OSRS Hunter Guide 1–99: Birdhouses, Rumours and Fastest XP

Why Hunter Is Worth 1–99

Hunter is the only skill where the correct use of an hour is sometimes ninety seconds of work followed by nothing at all. A birdhouse run on Fossil Island takes somewhere around 73 to 90 seconds of actual play, and the four traps then need fifty minutes to fill before there is anything to collect. That is not a training session in any recognisable sense; it is a farm run. Played as one (set, walk away, come back when the timer says so), birdhouses give the fastest Hunter experience in real time effectively as far as level 80, and they stay viable all the way to 99 for anyone who is not racing.

The second thing that separates Hunter from the other gathering skills is that your level is not just a permission slip for better creatures. It is also the number of traps you are allowed to lay: two from level 1, three at 40, four at 60 and five at 80, with one more than usual in the Wilderness. Two traps used to wait until level 20; the 19 August 2026 update moved them to level 1. Three specific levels therefore change how a hunting spot physically plays, and every level between them changes almost nothing about it. That is why the levels immediately below 40, 60 and 80 are the ones worth drinking a hunter potion through rather than earning honestly.

Then there is the Hunter Guild, which opens at 46 Hunter in the Avium Savannah and brought rumours with it. A Guild hunter names a creature, you hunt that creature until it drops a rare creature part, and you hand the part in for experience calculated from your level and the tier of the hunter who set the task. Rumours gave Hunter something it had never had: an assignment, a way to block the assignments you hate, and rewards you keep rather than sell. Those are the quetzal whistle, the guild hunter outfit, quetzal feed, and the Quetzin pet, which only drops from expert and master loot sacks.

What the skill still lacks is a comfortable middle. Birdhouses, herbiboar and maniacal monkeys ask almost nothing of your attention; black chinchompas with tick manipulation, a shooting alt and a Wilderness escape plan ask for all of it. Most of planning a Hunter 1–99 is working out which of those two you will really sit down and play.

Bils Services offers hand-done Hunter training if you would rather not do the grind yourself. The methods below work the same either way.

The XP rates below are the OSRS Wiki's figures for efficient play, from Hunter training and Bird house trapping. Expect the low end of each range while you are still learning a method. Chinchompa, crab paste and herb prices move with the Grand Exchange, so where a method pays we give the quantity per hour and leave the pricing to the day you sell.

Pick Your Method

Every rate in that table comes from the wiki's Hunter training and Bird house trapping pages. They are efficient-play figures: chinchompa rates assume tick manipulation and practice, rumour rates assume a block list, the full guild hunter outfit and good teleports, and herbiboar assumes 66 catches an hour. The wiki also flags some of its lower-level rates as possibly dated since the deadfall trap rework, so read the early numbers as a ranking.

The bird house figure needs one translation. A redwood run gives 4,800 XP for about 80 seconds of play, which is where the 216,000 "per active hour" comes from, but you can only run once every fifty minutes, so in real time it is about 5,760 XP an hour that costs you almost nothing. That is why birdhouses sit underneath every other row rather than competing with them.

Quest XP and the Unlocks That Matter

The Hunter experience from quests and the Natural History Quiz totals 213,500 on the wiki's Quest experience rewards table. That is a meaningful shove through the early levels and close to irrelevant by the eighties, so treat the table above as an access list first and an experience list second. Three entries genuinely reorder the guide: Bone Voyage, because Fossil Island is where the passive route lives; Eagles' Peak, because a box trap is the gate on every chinchompa in the game; and starting Fairytale II - Cure a Queen, because a surprising number of the hunting areas below are addressed by fairy ring code rather than by teleport.

Two more are worth settling before you commit to a high-level method rather than discovering them at level 60. Maniacal monkeys need Monkey Madness II and the greegree, full stop. Carnivorous chinchompas at the Tlati Rainforest spot need Varlamore through Children of the Sun, and the quetzal to Tal Teklan through Twilight's Promise; without both you are running to a worse spot with sparser spawns.

Diaries are a smaller but real part of this. The hard Wilderness Diary is the recommended access for black chinchompas, and the skill is itself a requirement on a long list of diary tasks: 5 for Desert easy, 9 for Western Provinces easy, all the way up to 69 for Western Provinces hard. If you are diary-hunting anyway, several Hunter levels are already spoken for.

