OSRS 1–99 Woodcutting Guide

Every game tick — that is, every 0.6 seconds — while you are chopping, the game rolls a hidden chance for you to receive a log. By default a tree only offers that roll once every 4 ticks (2.4 seconds), and you gain experience only when a log actually appears: the swing animation itself is worth nothing. The size of that chance scales with three things working together — your Woodcutting level, the axe you are using, and the tree you are chopping. A higher level and a better axe both raise the odds of a successful chop, which is exactly why you should always be cutting the best tree you can and swinging the best axe you can wield.

Trees come in two mechanical flavours, and the difference is the foundation of everything fast in this skill. Most trees you meet — regular, oak, willow, maple, yew, magic, redwood — have a depletion timer introduced with Forestry in 2023. The timer only starts ticking once you receive your first log, and it scales with the tree: an oak lasts about 27 seconds while a redwood stands for over four minutes. When the timer runs out, your next log fells the tree and you move on. A second group — teak and mahogany trees that you plant yourself, plus a few special trees — behaves differently and rolls for logs on a fixed cycle without the same depletion behaviour. That predictable cycle is what makes tick manipulation possible: by starting a separate timed action (or by absorbing an attack on a fixed beat) you can interrupt the swing and force a faster log roll — every 3 ticks, every 2 ticks, or even effectively every 1.5 ticks — instead of the default 4. We break those tiers down in the fastest-route section; for now the takeaway is simply that the trees you can manipulate are where the top experience rates live.

Two more details shape day-to-day chopping. First, while cutting you can randomly receive a bird's nest on the ground beneath you — these can hold tree or fruit-tree seeds, rings, or a clue scroll, and the rarer ones are genuinely valuable, so always pick them up. Second, chopping the same tree as other players gives an invisible Woodcutting boost of up to +10 (one level per additional chopper, capped at ten), which both speeds up your own logs and is the quiet reason busy Forestry worlds are worth seeking out. Logs themselves are not a dead-end resource either: they feed straight into Firemaking and Fletching, so nothing you cut has to go to waste.

Your axe sets your chop speed, so the first rule of Woodcutting is to always use the best axe your level allows. The Woodcutting level needed to chop with each is: bronze and iron 1, steel 6, black 11, mithril 21, adamant 31, rune 41, dragon 61, and crystal 71. The jumps are large — a rune axe is roughly three times faster than a bronze one, and a crystal axe is over four times faster — so upgrading your axe is by far the cheapest way to speed up the early grind. Axes can be bought from the Grand Exchange, and ironmen can buy up to a steel axe from Bob in Lumbridge or grab axes up to rune from the shop inside the Woodcutting Guild at level 60. As a tool, an axe only needs to be in your inventory, not equipped — though equipping it frees an inventory slot.

The high-tier axes carry a shared special attack called Lumber Up — found on the dragon, crystal, infernal, and cosmetic 3rd age axes. It costs 100% special-attack energy and temporarily boosts your Woodcutting level by +3 for three minutes (the boost ticks down one level every 60 seconds), and it stacks with the Woodcutting Guild's invisible boost. Pop it at the start of a session, and re-pop it as it fades; the Lightbearer ring lets you use it more often, while the Preserve prayer extends each boost by 50%. The crystal axe deserves a special note: it gives a 15% efficiency gain over the rune axe (against the dragon axe's 10%), making it about 4.5% faster than a dragon axe, but it requires level 71 Woodcutting and completion of Song of the Elves to make and use.

Two specialised axes round out the kit. The infernal axe is made by using a smouldering stone on a dragon axe (requiring 61 Woodcutting and 85 Firemaking); while it sits in your inventory it has a 1/3 chance to instantly burn each log you cut for half its Firemaking experience — free, passive Firemaking that ironmen and skillers love, and which the Pyromancer outfit even boosts. It burns 5,000 logs before reverting to a plain dragon axe. The newer felling axes are two-handed axes that give 10% more Woodcutting experience when used with Forester's rations (one ration is consumed per experience drop, and rations also restore run energy). They also have a 20% chance to not produce a log, which sounds bad but actually makes them more AFK, since your inventory fills slower. The tradeable felling axes go up to the dragon felling axe; the untradeable crystal felling axe — built from a felling axe handle on a crystal axe near a singing bowl — is the single fastest axe in the game for tick-manipulated training.

The Woodcutting experience-boost set is the Lumberjack outfit, and wearing the full four-piece set grants +2.5% Woodcutting XP — hat +0.4%, top +0.8%, legs +0.6% and boots +0.2%. Like every skilling outfit, the bonus is a free, permanent multiplier that applies to every chop everywhere, so it quietly saves you a meaningful chunk of hours across a full 1–99 grind. It is the single best value upgrade in the skill and an easy first goal. The matching Forestry outfit from the Forestry rewards shop provides the exact same +2.5% bonus, and its pieces count as Lumberjack pieces for the set, so you never need both.

