ardougne and more. Your house starts as a single empty room with a garden, and you expand it by adding rooms (each costs coins) and then building furniture in the fixed hotspots inside those rooms.

Every piece of furniture needs a hammer and a saw in your inventory, plus a set number of planks — and, for the cheapest early items, some nails. Building grants a fixed chunk of experience the instant the piece appears. The catch that defines the entire skill is this: building consumes the planks, but removing the piece gives you nothing back — the materials are simply gone. So the standard training loop is build → remove → build the same piece again, deliberately burning through planks purely for the XP they carry.

Because the experience comes almost entirely from planks, the number that actually matters is experience per plank. A regular plank is worth roughly 29 XP, an oak plank about 60, a teak plank 90, and a mahogany plank around 140. Higher-tier planks cost far more on the Grand Exchange but pack much more XP each, which is why your plank choice decides both your speed and your total bill. A method that uses more planks per build, or a more expensive plank, will train faster — for more gold.

Two more quirks are worth knowing up front. First, most furniture can be built above your level using temporary boosts (covered in its own section below), so you rarely have to wait long for the next unlock. Second, because you are constantly building and instantly removing the same item, you keep your planks in your bank and have them ferried to you in batches — either by walking to an assistant who un-notes them, or, better, by a hired servant. Solving that ‘how do I keep planks flowing’ problem is the real efficiency game in Construction, and it is why the butler is such an important upgrade.

Before you commit to the gold sink, it is worth knowing what you actually get for it — because a leveled house is one of the biggest quality-of-life upgrades in the game, and the perks are what make the spend feel worthwhile. The headline rewards you are working toward:

• Teleports — a portal nexus and jewellery boxes turn your house into a personal fast-travel hub, letting you hop to dozens of destinations from one spot. A spirit tree and a fairy ring extend that network even further, and the mounted xeric’s talisman or digsite pendant add more.
• Altars — a gilded or marble altar with lit incense burners hugely boosts the Prayer XP you get from offering bones, making your house the best place in the game to train Prayer. The occult altar lets you switch your spellbook on command without questing back and forth.
• Restoration — an ornate rejuvenation pool fully heals you, restores run energy, cures poison and venom, and recharges your special attack every time you dip in. For anyone preparing for bossing or raids, this single feature is transformational.
• Utility — combat dummies for testing damage, a STASH network for clue scrolls, a costume room to store hundreds of holiday and clue items, and a workshop for tool storage.

Most players set level 84 as their first serious target: it is the level that, combined with a small temporary boost, lets you build the very best maxed-house furniture. Many stop there and never push for 99 because 84 already unlocks essentially everything useful. Those who do go all the way are rewarded at 99 with the Construction skillcape, whose teleport gives unlimited trips to your house and to each of its portal destinations — widely considered one of the best cape perks in the game. In the Sailing era, higher Construction also boosts your shipbuilding capability, so the skill has become more relevant than ever.

Construction’s toolkit is short, but two of the items are absolutely mandatory: you cannot build anything without a hammer and a saw sitting in your inventory. The basic versions cost a handful of coins from any sawmill operator or general store, so there is no reason to ever be without them — but new players are caught out by this constantly, so it is the first thing to check if a build option is greyed out.

Beyond the basics, a few upgrades make training noticeably smoother. The Crystal saw is the big one: obtained from the The Eyes of Glouphrie quest (by singing a crystal saw seed at a singing bowl), it sits in your inventory and lets you build furniture up to 3 levels above your current Construction level. That invisible boost is invaluable for reaching method unlocks early, and it stacks with other boosts. Note its limits: the saw does not help you build new rooms, plant garden flowers, or unlock higher Mahogany Homes contracts — only furniture that requires both a saw and a hammer. It also has a charge limit (28 charges, or 56 with the medium Western Provinces Diary), with one charge spent each time it actually boosts a build.

The Imcando hammer (from the Camdozaal content) and Amy’s saw (a Mahogany Homes reward) can each be worn in an equipment slot rather than taking an inventory space. On a Mahogany Homes run that frees up room to carry one extra plank per trip, a small but real efficiency gain. None of these tools change your raw XP rate, but together they shave time off the grind and let you punch above your level when you need to.