Hunter 1–99 Level Path

Read that table as the active column of a two-column plan. The other column is birdhouses, and it runs from level 9 to whenever you stop caring, independently of everything above. Four traps, fifty minutes, roughly a minute and a half of play. You can lay them before a Slayer task and collect them after it, and the experience arrives regardless of what the rest of your evening looked like.

The trap breakpoints deserve to be planned around rather than noticed in passing. Forty, sixty and eighty are the levels that change a spot's layout (twenty stopped being one when two traps moved to level 1), and a hunter potion taken in the levels just below any of them buys you the extra trap early. The wiki's red salamander numbers show the size of it: about 55,000–60,000 XP an hour with three traps before 60, and 80,000–85,000 with four, for roughly 10 hunter potions from 57 or 2 from 59. Blackbird red and Trapper's tipple do the same job with a smaller boost and a single dose each, which makes them situational: worth it when the next level is a breakpoint, not worth it as a habit.

One thing the level bands hide: falconry ignores the trap count entirely, because your hands have to be empty to carry the bird. That is why it slots neatly into 43–49 despite sitting either side of no breakpoint at all, and why it feels so different from the trapping methods on either side of it.

Fastest XP Methods

The fastest route splits at level 73, and the split is about where you are willing to stand rather than what you are willing to click. Below that, it is the active ladder above (weasels, ruby harvests with snares running, red crabs, jerboas, falconry, razor-backed kebbits), with birdhouses collected alongside because they cost you almost no time to run.

From 73, black chinchompas in the Wilderness Hunter area are the fastest experience in the skill, and the method is a genuine technique rather than a location. Traps go down a tick faster with tick manipulation, and with correct timing you can lay a trap immediately after picking one up, which the wiki calls trap resetting: check a filled trap, delay the skilling timer with a knife on a teak or mahogany log, cancel by clicking under yourself, lay the trap, and walk to the next one on the same tick. A knife and logs need two inventory slots where herb and tar need three, which is why that particular combination is the recommended one.

Two supporting habits carry more weight here than they look like they should. Shooting stray chinchompas with a ranged weapon forces a new one to spawn, and the fresh spawn walks into a trap far faster than the wanderer did, which is the whole argument for a second account holding a crystal bow or a magic shortbow. That alt can also carry your box traps, brews and spare logs, freeing inventory space on the account actually doing the hunting.

In numbers, the wiki's Hunter training table puts black chinchompas at 157,000 XP an hour at 73 with a shooting alt, 197,000 at 80 and 265,000 at 99; solo, the same levels give 145,000, 167,000 and 225,000. Those rates assume good practice and a player killer about once every one to two hours. Uninterrupted, with an alt and tick manipulation, the ceiling at 99 is around 300,000.

If none of that appeals, expert and master rumours are the wiki's stated alternative for players who will not tick manipulate, will not enter the Wilderness, or will not run an alt. You give up the chinchompas and their profit; you keep almost all of the speed. The next section puts the two side by side.

Hunter Rumours vs Chinchompas

From the low seventies every Hunter plan comes down to this choice. The wiki's own advice is that players who will not use tick manipulation, hunt in the Wilderness or run an alt should do Hunters' Rumours, because the rates are similar. Here is how similar, from 80 to 99.

Verdict: pick black chinchompas if you will tick manipulate in level 32–36 Wilderness and want the fastest 99 plus the profit; pick rumours if you will not, or you are a Hardcore, because they finish 80–99 in a similar number of hours with no risk. Carnivorous chinchompas are the profit option outside the Wilderness, from 80.

Hours are each level band's experience divided by the wiki rate at its start and at its end, so the low figure assumes you hold the top rate. The chinchompa counts come from the wiki's own GP formulas, which treat each black chinchompa as 315 XP and each red one as 265 XP.

