OSRS 1–99 Herblore Guide

Before you can train Herblore at all you must complete the Druidic Ritual quest, started at the stone circle north of Taverley. It needs raw bear, rat, beef and chicken meat, takes well under ten minutes, and awards 250 Herblore experience — enough to put you at level 3. Until that quest is done your Herblore level is locked at 1 and the herb and potion menus do nothing. This is a hard gate: there is no “level 1 grind” you can do beforehand, so the quest is genuinely step zero of the skill.

With the quest finished, the skill has three building blocks. First you clean a grimy herb — grimy ranarr weed becomes clean ranarr weed — which gives a tiny amount of XP and is more often done for profit than for training. Second you combine that clean herb with a vial of water to create an unfinished potion, for example a ranarr potion (unf). Crucially, this herb-into-vial step gives zero experience. Third, you add a secondary ingredient to the unfinished potion to finish it, and that is where all the experience comes from. A Prayer potion, for instance, is a ranarr potion (unf) with snape grass added, and finishing it is worth 87.5 Herblore XP.

Because the unfinished step is free XP-wise, almost everyone buys unfinished potions ready-made (or pre-makes a stockpile) and trains purely on the finishing step. The standard workflow is to set your bank's withdraw-X to 14, pull 14 unfinished potions and 14 secondaries, use one on the other, and let the whole inventory process on its own. The higher the level you can reach, the more experience each potion gives, so Herblore is essentially a ladder: you unlock a better potion, switch your supply over to it, and keep climbing. There are no failures, no random chance, and no XP at all from gathering or from the herb-to-vial step — which is exactly why Herblore is one of the quickest skills to 99 in raw hours but one of the hungriest for materials and gold. Everything you assert about a potion — its level, its XP per make, its ingredients — can be cross-checked in our Herblore calculator before you buy a single herb.

Herblore is one of the most useful support skills in the game because it feeds your combat directly. Prayer potions and super restores keep your prayer points up at every boss; Saradomin brews are the staple food at high-end PvM, healing while raising your Defence; super combat potions are the standard one-sip melee boost; and stamina potions keep your run energy topped up everywhere from agility courses to slayer travel. A trained Herblore account makes all of these itself instead of buying them, which saves an enormous amount of gold over a main's lifetime — a single trip to Vorkath or the Chambers of Xeric can burn through a dozen potions, and those costs compound across thousands of kills.

At the top end Herblore is close to mandatory. The Chambers of Xeric raid rewards a high Herblore level because better potions mean longer, safer raids — you want at least level 78 for the useful potions, and 90 genuinely helps with the best ones such as super combats and overloads' supporting brews. Recent additions have raised the floor too: surge potions (level 81) are now an expected boost for both PvM and PvP, and your Herblore level even affects how many fight attempts you can prepare for against newer bosses. None of this means a main must rush Herblore early — it is not a requirement for most content the way a combat level is — but it pays for itself the moment you start doing serious bossing.

For ironmen the calculus is different and the skill is genuinely game-changing. Because Prayer potions, super restores, Saradomin brews and anti-venoms cannot be bought, an ironman who wants to do any high-level PvM has to mix them personally, so Herblore quietly unlocks the rest of the account's endgame. Finally, the level-99 cape is a real quality-of-life reward rather than a vanity item: it lets you mix grimy (uncleaned) herbs straight into unfinished potions — skipping the cleaning step entirely — bypasses the hard Desert Diary requirement for mixing potions in Nardah, and can be searched once a day for a free pestle and mortar.

Herblore has no XP-boosting skill outfit the way Woodcutting has the Lumberjack set or Mining has the Prospector kit — the levelling speed comes purely from which potion you make, not from gear. What gear can do is lower the cost, and on an expensive skill like this that matters just as much. A couple of items do it dramatically. The amulet of chemistry gives a 5% chance to produce a 4-dose potion instead of a 3-dose whenever you finish a potion, effectively printing extra doses for free and raising the resale value of everything you make; it crumbles after a number of charges, so it needs replacing, but each charge is cheap enough to be worth it on most potions.