The Carpenter’s outfit is Construction’s XP-boost set, and grabbing it early is one of the highest-value decisions you can make in the skill. The full four-piece set grants +2.5% Construction XP — a free, permanent boost applied on top of everything you build for the rest of the grind to 99. Over tens of millions of experience, that 2.5% saves you a meaningful number of planks and a meaningful number of coins, so the set pays for itself many times over.

The individual pieces give partial bonuses — 0.4% for the helmet, 0.8% for the shirt, 0.6% for the trousers and 0.2% for the boots — but the headline 2.5% only applies when all four are worn together, so there is little point stopping short of the full set. You buy the pieces from Amy at Mahogany Homes using Carpenter points, the currency you earn simply by completing contracts: 400 points for the helmet, 800 for the shirt, 600 for the trousers, and 200 for the boots, for 2,000 points total.

The elegant part is the order of operations. Because Mahogany Homes is also a perfectly good low-level training method, most players do their early levels there, naturally accumulating Carpenter points, buy the outfit as soon as they can afford it, and then wear it for every other method afterward. You finish your cheap early training already holding a permanent boost. The pieces can be stored in a magic wardrobe in your POH so they never clutter your bank. The outfit is covered alongside every other skilling XP set in our Skilling Outfits guide.

Construction has unusually generous temporary level boosts, and crucially they stack — which is how players build furniture (and even complete maxed houses) several levels before they would normally qualify. Unlike most skills where a boost just shaves a level or two off a single requirement, in Construction these boosts are part of standard practice for reaching the top-end items.

The reliable, repeatable combination is the Crystal saw (a steady, on-demand +3) plus a trimmed cup of tea (an extra +2), giving a dependable +6 boost whenever you want it. Because both are consistent, this is what most players use day to day — for example, to build a level-90 portal nexus at level 84 Construction. The trimmed cup of tea is a small reward item, and the Crystal saw boost is free to re-apply since it is just an inventory item.

For the absolute ceiling there is the spicy stew, unlocked by freeing Evil Dave during Recipe for Disaster. An orange-spiced stew gives a random boost anywhere from −5 to +5 — meaning it can actually lower your level and waste the stew — but on a maximum roll, stacked with the Crystal saw, you reach a temporary +8, the highest possible. Because the stew is unpredictable, players generally rely on the +6 saw-and-tea combo for any building they do repeatedly and only gamble on stews for that last stubborn level or two on a one-off maxed-house upgrade. Stock several stews when you do, since you will likely burn a few before a good roll lands. Remember the Crystal saw boost cannot help build new rooms — only the furniture inside them — so plan your room layout at your true level first.

The early levels of Construction fly by, especially compared to the long grind that follows. There are a couple of ways to get rolling. On a fresh members account, the Daddy’s Home miniquest is a quick, gentle introduction: it takes you straight from level 1 to 8, hands you a player-owned house for free, and walks you through the basics of Mahogany Homes. It is genuinely worth doing for the free house and the head start, though it is not strictly required — you can simply buy a starter house for 1,000 coins and begin building.

From there, the fastest low-level path is building cheap furniture in your own house. Start in a Parlour with crude wooden chairs and similar pieces made from regular planks and nails — at the very bottom levels this gives somewhere around 50k XP/hour, which is excellent for how trivially cheap the materials are. A word on nails: they come in tiers from bronze up through iron, steel, mithril, adamant and rune, and the game always consumes your weakest nails first. Cheaper nails also have a chance to bend and be wasted on each build, but for crude furniture that hardly matters — plain steel nails are the sensible, cheap default, and you should never pay for high-tier nails just to train.

As soon as you can, graduate to oak furniture — oak chairs, oak beds, and oak tables. These use only oak planks with no nails at all, which makes them cleaner and more predictable, and they carry you efficiently up to level 33. Throughout this early phase you restock planks by un-noting them at Phials, the assistant standing just outside the Rimmington house portal — hand him noted planks and a few coins and he returns them un-noted, ready to build with. One firm piece of advice for all of these player-owned-house methods: do them on a desktop client such as RuneLite rather than mobile. The rapid build-and-remove clicking, combined with the inventory management, is genuinely difficult to keep up on a touchscreen, and RuneLite’s plugins (covered later) make the whole thing far smoother.