Rumour experience is (your Hunter level + 5) × 50 for novice and adept, × 55 for expert and × 60 for master, so an expert rumour at 72 is worth 4,235 and a master rumour at 99 is worth 6,240. Speed then comes from the block list. Two Guild hunters never assign the same creature, so you block a task by holding it with one hunter while you complete rumours from the others; hand it in and it returns to the pool. The rumours page lists the base rare-part rates, which tell you what to block: box trap creatures drop their part at 1/50, herbiboar at 1/7 and falconry kebbits at 1/10.

Two smaller notes. Toggle back-to-back rumours with Guild Scribe Verity, which the wiki says can raise your rate. And if the next rumour tier is a level or two away, reach it before you start: the same hunting pays more at the higher multiplier. For the GP side of rumour loot sacks, see our Hunter rumours money guide.

Hours to 99 Hunter

Experience totals come from the wiki's experience table: 992,895 for level 73, 1,986,068 for 80 and 13,034,431 for 99. The birdhouse row adds up the wiki's count of houses needed at each tier, about 12,900 houses or 3,230 runs from 9 to 99, at 73–90 seconds a run.

A full fast route therefore looks like this: birdhouses from 9 the whole way, the active ladder to 73 (the razor-backed kebbit band from 49 is only about seven hours), then roughly 50–63 hours of chinchompas or 54–68 of rumours. Every birdhouse run you collect along the way comes off the end of that number, which is why the two-column plan is worth the discipline.

Cheapest / Budget Approach

Hunter's costs are unusually easy to control, because most of the equipment is either permanent or nearly free. Net traps, box traps, bird snares and butterfly nets come back to you when you pick them up. Crab traps at the Pandemonium and on the Crown Jewel are built once and stay built. The falconry costs a flat 500 coins per rental and nothing else. There is no consumable equivalent of bars or herbs anywhere in the skill except drift nets, which are destroyed on collection: the wiki budgets about 115 of them an hour.

The one recurring bill is birdhouse seeds, and it is a bill you choose the size of. Each birdhouse takes ten seeds of any kind, or five if you use wildblood seeds or herb seeds of ranarr and above, so a run of four costs forty or twenty. The cheap play is to feed them potato or onion seeds and keep the valuable ones for the Farming patches they belong in; the wiki is clear that the seed type does not change what you get back. The other input is a clockwork, and the clockwork comes back every time you collect, so you are really only buying logs and seeds.

The genuinely budget route to a high level is birdhouses and nothing else, and it is a legitimate plan rather than a consolation prize: the wiki describes them as viable to 99 provided you are not in a hurry. From 9 to 99 that is about 3,230 runs, so the cost is calendar time instead of gold, which is a trade a lot of accounts should take.

Where money quietly disappears is transport. Digsite pendants are the fast way onto Fossil Island and they are charges you spend, though you can make them yourself by enchanting ruby necklaces with Lvl-3 Enchant once you have shown a clean necklace to a Varrock Museum archaeologist. Stamina potions are the other recurring cost, and they matter most on the running-heavy methods: herbiboar, falconry and the kebbit tracking bands. Without them, the wiki drops razor-backed kebbits from about 130,000 to about 100,000 XP an hour.

AFK & Lower-Intensity Options

Hunter's low-attention options are unusually good, and they are low-attention in three different ways worth telling apart. Birdhouses are not AFK at all; they are absent. You are not at the keyboard during the fifty minutes; you are doing something else entirely, and the experience accrues because the traps are filling without you.

Maniacal monkeys are the closest thing the skill has to conventional AFK. One deadfall trap, one banana, and an interaction every twenty-five to thirty seconds, for 51,000 XP an hour at 60 rising to 110,000 at 99. Because an inventory of banana baskets lasts around fifty minutes before you bank, the trip length lines up neatly with a birdhouse cycle, which is a pleasant accident rather than a design.

Herbiboar is low-effort in the sense of being forgiving rather than idle. You are tracking constantly, but nothing punishes a slow click, and the harvest gives herbs and Herblore experience for the trouble: 137,000 Hunter XP an hour at 80 and 171,000 at 99 on the wiki's 66 catches an hour. Rainbow crabs sit in a similar band: five traps that catch at a consistent rate and cannot fail, with the caught crabs ground into stackable paste so you are not banking, for 122,000 XP an hour with four traps and 155,000 with five.