There are two ways to get it. The classic, fastest route is the Temple Trekking minigame: by escorting your follower on route 1 and engaging only the undead-lumberjack event, you can assemble the full set in under an hour. The modern route is Forestry itself — you buy the pieces from the Forestry rewards shop using Anima-infused bark earned from Forestry events, paired with some noted yew, magic and redwood logs per piece. Either way the result is identical. One handy upgrade is the clothes pouch (built with a clothes pouch blueprint from the Forestry shop and attached to your Forestry kit): it lets you bank the outfit and still receive the XP boost while wearing other gear — for example prayer armour to reduce drain at Sulliuscep. The Lumberjack set sits alongside every other XP-boost set in our Skilling Outfits guide if you want to compare them side by side.

The opening levels pass in minutes, so don't overthink them. From level 1–15 you chop regular trees — about 161 logs total — anywhere convenient, with the classic spots being behind Lumbridge Castle or on the outskirts of Varrock. Main accounts going for pure speed should simply drop the logs; ironmen can light or fletch them as they go for a little free Firemaking or Fletching on the side. Whatever you do, keep swinging the best axe you can wield, because that matters more than location at this stage.

At level 15 you unlock oak trees, which are the fastest steady experience all the way to 35 at a relaxed, fully AFK ~22k XP/hr — roughly 534 oak logs takes you from 15 to 35. At level 30 you technically unlock willow trees, the long-running free-to-play staple, but oaks remain better experience until 35, so most efficient players stay on oaks and jump straight to teaks at 35. The exception is if you intend to AFK rather than tick-manipulate, in which case willows (and later maples) make a comfortable stepping stone.

If you would rather skip the early grind entirely, a cluster of short quests hands out enough Woodcutting experience to fast-forward the start. On a fresh account, completing Monk's Friend takes you from 1 to 14 instantly; chopping a handful of regular logs to 15 then lets you complete The Ribbiting Tale of a Lily Pad Labour Dispute for another 2,000 XP. Stacking the full set of Woodcutting-XP quests can carry a new account to around level 28 before you cut a single tree for training, which is an efficient path if you are heading for the quest cape anyway.

From level 35, tick-manipulated teak trees are the fastest experience in the skill all the way to 99 — and even with no manipulation at all, teaks are the fastest experience up to level 65. Because teaks roll on a fixed cycle rather than depleting like regular trees, you can interrupt the swing to force faster log rolls. Be warned up front: these are the most click-intensive methods in the game, and many players sensibly choose the calmer Sulliuscep or AFK routes instead. But if you want the absolute ceiling, this is it. There are three tiers, trading effort for speed.

• 3-tick teaks — the entry rhythm. You start a 3-tick action (the classic is using a clean herb on swamp tar) every 1.8 seconds, then click the tree, and repeat. It is a ~33% speed-up over plain chopping and the easiest of the three to sustain, but the gain rarely justifies the extra clicking unless you are also picking up Forestry events.
• 2-tick teaks — the popular meta. You get two monsters attacking you on alternating ticks (birds on Ape Atoll or the Isle of Souls, rabbits in Prifddinas) with Auto Retaliate on and an unloaded shortbow equipped; each hit resets the chop and lets you receive a log every two ticks. An even simpler variant is to plant your own teak trees and just step a tile between chops — planted teaks have a chance to drop two logs at once, which is effectively 2-tick woodcutting with no monsters involved. This tier reaches roughly 150–215k XP/hr at high levels, and already gives a strong ~78k XP/hr the moment you unlock it at 35.
• 1.5-tick teaks — the absolute ceiling. Done on planted teaks on Fossil Island by combining a 3-tick action with the tile-stepping double-log trick, giving a chance at two logs every three ticks. It is brutal to hold for long sessions but is the single fastest Woodcutting method in the game, scaling from ~93k XP/hr at level 35 up to around 235k XP/hr at 99 with a crystal felling axe.

For all of these, use the best felling axe you can with Forester's rations for the extra 10% experience (the rations also keep your run energy topped up). The best teak spots are the Hardwood Grove on Fossil Island, near Castle Wars, on Ape Atoll, or in Prifddinas (where you also bank crystal shards). If constant clicking isn't for you, the table's headline teak rate is the no-manipulation band — a perfectly respectable scaling line on its own — and the AFK section below trades XP/hr for your sanity.

At level 65, the Sulliuscep mushrooms in the Tar Swamp on Fossil Island are the fastest experience in the skill without tick manipulation, and a far calmer alternative to teaks. Per our method table they scale from about 83k XP/hr at level 65 to roughly 102k XP/hr near 99 with a crystal axe, with comfortable AFK intervals between actions. You need access to Fossil Island, which means completing the Bone Voyage quest first, plus a rake and an axe in your kit.