The single biggest speed upgrade for traditional house training is hiring a servant. A servant solves the core efficiency problem of the skill — keeping a steady supply of planks flowing — by fetching and un-noting them from your bank and bringing them to you while you keep building, so you never have to stop and walk to Phials. There are five servants of escalating quality, but in practice only two are worth your attention.

The human butler becomes available at level 40 Construction. You hire him from the Servants’ Guild in the north-east corner of East Ardougne, and before he will work for you, your house must contain two bedrooms, each with a bed — a small one-time setup. The human butler is cheap to keep and perfectly adequate for the mid-tier methods, where the pace is relaxed enough that his slower trips do not hold you back. For a budget player, he is all you need.

The demon butler, named Alathazdrar, unlocks at level 50 and is the real workhorse for fast training. He carries 26 planks per trip and returns in about 7 seconds, fast enough to feed even the most plank-hungry methods without you ever running dry. The downside is cost: his wage is 10,000 coins every eight trips, which adds up substantially over a long session, so he is only worth hiring for the fast mahogany routes where his speed actually translates into XP.

Both butlers demand payment every eight bank trips, interrupting you with a dialogue if you do not have coins ready. The fix arrives at level 58, when you can build a servant’s moneybag in your house: load it with coins and it auto-deducts each wage, so payment prompts never break your clicking rhythm again. It is a must-have for any high-intensity training. One more money-saving trick: since the butler charges per eight trips regardless of how many planks he carries each time, always request the maximum planks per trip — bigger loads mean fewer paid trips for the same number of planks delivered, lowering your cost over the whole grind. Note that until you have a butler, slow servants below the human butler are actually slower than just un-noting at Phials yourself, so do not bother with them.

At level 33 you unlock oak larders, the dependable workhorse method that carries the majority of players from 33 all the way to their next major unlock — which, depending on budget, might be anywhere from level 50 to 74. Each larder is built in the larder hotspot of a Kitchen room and consumes 8 oak planks for 480 experience. Our method table rates this at around 430,000 XP/hour with efficient, focused clicking, which is outstanding value given how cheap oak planks are relative to teak or mahogany.

The reason oak larders endure is exactly that price-to-speed balance. They are not the fastest method in the game, but they are cheap, and 430k/hour is brisk enough that many budget-conscious players simply ride them well past level 50 — even past 74 — rather than paying the steep premium for mahogany. If your priority is keeping the bill down, oak larders are very hard to beat. The eight-plank build also pairs naturally with a butler’s delivery cadence, making the loop comfortable to sustain.

To run them efficiently, set up the Menu Entry Swapper plugin so you can left-click to build and remove instead of right-clicking through a menu — this change was explicitly approved by Jagex and is standard practice. Hold shift and right-click a hotspot once to set its left-click action, then just spam build and remove while a butler (or Phials) keeps your planks topped up. There is also a community plugin called Construction QOL that remaps build and remove onto a single hotkey, smoothing the rhythm further. For ironmen, the catch is supply: you cannot buy oak planks, so you must make them from oak logs at a sawmill (or with Plank Make), and feeding the method becomes the real bottleneck rather than the building itself.

Once you can afford the better planks, the fast meta opens up. These are the traditional player-owned-house methods, in the order you unlock them — each is a step up in speed (and usually cost):