Drift net fishing earns a mention for a different reason. It is only moderately AFK, but with aerial fishing it is one of two methods that split XP properly between Hunter and Fishing, and the wiki calls it the most efficient way to train both at once: 116,725 Hunter and 88,550 Fishing XP an hour from 70 in both. For an account that needs both Hunter and Fishing, it removes an entire project from the list; our Fishing guide covers the Fishing half.

From 82, stymphikes in Vampyrium are the newest quiet option, behind The Blood Moon Rises. Bait a stymphike tree with one to three letvek, hide in the nearby bush, and spear the bird when it lands about 39 seconds later. That is three clicks every 45 seconds, 125 XP each time your character peeks out, and a theoretical 143,175 XP and 1,245 stymphike feathers an hour if you never miss.

Goat hunting on Wyrmscraig, released on 29 July 2026, is a lure-based option from 60 Hunter that needs Sheep Herder and 62 Sailing. You push goats into a pit with a cattle prod, Telekinetic Grab or Dark Lure, and the pit holds 16 goats at 60–68, rising to 24 at 93–99. It is active rather than AFK: about one goat every 6 ticks, for roughly 95,000 XP an hour at 60 rising to 175,000 at 99 with Telekinetic Grab. Our Wyrmscraig guide covers reaching the island.

The Profitable Route

Three methods pay while they train, and they pay in different currencies. Black chinchompas are the headline: the fastest experience from 73 and profitable at the same time, sold as ranged ammunition rather than as a raw material. Carnivorous chinchompas do the same thing outside the Wilderness at the cost of some speed, and become properly worth doing at 80 when the fifth trap arrives rather than at 63 when the creature does.

Rainbow crabs are the quiet one. Five permanent traps on the Crown Jewel, fine fish offcuts as bait, and a pestle and mortar to grind catches into stackable paste, a method where the profit is the difference between what the bait costs and what the paste sells for, and where banking the crabs instead lowers your experience substantially.

Then there are the by-products. Birdhouses return bird nests, feathers and raw bird meat every fifty minutes for nothing. Herbiboar hands over grimy herbs, more of them with magic secateurs, and a 1/6,500 chance at Herbi on each harvest. Maniacal monkeys drop a damaged monkey tail on every catch and an intact monkey tail at 1/5,000. Moonlight moths can be jarred for Prayer restoration or sold. Aerial fishing is the only source of the pearl rods, the fish sack and the golden tench.

In quantities, which is what you actually sell: the wiki's rates work out at roughly 460–840 black chinchompas an hour from 73 to 99, depending on level and whether you run an alt, and 615–830 red chinchompas an hour from 80 with tick manipulation. Rainbow crabs come to about 565 an hour with four traps and around 700 with five, each one paste less one fine fish offcut. Herbiboar gives one to three herbs per catch, one more with magic secateurs, at about 66 catches an hour. Price those on the day you sell; the birdhouse runs guide does the same for nests.

Equipment Progression

Two of those rows correct beliefs that persist anyway. Camouflage gear does not help you catch anything; its value is weight and, for the three big-cat sets, damage reduction from the creatures that fight back. And bait and smoking are real but tiny: bait adds 3% to a trap's catch rate and a lit torch adds 2%, which is generally not worth the inventory space or the clicks except at very low levels where a failed trap is a large share of your session.

The guild hunter outfit is the exception worth chasing. It is the only Hunter clothing that improves catching, and its second bonus compounds with the activity that awards it: a better rare creature part rate makes rumours shorter, which makes more rumours, which makes more outfit pieces. If you intend to spend any real time in the guild, finish the set early rather than treating it as a completion goal.

The three Hunter shops (Aleck's Hunter Emporium in Yanille, Imia's Supplies in the Hunter Guild, and the Nardah Hunter Shop) all carry the same stock, so buy at whichever one your route already passes. If you have 71 Magic and Dream Mentor, the Hunter Kit spell on the Lunar spellbook produces a kit containing a bird snare, box trap, butterfly net, impling jar, noose wand, rabbit snare, teasing stick and unlit torch, which quietly solves most of the equipment table above in one cast.

Where to Train

Which Route Should You Actually Pick?