The loop is a rotation rather than a single tree. Only one Sulliuscep is fully grown and choppable at a time; you chop it down, then walk to the next active mushroom in a fixed sequence (its location cycles the same way each time for a given player), raking obstructing sprouts as you go. Along the way you'll be chipped at by tar monsters and poisonous spine mushrooms, so bring something to cure poison, a defensive setup, and decent food — a few Saradomin brews are popular for the low-maintenance healing and Defence boost. As a bonus, you pick up numulite (the Fossil Island currency) and a little passive Prayer experience while you chop, which is exactly why this method is a favourite for ironmen who want fast Woodcutting that also feeds wider account goals.

If you would rather train in the background, build your route from the trees the method table marks as AFK-friendly: oaks (15) → maples (45) → yews (60) → redwoods (90), with willows as an optional low-level filler. The higher the tier, the longer the tree's despawn timer, and the longer you can look away — maples give about a minute of hands-off chopping, yews around two minutes, and the AFK king, redwoods, let you chop two faces of the giant tree from a single spot for up to four-and-a-half minutes at a time. Redwoods at level 90 are the most relaxed high-level experience in the game (around 68k XP/hr in our table, more with a crystal axe), and most players simply camp them from 90 to 99 because the effort-to-reward ratio is so good. Importantly, for AFK you want a normal world, not a Forestry world — on Forestry worlds trees fell more unpredictably, which shortens your AFK windows.

The single best AFK location from level 60 is the Woodcutting Guild, just south of Hosidius, which grants an invisible +7 Woodcutting boost on top of stacked yews, magics and redwoods, a bank chest right there, and an axe shop. A solid middle-ground inside the Guild is cutting maple trees, which keep a high chop rate while still giving about a minute of AFK. A niche members alternative is the blisterwood tree in Darkmeyer (after Sins of the Father), which keeps the old-school 1-in-8 stop-chopping mechanic for roughly 60–80k XP/hr; above level 90, though, redwoods are simpler and just as fast. Most accounts end up mixing styles — tryhard teaks when they can focus, AFK redwoods when they can't.

The 2023 Forestry update turned Woodcutting into a far more social skill. When several players chop the same tree on a Forestry world, random Forestry events spawn nearby, each giving bonus Woodcutting experience and Anima-infused bark. If you actually participate in the events as they appear, you can lift your overall experience rate by at least 40% over chopping alone — and that is before the invisible up-to-+10 boost from chopping alongside other players. To start, grab the free Forestry kit from a friendly forester in Draynor, Seers' Village or Prifddinas (it stores the bits you find while chopping), then simply cut a tree on an official Forestry world. The most popular world is usually 444; free players use world 301. Forestry needs only level 15 Woodcutting (oaks) to take part, and it does not work in the Woodcutting Guild or on blisterwood trees.

There are nine events, each with its own mini-puzzle. In Rising Roots you chop the root with green veins; in Flowering Bush you find and pollinate the two bushes that can trade pollen; the Struggling Sapling needs you to feed it the right combination of three materials; the Enchantment Ritual asks you to stand on the odd-one-out symbol; Friendly Ents must be trimmed according to what they say; Pheasant Control has you snatch the egg from the unguarded nest; Poachers asks you to disarm fox traps (for Woodcutting and Hunter XP); Beehives has you add logs to build a hive (for Woodcutting and Construction XP); and the Woodcutting Leprechaun lets you bank your logs on the spot. You don't chase events specifically — they happen passively while you train at a busy tree — so for the free bonus, always pick a populated world. The default RuneLite Woodcutting plugin can highlight and notify you of events, and a tree-count plugin shows how many choppers are present for the level boost.

The Anima-infused bark you earn from events is spent at the Forestry rewards shop, which holds most of the genuinely useful upgrades in the skill. The headline buy is the Forestry outfit (or the components for the Lumberjack outfit), giving the permanent +2.5% experience boost. The clothes pouch blueprint lets you build a clothes pouch so you can store the outfit and keep its boost while wearing other gear. Twitcher's gloves meaningfully increase your bird's-nest chance — well worth it given how valuable rare nests are. The felling axe handle turns a regular axe into a felling axe (and is the only way to make the crystal felling axe), while Forester's rations can be bought here too for ironmen who don't want to craft them from leaves and cooked food.

The shop also stocks several quality-of-life and cosmetic items: a log basket that holds extra logs (handy if you're banking cuts for Firemaking, Fletching or Hunter), sawmill vouchers that are a treat for ironmen training Construction, a secateurs for making Forester's rations, a cape pouch for max-cape holders, and various clothing. Because the bark accrues passively while you do your normal training, there is no need to grind events specifically — just bank the bark and spend it on the outfit first, then Twitcher's gloves, then whatever else fits your account.