The upgraded alchemist's amulet from Mastering Mixology is the big one: it stores up to 5,000 charges of an amulet of chemistry and bumps the bonus-dose chance to a much stronger 15%, which slashes the effective cost of the expensive potions where it matters most. The other key reward is the prescription goggles, also from Mixology, which give a 10% chance not to consume the secondary ingredient on most potions. Worn together, the alchemist's amulet and prescription goggles can cut a meaningful slice off your total training bill — and the savings scale up exactly when you need them, on potions with pricey secondaries like crushed nests or torstol.

A pestle and mortar is needed whenever a recipe calls for a crushed ingredient — antipoison uses crushed unicorn horn dust, and Saradomin brews use a crushed nest — so keep one in your inventory and crush your secondaries before you start a session. The important mental model here is that none of these items change your XP rate. They only change how much gold each level costs, which is the part of Herblore that actually hurts. If you are training a cheap potion the savings are small; if you are pushing the fastest expensive pathway, grabbing the Mixology rewards first can pay for itself several times over on the way to 99.

The first 20 levels are quick and cheap, and there are a few ways to do them. Straight after Druidic Ritual the only things you can do are clean grimy guam or make Attack potions, and the potions are far faster XP than cleaning. To make them, buy guam potions (unf) and eyes of newt from the Grand Exchange — roughly 172 of each will carry you to level 20 — set withdraw-X to 14, withdraw 14 of each, use one on the other, press the spacebar to confirm, and repeat. Each full inventory takes about 16–17 seconds to process, so you settle into a quick bank-make-bank rhythm.

At level 5 you unlock antipoison potions (marrentill potion (unf) plus crushed unicorn horn dust), which are a touch faster and a clean way to push through the early teens — the table below shows them at roughly 90k XP/hr, and you need only around 109 of them to go from 5 to 20 for about 100k gp. At level 12 you can switch to Strength potions (tarromin potion (unf) plus limpwurt root), which the table rates at roughly 120k XP/hr — faster again and slightly cheaper. Any of these three is fine; the differences are minor and the whole 1–20 stretch costs only a small amount of gold. Pick whichever ingredients are cheapest on the day and don't overthink it. The real money decisions start at level 20 and up, when you commit to a route to 99 and the per-level cost begins to climb in earnest. From here on it is worth opening our Herblore calculator to compare the cost-per-XP of each potion band.

The pure-fastest pathway simply means always making the best potion your level allows, regardless of cost. As the method table shows, the rates climb steadily as you unlock each tier: Super attack at level 45 (around 240k XP/hr), Super energy at 52 (around 290k), Super strength at 55 (around 310k), and Super restore at 63 (around 350k). Each of these is a single clean herb plus one secondary — super attack is irit potion (unf) with eye of newt, super strength is kwuarm potion (unf) with limpwurt root, super restore is snapdragon potion (unf) with red spiders' eggs — so they all share the same fast bankstanding loop, just at higher cost and higher XP as you climb.

From level 81 the standout high-end potion is the Saradomin brew (toadflax potion (unf) plus a crushed nest), which the table rates at around 440k XP/hr and is worth a hefty 180 XP per make. From level 85, Ancient brews (dwarf weed potion (unf) plus nihil dust) are the fastest standard experience in our table at roughly 522k XP/hr, though they are very expensive and need the Ancient brew recipe unlocked. Following this absolute-fastest pathway to the letter costs hundreds of millions of gold for a single 99, which is why the overwhelming majority of players take one of the cheaper variants in the next section rather than the literal fastest. A common compromise is to make Saradomin brews from 81 to 99 instead of Ancient brews, which keeps the rate high while cutting the bill substantially.

Beyond the normal click rate, dedicated efficiency players layer tick manipulation on top to push higher still. Potions whose secondary ingredient stacks in your inventory — stamina potions and extended super antifire are the classic examples — can be made one per game tick (every 0.6 seconds) by holding the spacebar, which lifts the effective rate well above the standard figures shown in the table. It is brutally click-and-focus intensive and only sustainable in short bursts, so it is really only worth it if you are racing for the max cape; for everyone else the standard rates shown here are the honest target to plan around. Whichever pathway you choose, price out each potion band in our Herblore calculator first, because the gap between the fastest and the sensible route is measured in hundreds of millions of gp.