Answer one question first and most of the rest follows: are you willing to hunt in the Wilderness? If yes, your route ends at black chinchompas from 73 and the only remaining decisions are how much tanking gear you are prepared to risk and whether you will run an alt. If no, your route ends at expert and then master rumours, with carnivorous chinchompas as the profitable substitute, and the wiki itself frames rumours as the alternative for exactly this player.

The second question is whether Fishing is also on your list. Drift net fishing splits its experience between the two skills, which makes it a poor Hunter method and an excellent way to close two projects at once. If Fishing is already done, the split is pure loss and you should be somewhere else the moment you notice.

The third question is about your calendar rather than your account. If your play happens in long uninterrupted sessions, the active ladder is straightforwardly better and the trap-count breakpoints are worth potion-boosting through. If your play happens in scattered ten-minute windows, birdhouses are not a compromise; they are the method that best fits the shape of your time, and they are competitive on real-time experience up to level 80 anyway.

Where the answers conflict, let the trap count break the tie. Sitting at 57 with three traps deciding between red salamanders and falconry is a different question from sitting at 60 with four, and the same is true at 79 versus 80 for carnivorous chinchompas. When you are within a few levels of a breakpoint, the correct move is usually to finish reaching it with whatever you are already doing and then reconsider, because the spot you were evaluating is about to play differently.

Finally, if you are within reach of a rumour tier, the tier is worth waiting for. The completion formula is your level plus 5, multiplied by 50 for novice and adept, 55 for expert and 60 for master, so a rumour handed in one level and one tier later is worth meaningfully more for the same hunting: 5,225 for an expert rumour at 90 against 5,760 for a master one at 91. That is not true of any other method here, where an extra level changes nothing until the next breakpoint.

Practical Tips That Actually Matter

Tools worth turning on:

• The Herbiboar Helper plugin on the official client, the only such tool the wiki names outright. It highlights the correct object to search on a herbiboar trail, which is the entire skill ceiling of that method.
• Menu entry reordering, set on the kebbit bushes so the default left click is "attack" rather than "search". At razor-backed kebbits you make that click hundreds of times an hour, and the wrong default costs a tick each time.
• The same reordering on raw beast meat, set to "drop", so clearing your inventory between catches does not open a menu.
• Menu reordering again at net traps, changing the newly-set net's default from "Dismantle" to "Walk here". It stops you accidentally taking down a trap you just reset, and it lets you spam-click under yourself to cancel the set animation.
• Butterfly spawn tile marking at the glacialis and moth spots, so you are clicking a known tile rather than hunting for the creature that just moved.
• The trap-smoking chat message filter, which has been filterable since 2018 and is worth turning off once you have decided that a 2% catch bonus is not part of your method.
• PK Skull Prevention, if you are hunting black chinchompas. It exists to stop you being skull-tricked while you are watching traps rather than watching players.
• A timer for the fifty-minute birdhouse cycle, in whatever form you will actually respond to. The method's entire advantage is that the traps fill without you, and it evaporates if you collect them ninety minutes late.

Common Mistakes

Ironman Notes

Hunter is one of the few skills where an Ironman is barely disadvantaged, because the skill produces its own inputs. Bird nests from birdhouses contain seeds, and seeds are what birdhouses need. Net traps, snares and box traps are returned when collected. Crab traps are built once. The only genuinely consumable equipment is the drift net, and Annette will store two thousand of them for you. The Ironman Hunter guide sums the skill up as training as normal, with the emphasis on what it feeds: Herblore through nests and herbiboar, and Ranged through chinchompas.

Start with Bone Voyage and the initial birdhouse run, and do that run properly: it is not four traps, it is four traps plus three Mushtrees and the Strange Machine. Use the digsite pendant on the southern machine at the House on the Hill to add the Fossil Island teleport to the pendant, and click the Mushtrees at the House on the Hill, Mushroom Meadow and Verdant Valley to register all three. Skip any of that and every subsequent run costs you the walk you were supposed to have removed.