• Level 50 — Mounted mythical capes (requires the Dragon Slayer II quest for the mythical cape). Built in a Quest Hall, each one uses 3 teak planks plus one mythical cape, and crucially gives a boosted 123 XP per teak plank instead of the usual 90. You get the cape back every time you remove the mount, so the cape is a one-time cost and the planks are the only ongoing spend — making this the cheapest of the fast methods at roughly 430k XP/hour. Pair it with a human butler (the demon butler is actually too fast to be worth it here) and request the maximum planks per trip to save coins.
• Level 52 — Mahogany tables. Built in a Dining Room from 6 mahogany planks each, these reach ~800,000 XP/hour in our table — the fastest single-piece method available, and the go-to from 52 until 77 for players chasing speed. The cost is the catch: mahogany planks are expensive, so this is where the bill climbs fastest.
• Level 74 — Oak doors. A welcome cheaper option at ~520,000 XP/hour, built from 10 oak planks in the doorway of a Dungeon room. The XP-per-coin here is superb because oak planks are cheap, though the 10-plank appetite makes a demon butler near-essential to avoid waiting around between builds. A great choice if you want fast levels without the mahogany price tag.
• Level 77 — Gnome benches (mahogany). The fastest method in the entire skill at ~1.1 million XP/hour. Built in a Superior Garden, two benches sit directly side by side so you can remove one while building the other, eliminating the dead time between actions. They use the same 6 mahogany planks and same XP as mahogany tables, but the back-to-back layout pushes the rate over a million. The trade-off is brutal intensity: it demands perfectly-timed, constant clicking and is genuinely hard to sustain flawlessly for a full hour.

For a middle ground at the same level, teak garden benches (level 77) run a little faster than oak doors at a moderate teak-plank cost — a sensible pick if mahogany is too pricey but you want more speed than oak. Whichever you choose at the top end, the efficiency trick is to match your demon butler’s plank request to your pace: request a large batch (commonly 24 planks for gnome benches) timed so he returns at the exact moment you run dry, keeping you building continuously. Plan the full plank count and cost for any of these on our Construction calculator before you start buying.

Mahogany Homes is a Construction minigame and the best choice if you would rather save gold and train at a calmer pace. Instead of the relentless build-and-remove spam of POH training, you travel to NPC houses scattered around the map and repair or replace their damaged furniture using planks and the occasional steel bar. Notably, nails are not required for contracts. Each contract you finish rewards Construction XP, a cup of tea that fully restores run energy, and Carpenter points toward the outfit. It is dramatically cheaper per XP than POH methods and far less click-intensive, at the cost of lower hourly rates.

There are four contract tiers, each gated by Construction level and using a different plank type: Beginner (level 1, regular planks), Novice (level 20, oak planks), Adept (level 50, teak planks) and Expert (level 70, mahogany planks). Our method table rates Beginner contracts at roughly 50k XP/hour, Adept at ~200k, and Expert at ~280k. For most players the Adept tier is the sweet spot — it offers a strong blend of speed and low cost, and plenty of players keep grinding Adept contracts even past level 70 specifically to avoid the high price of mahogany planks that Expert demands.

To start, speak to Amy in Falador, just south of the park, and choose a contract tier you qualify for. She assigns you a randomly-located house; you travel there, repair every flagged item, then speak to the homeowner to bank the reward. After your very first contract with Amy, you can pick up future contracts from other contractors — Marlo in Varrock, Ellie in East Ardougne, and Angelo in Hosidius — or, far faster, use the Lunar spellbook’s NPC Contact spell to ring Amy for a new contract from anywhere, skipping all the running.

Two upgrades make Mahogany Homes much smoother. The plank sack, a reward from the minigame, stores up to 28 planks so you make far fewer bank trips. And a set of Graceful dramatically cuts run-energy drain as you dash between houses. Because you also bank Carpenter points the whole time, every contract is doubly productive — you are earning XP and working toward the permanent 2.5% Carpenter’s outfit boost. For an ironman, Mahogany Homes is frequently the most sensible main method precisely because it squeezes the most experience out of every plank you have to make yourself.

On an ironman account, Construction cannot be bought in one sitting the way a main can simply buy 50 million coins of mahogany planks and grind it out. Every plank must be gathered and processed yourself, so the real grind is plank supply, not the building. This completely changes the strategy: the methods that are ‘fastest’ for a main stop being fastest for an ironman once you count the many hours spent sourcing the planks that feed them. Raw XP/hour at the workbench is almost irrelevant when each hour of building costs you several hours of gathering.