The smart way to train Herblore is to make potions that are in high demand with high trade volume, because those buy and sell back close to what their ingredients cost — meaning you lose very little gold per level even though the raw outlay looks large. The standout is the Prayer potion at level 38 (ranarr potion (unf) plus snape grass): it posts around 200k XP/hr in the table and costs only about 4 gp per XP, which makes it one of the best value-for-speed methods in the entire skill. Prayer potions and super restores are also some of the most-traded items in the game, so you can buy thousands of unfinished potions and sell thousands of finished ones without crashing the price.

A sensible cheap-and-fast ladder is to make Prayer potions from 38, move to super restores at 63 (around 350k XP/hr), and slot in ranging potions at 72 (wine of Zamorak plus dwarf weed potion (unf)) where they are affordable — this keeps your rate in the 350–440k range while spending a small fraction of the pure-fastest bill. Players who want to spend even less commonly train on super restores all the way to level 90, then switch to super combat potions. Super combats are made by combining a torstol with a 4-dose super attack, super strength and super defence in your inventory at once, so they use more ingredients per make and you can't AFK them quite as long, but they still post around 320k XP/hr in the table.

One honest caveat on our rates: super combats are actually slower than Saradomin brews (320k versus 440k), so you pick them at the top end for their lower cost and self-supply convenience, not for raw speed. That is the recurring theme of this section — the cheap-and-fast routes trade a handful of extra hours for hundreds of millions of saved gold, which is why they are what the overwhelming majority of mains actually do. Run your exact level range through the Herblore calculator and check current margins on the GE price tracker to pick the cheapest viable potion for your level at the moment you train.

Herblore is one of the more AFK-friendly skills on a regular account, because once you click an inventory of potions the game quietly processes all 14 on its own while you do something else. The catch is that the AFK window is short. A normal full inventory of 14 potions finishes in only about 17 seconds, after which you have to bank and reload. That is plenty to train while watching something on a second screen or working alongside it, but it is not a true leave-the-room method — you are clicking the bank every 17 seconds.

The way to stretch that window is to make potions whose secondary ingredient stacks into a single inventory slot. Because a stacked secondary frees up the slots a non-stacking secondary would occupy, you can carry more unfinished potions per trip, and the AFK time roughly doubles to around 31 seconds per batch. The headline examples are stamina potions (super energy plus amylase crystals, from level 77) and extended super antifire. Tellingly, these are both the most AFK-friendly and the potions used for tick-manipulated speed-running — so “most AFK” and “fastest with effort” turn out to be the same recipes. You simply choose whether to coast and reload every half-minute or to lock in and spam the spacebar for maximum rate.

One more low-effort option is AFK cleaning grimy herbs: click once and let the game slowly clean a full inventory, which lasts around 50 seconds before you reload. The XP is poor for the time, though — you can clean five to ten times faster by spam-clicking — so cleaning is really a low-intensity profit method rather than a training one, and it is covered in the profitable section. For pure AFK training, stackable-secondary potions are the clear pick.

Herblore is hard to make money on while also levelling fast — the two goals pull against each other — but several side methods turn a real profit. The simplest is cleaning grimy herbs. You can do it AFK or, far better, by spam-clicking, and at higher-value herbs the margins add up: cleaning grimy ranarr or grimy torstol (level 75) by spam-clicking can clear several hundred thousand gp per hour, and certain newer high-value herbs push that even higher for patient players willing to wait on the Grand Exchange. The XP per click is poor, so cleaning is a profit play rather than a training one, but ironmen and money-conscious mains use it constantly, and it stacks neatly with other tasks because the only input is grimy herbs.

The next reliable earner is making unfinished potions. Combining clean herbs with vials of water gives zero experience but produces a tradeable item, so many players run it on alt accounts purely for gold — snapdragon potions (unf) are a common choice, and some higher-tier unfinished potions clear several hundred thousand per hour. Because it gives no XP, it never competes with training, which is exactly why it lives in the “profit, not progress” category.

