OSRS Kraken Guide: 87 Slayer, Best Gear, Strategy & Drops

Kraken Requirements and How the Fight Works

The Kraken is the boss version of cave krakens, found in Kraken Cove (fairy ring AKQ, then run west). You need 87 Slayer, which cannot be boosted, and a Kraken or cave kraken task; masters only hand out cave krakens once you also have 50 Magic. Fight it with magic, because melee cannot reach it and ranged deals a seventh of its normal damage.

Every kill starts with a fishing explosive on the big whirlpool (60 coins each from any Slayer master). Then turn Auto Retaliate off, ignore the four tentacles and keep your hitpoints above 45. Its typeless attack hits up to 28 and protection prayers do nothing against it, so bring healing instead: a Sanguinesti staff, blood spells, or the food it drops.

What players come for is the trident of the seas and the kraken tentacle, two items that sit in a lot of accounts for a very long time. The trident is a rewarding early magic weapon and the tentacle upgrades a whip, so this is a boss that tends to be visited early in a player's high-level Slayer career and then revisited whenever cave krakens come up again. It is also popular enough that finding an empty world is a genuine part of the trip, which the game solves by selling you a private instance for 25,000 coins.

The 25,000-coin instance also keeps your drops on the floor for three hours instead of two minutes, so you can stack food and loot between kills.

Is Kraken the Right Fight for You Yet?

This is the boss to send a newer high-level Slayer account to. The wiki's suggested skills are modest, the Kraken's accuracy is poor enough that it rarely threatens a prepared player, and the failure state is usually a wasted trip rather than a death. What it does require is a magic setup you are willing to commit to, because ranged is crippled here and melee cannot reach the boss at all.

You are ready for this fight if:

• You have 87 Slayer and a cave kraken task. The task itself needs 50 Magic to be assigned, which tells you something about the intended style.
• You can cast at 75 Magic or above with a powered staff or a decent autocast weapon.
• You have around 70 Defence and 75 Hitpoints, which the strategy page lists as the comfortable floor.
• You are willing to fight in something other than robes. The recommendation is blunt: unless your magic armour is virtus or ancestral, wear your best ranged armour instead.

Come back later if any of these are true:

• Your plan is to range it. Ranged attacks deal one seventh of their normal damage against the Kraken, with accuracy unaffected, which means you will hit consistently for almost nothing.
• Your plan is to melee it. It cannot be reached by melee at all.
• You are relying on protection prayers to keep your health topped up. The Kraken's attack is typeless and prayer does nothing against it.
• You have no way to get to Kraken Cove other than running. The fairy ring is the trip, and without it the travel time swamps the kill time.

Access Requirements

Kraken is gated behind 87 Slayer + cave kraken task.

87 Slayer + cave kraken task also tends to sit alongside the other Slayer boss gates, so it is usually cheaper to clear them together than to come back for each one. The boss requirements checklist lists them by group.

Location and How to Get There

Kraken is found in the Kraken Cove.

Travel to the Kraken Cove and enter the instanced whirlpool. You need a Kraken or cave kraken task, and cave krakens additionally require 50 Magic, a requirement people forget because the Slayer level is the headline.

Fairy ring code AKQ, then run west to the dungeon entrance. Once inside Kraken Cove, run west again to find the entrance to the Kraken's own lair. That is the whole trip, and it is short enough that the return teleport matters more than the outbound one.

The wiki's loadout carries two separate teleports for a reason: one out, such as a house tablet, explorer's ring 4, construction cape or max cape, and one back to the cove, such as a Piscatoris teleport, or a house tablet with a fairy ring built in your house. Without the elite Lumbridge and Draynor diary you will also need a dramen staff to use fairy rings at all.

A private instance costs 25,000 coins and lasts until you leave or log out. The obvious benefit is not having to hop for an empty world; the less obvious one is the loot timer, and it is the bigger of the two.

Cave Kraken Task: Boss or Regular Cave Krakens?

A cave kraken task can be spent on the boss or on the regular cave krakens in the same cove. Most players take the boss; the wiki calls it the better choice for the task because the cave krakens' drop table is much less lucrative.

Ironmen chasing a first trident are the exception, since the uncharged trident is the more common of the two. For those trips, earth spells with Protect from Magic on are the simple setup.

Task sizes are 30 to 50 from Chaeldar, 80 to 100 from Konar, and 100 to 120 from Nieve and Duradel. The Krack On unlock (100 Slayer points) raises that to 150 to 200.