The standard ironman pipeline is to acquire teak and mahogany logs, then convert them to planks. The best passive source by far is Managing Miscellania — the kingdom minigame can be set to harvest hardwood logs while you do other things, slowly stockpiling the raw material with minimal effort. Once you have the logs, you turn them into planks either at a sawmill or by asking a butler in your house to make them (the butler conveniently auto-banks the finished planks, which is the quickest conversion loop). The Varlamore sawmill is a recent addition that sits right next to a bank for fast conversions, and salvaging can yield sawmill vouchers that cut the conversion cost.

Several tools ease the burden. The plank sack (28 planks) and the log bag reduce banking trips when gathering and building. Mages who have level 86 Magic and have completed Dream Mentor can cast the Plank Make spell to convert one log into a plank at 70% of the sawmill’s coin cost — a worthwhile saving if you are making planks in bulk. Given that plank supply is the whole bottleneck, most ironmen lean heavily on Mahogany Homes for its superior XP-per-plank rather than chasing raw XP/hour. For the cheapest early levels, you can pick up free regular planks behind the Barbarian Assault minigame on the ground, and Tempoross is another decent plank source — both let you knock out the first 30-odd levels without spending a single self-made plank.

The payoff for all those burned planks is a fully kitted-out house, and it is worth planning your endgame furniture so you do not over-level or over-spend. The benchmark target is level 84 Construction: combined with the reliable +6 temporary boost (Crystal saw plus a trimmed cup of tea), level 84 is enough to build essentially every top-tier item, including the level-90-plus furniture. This is exactly why so many players treat 84 — not 99 — as the real goal of the skill.

Beyond planks, the best upgrades demand special materials that you should stockpile in advance, because buying them all at once gets expensive and some are not always in deep supply on the Grand Exchange:

• Bolt of cloth and limestone bricks — common ingredients in many mid- and high-level pieces, including curtains, rugs and stone fixtures.
• Gold leaf — used in gilded altars, gilded decorations and several prestige items; not cheap, so buy only what your build list needs.
• Marble blocks — the backbone of marble altars, the surround for the ornate rejuvenation pool, and marble statues. A serious chunk of any maxing budget.
• Magic stones — the single most expensive material in the skill, required for the occult altar, the portal nexus, and the ornate jewellery box. These dominate the cost of a maxed house, so prioritise the magic-stone items you will genuinely use.

The practical advice is to prioritise the features you will touch daily — a portal nexus and jewellery box for teleports, an ornate pool for restoration before bossing, and a good altar for Prayer training — and leave the purely cosmetic or rarely-used upgrades for later. Price up your full materials list in our GE Price Tracker before committing to a big maxing shop, since marble and magic-stone prices in particular can swing the total significantly.

A few honest closing notes on what this skill actually costs and how to train it sanely. First and most important: Construction makes no money. There is no profitable method, no sellable product — every plank you build is gone, so you should budget for the skill like a purchase rather than expecting any return. As a rough guide to 99: the cheaper oak-tier and mounted-mythical-cape routes run in the region of 100 million coins, the fast mahogany methods (tables and gnome benches) closer to 200 million, and Mahogany Homes is the bargain at a small fraction of that — though it trades that saving for a great many more hours. This is precisely why Construction is the classic skill that players choose to fund with bought gold: the bottleneck is gold, not game knowledge, so adding gold directly buys levels.

Whatever route you take, decide your priority before you start — minimum cost, minimum time, or somewhere in between — and plan the plank count and coin total on our Construction calculator so there are no surprises halfway through.

Practical tips to make the grind smoother:

• Install the Menu Entry Swapper plugin to left-click build and remove, and consider the Construction QOL plugin to remap both onto a single key.
• Train on a desktop client, not mobile — the timing is too tight for a touchscreen on the fast methods.
• Grab the Carpenter’s outfit early via Mahogany Homes for its free, permanent 2.5% boost.
• Build a servant’s moneybag at level 58 so wage prompts never interrupt your rhythm.
• Use cheap steel nails for the very early crude-furniture phase and never waste coins on rune or adamant nails for training.

Finally, a fair warning to anyone expecting a pet: there is no Construction skilling pet. The reward waiting at the finish line is the Construction cape — and its house-teleport perk genuinely earns its reputation as one of the best in the game, granting unlimited trips home and to every portal destination you have built. For more skill walkthroughs, head to our full OSRS guides hub.