At the high end sit the divine potions. After completing Song of the Elves you can add crystal dust to a finished potion to make its divine version, and the divine super combat potion (level 97) is the headline money-maker — capable of over a million gp per hour in profit if you convert crystal shards efficiently. It demands real starting capital and a near-maxed Herblore level, and gathering your own shards eats into the margin, so it is an endgame method rather than a starter one. Finally, the Mastering Mixology minigame (covered next) is both a strong money-maker and the most XP-efficient way to level at higher levels, which is a rare combination for this skill. Whatever you pick, check live margins on the GE price tracker first — potion prices move constantly, and a method that profits today can break even tomorrow.

Mastering Mixology is a Herblore minigame added in 2024, playable from level 60 (with the best rewards opening up at 81). The loop is to grind herbs into three coloured pastes, combine those pastes to fill randomised potion orders, and bank the reward points you earn, which you then spend in a dedicated shop. Its defining feature — and the reason it changed how the skill is trained — is that it gives the most Herblore XP per herb in the game. That makes it the single best way for an ironman to convert a limited, farm-gated herb supply into levels, and it doubles as a strong profit method for mains who trade their reward points for Aldarium, a secondary used in surge potions that sells well.

The minigame is also where the best Herblore quality-of-life items come from, so even players who do not train there long-term usually visit to collect them. The alchemist's amulet and prescription goggles described in the gear section are both Mixology rewards. So is the reagent pouch (usable from level 81), which holds 26 of each secondary ingredient and lets you make 26 potions per inventory instead of 14 — a large throughput gain that roughly halves your banking, and a near-essential upgrade for ultimate ironmen who cannot use a normal bank freely. The minigame also introduced two new potions, the goading potion and a second new brew, which gave it lasting relevance beyond just being an XP method.

One last reward worth grabbing is potion storage, a dedicated bank area for unfinished and finished potions that can free up hundreds of bank spaces once you account for every dose of every potion you keep. The practical takeaway: if you intend to take Herblore seriously at all, a few Mixology sessions early to unlock the goggles, amulet and reagent pouch will pay for themselves many times over across the rest of your training, both in saved gold and in saved clicks.

It is worth being clear about when Mixology is and is not the right call. For a main account with deep pockets, normal bankstanding potions are still faster per hour than the minigame, so Mixology is something you dip into for the rewards and the occasional profit rather than your main grind. For an ironman, the maths inverts completely: because herbs are your scarce resource and Mixology squeezes the most XP out of each one, it becomes the backbone of the skill rather than a side activity. Decide which account you are before you commit a long session, and treat the reward unlocks as the universal first goal either way.

For ironmen, Herblore flips on its head. The bottleneck is no longer gold — it is the raw materials, which you have to grow and gather yourself before you can train at all. That single change rewrites the whole strategy: instead of making the highest-XP potion your level allows, you make potions that are useful to you and have easy ingredients, and you accept that your rate is capped by your herb supply rather than your clicking. Trying to ape the main account fastest pathway as an ironman is a trap, because you simply will not have the herbs.

Herbs come mainly from farming runs — planting ranarr, snapdragon, toadflax and torstol seeds across the herb patches and harvesting on a rotation — plus drops from PvM and bosses. Secondary ingredients are sourced in a similar patchwork: some come from shops, some from farming, and some you gather by hand. Snape grass, red spiders' eggs and limpwurt roots, for example, each have their own little supply chain, and gathering secondaries is often the real time sink rather than the herbs themselves.

To get started, buy vial of water packs and eyes of newt from shops around the game and make Attack potions for your first levels, exactly as a main would. From there, lean on potions with reachable ingredients — serum 207s, energy potions, Prayer potions and super attacks — while your farming patches keep refilling the herb pipeline. The biggest single unlock is Mastering Mixology at level 60: because it gives the most XP per herb of anything in the game, it stretches a limited herb supply further than any potion can, and it is the standard ironman route to a fast cape. Plan your farming rotation and your potion targets around what you actually consume at the bosses you fight, and use our Herblore calculator to work out exactly how many herbs and secondaries each level goal will require so your farm runs are never wasted.