Then solve seeds and logs, since those are the only recurring inputs. Low-level allotment seeds arrive from bird nests, which birdhouses themselves produce, so the loop closes on itself surprisingly quickly; until it does, the Draynor Seed Market and Amelia's shop in the Farming Guild sell cheap seeds (stock varies from 5 to 20 per world, so hop), and Master Farmers drop plenty when pickpocketed. Crafting matters more for an iron than for a main, because assembled bird houses are uncommonly traded: you need a Crafting level one above your Hunter level for each tier, which a birdhouse run alone will not keep up, and 25 Construction for the crafting table 2 that assembles clockworks.

After that, the skill mostly funds itself. Rumours are worth taking seriously on an iron for the rewards rather than the experience: loot sacks of herbs, logs, hunter meat, nests and bones, the guild hunter outfit, and the Huntsman's kit that stores your rings of pursuit. That last one is the difference between razor-backed kebbits being sustainable and being a bank trip every few minutes. The milestones matter too: 10 rumours unlock the basic quetzal whistle blueprint, 25 let you cook graahk, kyatt and pyre fox, 50 add dashing kebbit and antelope meat, and 100 and 250 bring the enhanced and perfected whistle blueprints.

From 80, herbiboar is the iron's herb machine. Each harvest gives one to three herbs, one more with magic secateurs, at about 66 catches an hour, plus 3,300 Herblore XP an hour, and the iron guide recommends 80+ Herblore for better herbs. Bring a herb sack and stamina potions; with both, attentive players get 115,000–130,000 Hunter XP an hour by the iron guide's count. Our Herblore guide shows where those herbs go.

Chinchompas are the iron's Ranged ammunition, which is why most irons hunt them even after the Hunter level stops mattering; our Ranged guide covers chinning. The iron guide's advice is to take birdhouses to 80 before red chinchompas so you lay five traps from the start. Hardcore ironmen cannot realistically hunt black chinchompas in the Wilderness, so for them the late game is rumours, herbiboar and red chinchompas at Tlati.

Ultimate Ironman

The UIM Hunter guide keeps the same methods and changes the logistics. Use noted logs for birdhouses (Wintertodt and Ents are the usual sources) and unnote them at a bank chest, and get a mounted digsite pendant in your house as soon as you can: it needs 82 Construction, boostable from 74. At herbiboar, note the herbs at the tool leprechaun by the hardwood patches and drop fossils in the storage by the mycelium pool. For maniacal monkeys, bring Bones to Bananas tablets, which you can break while riding the stunted demonic gorilla.

Rumours suit a UIM unusually well. Loot sack rewards arrive noted, the Huntsman's kit holds your Hunter gear in one slot, and the imbued quetzal whistle (earned by giving Soar Leader Pitri 10,000 charges' worth of food) has unlimited teleports and can be bought back for 50,000 coins if lost. Our Ultimate Ironman guide covers the storage side of the account.

When Paid Training Makes Sense

The case for buying Hunter rests on what it is blocking. The cost of a gathering skill is hours rather than gold. Worth buying if those hours are the only thing between you and the content you actually log in for; not worth buying if you find the rhythm of it relaxing, which plenty of people genuinely do.

If you do order it, the thing to specify is the route as well as the level range: rumours and birdhouses and fast XP are different jobs on this skill, with different timelines and different supply bills for the same 99. Our Hunter page lists what we need from you, and the work is played rather than botted.

FAQ

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Final Takeaway

Hunter rewards a plan made of two independent parts. The first is birdhouses, started at 9 and collected on their fifty-minute cycle for as long as you can be bothered; they cost you almost no real time and carry the fastest experience in the skill up to level 80. The second is whatever active method your appetite for risk and clicking actually supports: the kebbit and salamander ladder to the seventies, then either the Wilderness for black chinchompas or the Hunter Guild for expert and master rumours, which land within a few hours of each other from 80 to 99.

Between those two, the numbers to keep in your head are small and specific: 40, 60 and 80 for traps, 46, 57, 72 and 91 for rumour tiers, and fifty minutes for the birdhouses. Almost every real decision in a Hunter 1–99 is a question about which of those thresholds you are closest to.

If the level itself is what is blocking you (a diary task at 69, the Hunter Guild at 46, or the 80 that makes herbiboar and the fifth trap possible), that is a training problem rather than a knowledge one, and our Hunter training is played by hand on the same methods described above.

Browse Hunter training, more skill guides, or the full blog for related progression help.