Be honest with yourself before chasing gold here: Woodcutting is not a strong money-maker, and most of the fastest experience methods drop their logs for speed rather than bank them. That said, there are a few genuinely worthwhile profit angles. The most lucrative is camping Forestry events — hopping between Forestry areas to stay eligible and completing only the announced events for bark, which converts (via felling axes) to well over 700k gp/hr at high levels for the dedicated. More practically, mahogany logs are the best straightforward profit: unlocked at just level 50 and cut in Tai Bwo Wannai or Prifddinas, they bring in roughly 140k gp/hr at unlock scaling toward ~200k gp/hr.

The reliable banking logs are yew, magic and redwood. Yews and magics each sit around 150k gp/hr in profit, and redwoods double as a profitable AFK method since you can bank rather than drop them. Ironmen take a different view entirely: they bank teak and mahogany logs to feed Construction, where those hardwoods are the backbone of high-level training, and they keep yew and redwood logs for Fletching and Firemaking. Whatever you bank, log prices drift with demand, so check live values in our GE Price Tracker before committing a long session to profit over experience — and remember that on every profit method you are earning far less per hour than a dedicated money-maker, so most players treat the gold as a bonus on top of the levels.

Woodcutting is fully trainable to 99 in free-to-play, though the tree list is much shorter than members. The standard route is regular trees to 15, oaks to 30, then willows as the long-standing F2P XP staple, with maples (now available to free players) as a comfortable AFK option in the middle, and finally yews from 60 onward as the relaxed F2P ceiling at roughly 30k XP/hr. That yew stretch is the entire back half of an F2P 99, so settle into a good spot for it.

Free players who want speed have options too. The fastest method in F2P is actually 2-tick oaks: you lure two rats from Falador farm to the city entrance, get them attacking on alternating ticks, and click-tree-then-ground on each hit — this reaches over 100k XP/hr above 60 Woodcutting (where oaks have a 100% chop chance) but demands constant focus. A calmer fast option is 3-ticking willows on a Forestry world, which can clear 70k XP/hr while still letting you catch event bonuses. Forestry itself is open to free players from level 15 (use world 301), so F2P accounts can chase Anima-infused bark and the outfit too.

What free players miss is everything members-only: teaks, mahoganies, redwoods, Sulliuscep, the Woodcutting Guild, blisterwood, and the high-tier and felling/crystal axes. That means both the fastest route (tick-manipulated teaks) and the comfiest high-level AFK (redwoods) require a membership — but a free player can still reach 99 cleanly on the willow-to-yew ladder if that's the goal.

A handful of unlocks make the whole grind smoother, and the biggest is the Woodcutting Guild (entered at level 60, south of Hosidius in Great Kourend). It is the best high-level training location bar none: stacked yews, magics and redwoods, an invisible +7 Woodcutting boost inside, a bank chest, an axe shop, and a +7.5% bird's-nest chance bonus that adds up over a long stay. From 60 onward there is rarely a reason to chop high-tier trees anywhere else for AFK training.

Several quests open key doors rather than handing out big lumps of experience. Bone Voyage unlocks Fossil Island for redwoods and Sulliuscep; Song of the Elves unlocks the crystal axe (and Prifddinas teaks); Sins of the Father unlocks the blisterwood tree; and Animal Magnetism gives Ava's accumulator, which automatically collects many of your bird's-nest drops so you don't have to bend down for each one. There is no single quest that dumps a huge amount of Woodcutting experience, so beyond the low-level questing skip discussed earlier, the path to 99 stays almost entirely method-based. The useful items to keep in mind are Twitcher's gloves and Ava's accumulator for nest farming, the clothes pouch for wearing the boost invisibly, and a felling axe with rations once you're tick-manipulating.

A few habits make the grind noticeably smoother. Drop your logs on the fastest methods — banking trips quietly bleed XP/hr at the top end, so unless you're chopping for profit, dropping (or using the Forestry leprechaun) keeps you cutting. Use your dragon, crystal or infernal axe special attack at the start of every session and re-pop it as the +3 fades; over a long grind those boosted levels are free experience. From level 60, train in the Woodcutting Guild for the chop-rate and nest bonuses, and pick a busy world for the up-to-+10 player boost when you're chopping actively, or a quiet normal world when you want maximum AFK time. World-hop if your trees are crowded for AFK, or lean into the crowd for Forestry events.

Then there's the long-game reward. Every Woodcutting method has a chance at the Beaver skilling pet — higher-experience methods give better odds, so the fast teak grind doubles as your best shot at it — and there is always a small thrill in chopping one more tree for the roll. At level 99 the Woodcutting cape is the visible payoff, and the skill's high levels also unlock conveniences elsewhere in the game. Browse the rest of our tools and walkthroughs from the guides hub to plan what to train next.