There is no free-to-play Herblore — this is the shortest section in the guide for a reason. The skill is entirely members-only on every level. It cannot even be started without the Druidic Ritual quest, which is itself a members quest, and every single potion recipe relies on members-only herbs, members-only secondaries and members-only content to gather them. On a free account your Herblore level is permanently locked at 1 and the skill does literally nothing, so there is no method, rate or rotation to list here.

If you are currently free-to-play and planning ahead, the most useful thing you can do is line up the prerequisites so you can rush the skill the instant you subscribe. Note where Druidic Ritual is (the druids' circle north of Taverley) and what it needs (raw bear, rat, beef and chicken meat), and decide whether you want to start on Attack potions or antipoisons. The moment your membership goes live, knock out Druidic Ritual, grab Jungle Potion for its free 775 XP if you are levelled for it, and begin the low-level grind described earlier. Herblore is one of several skills — alongside Agility, Slayer, Construction, Farming, Hunter, Thieving and the higher tiers of Runecrafting — that simply does not exist outside membership, so the honest answer to “how do I train Herblore as F2P?” is that you cannot, and the plan is to be ready to start the day you can.

Two quests matter for Herblore, and the first is non-negotiable. Druidic Ritual unlocks the skill entirely and gives 250 XP (level 3) — without it you cannot train at all, so it is genuinely step zero. Jungle Potion is the only other quest with a meaningful Herblore reward, granting 775 Herblore experience on completion, a small but free head-start that shaves a little off the early grind. Beyond those, the Barbarian Training sub-activity at Otto's Grotto unlocks Herblore extras — the ability to make potion “mixes” that also heal Hitpoints, and to brew certain potions over a fire — which are nice quality-of-life additions rather than core levelling, but worth doing once you are established.

The bigger unlocks are level-gated potions rather than quests, and they are the real reason to push your level. Stamina potions open at level 77 and are the everyday run-energy staple used almost universally. Surge potions at 81 are a strong combined boost for both PvM and PvP. Super combat potions at 90 are the standard one-sip melee combo that replaces carrying three separate super potions. Anti-venom+ at 94 (made with torstol and an anti-venom) is the best venom cure in the game and important for content like Zulrah and the Theatre of Blood. And the divine potions from level 97 onward are the high-end boost upgrades that keep your combat stats from draining.

Running parallel to those, the Mastering Mixology rewards — the alchemist's amulet, prescription goggles, reagent pouch and potion storage — are the other unlocks worth chasing. They do not give a combat benefit, but they cut your training cost and your bank clutter for the rest of the account's life, which is why most serious players grab them early. Taken together, the quest gates, the potion unlocks and the Mixology rewards are the milestones to aim for as your level climbs toward 99.

A few habits make Herblore smoother. Always set the bank's withdraw-X to 14 (or 26 with a reagent pouch) so reloading is one click each side. Decide your pathway by cost, not just speed — the difference between the fastest and the cheap-and-fast routes can be over 100 million gp for the same 99, so price every band on the GE price tracker first. Keep an amulet of chemistry (or the alchemist's amulet) and prescription goggles on whenever you train expensive potions; the saved doses and secondaries add up fast. And if you are an ironman, let your farming runs — not your gold — set the pace, and prioritise Mastering Mixology once you hit 60.

One thing to set expectations on: Herblore has no dedicated skilling pet. Like the other artisan skills (Crafting, Smithing, Fletching, Cooking, Construction), it never received a training pet, so there is no rare drop to chase while you brew — the goal is simply the cape. At 99 the Herblore cape is a genuine quality-of-life reward: it lets you mix grimy herbs straight into unfinished potions (skipping the cleaning step), bypasses the hard Desert Diary requirement for mixing potions in Nardah, and can be searched once a day for a pestle and mortar. A final practical tip: decant your finished potions into 4-dose form before selling, since 4-dose potions trade at a better price per dose, and the amulet of chemistry's bonus 4-dose chance only helps if you are taking advantage of that. When you are ready to start, our Herblore calculator turns your target level into an exact herb-and-secondary shopping list, the GE price tracker keeps your cost estimates honest, and the guides hub covers the gathering skills — Farming especially — that keep a self-sufficient Herblore account supplied for the long haul.