Recommended Stats and Gear at Three Budgets

These are the wiki's suggested skills rather than gates, and the Kraken is unusually honest about it: a player at the bottom of this list kills it, just more slowly. The only genuinely fixed number is 87 Slayer.

The single most useful line on the wiki's equipment section is the one that contradicts the heading. Magic armour gives you less defence against the Kraken's attack, and the damage bonus from mid-tier robes does not repay that. The recommendation is explicit: bring magic armour only if it is virtus or ancestral, and otherwise wear your best ranged armour. A Masori or Karil's setup with an occult necklace is a better Kraken outfit than a full set of Ahrim's.

That advice follows from how the attack resolves. It is a magical ranged attack, meaning accuracy is rolled against your magic defence bonuses, so the stat you are protecting is exactly the one robes are worst at providing.

Your special attack weapon is really a resource choice rather than a damage choice, and it determines your whole inventory. An Eldritch nightmare staff restores prayer, which means you can bring very few prayer potions or none at all. A toxic blowpipe restores health, which frees the food slots and lets you carry far more prayer potions instead. Pick one and build the inventory around it rather than bringing a bit of everything.

A Sanguinesti staff sits in an odd category here: it heals roughly 21 hitpoints across a Kraken kill, which the wiki notes may make it worth carrying as an additional weapon, or outright better than the alternatives if you are taking a lot of damage.

Inventory and Supplies

The Kraken feeds you as you go (it regularly drops five edible seaweed or five sharks), which is why the instance matters more than its price suggests. Outside an instance, dropped items vanish after two minutes and become visible to other players after one, so food juggling is a chore performed under a timer. Inside a Kraken Cove instance, ground items last three hours, and the juggling becomes trivial.

Blood Barrage or Blood Blitz makes food genuinely optional. It is expensive and it deals less damage than earth spells, so the sensible version is to run a powered staff for most of the kill and switch to blood spells when you need topping up. You can even cast on the Kraken while it is submerged and still get the heal.

Prayer and Spellbook

There is no protection prayer to hold at the Kraken, and that is the fact worth stating first because it inverts the habit every other Slayer boss builds. Both the Kraken and its tentacles attack with a typeless magical ranged attack, and typeless means protection prayers have no effect whatsoever. Nothing you do with the prayer tab reduces the damage you take here.

What prayer is for is offence and convenience. Augury on the way in, Preserve if you are running long trips, and prayer potions sized to that rather than to a survival plan. This is why the wiki's inventory guidance treats prayer potions as roughly eight to ten and immediately notes that an Eldritch nightmare staff special can reduce that to nearly zero.

The Kraken's accuracy is the reason all of this is survivable. Despite a maximum hit of 28 it is described as fairly inaccurate even against a player in magic robes; the tentacles are the accurate ones, and they only hit for 2 apiece. Damage arrives before the projectile visually reaches you, so there is no window in which a reaction would have helped even if prayer worked.

Mechanics That Decide the Fight

The instance is a mechanic in everything but name. For 25,000 coins you get a private version of the cove that lasts until you leave or log out, and inside it ground items persist for three hours instead of two minutes. Since the Kraken regularly drops five edible seaweed or five sharks, that turns your food supply from something you juggle against a timer into something you pick up when convenient.

It has a hard edge, though. Everything left on the floor when you exit the instance, whether by leaving, dying or logging out, is permanently lost. If you die, the items you were carrying go to a gravestone outside the instance, but anything you had stacked on the ground does not.

Because there is nothing to react to, the stamina-based Combat Achievements are the only part of this boss that resembles a challenge. The wiki recommends a Sanguinesti staff or blood spells for those, on the grounds that passive healing removes your dependence on picking up food drops between kills.

Where Kraken Sits in Progression

Kraken is the entry point for the Slayer boss group, so there is nothing easier here to warm up on. Above it sit Cerberus and Skotizo.

Fight Strategy: Explosive, Auto Retaliate Off, Ignore Tentacles

1. 1

   Turn Auto Retaliate off before you go anywhere near the water.

2. 2

   Decide on the instance.

   If you plan to stay for more than a handful of kills, pay the 25,000 coins.

3. 3

   Use a fishing explosive on the large whirlpool.

   The Kraken and all four tentacles surface at once.

4. 4

   Attack the Kraken and only the Kraken.

   With Auto Retaliate off you will start hitting it automatically the moment it becomes vulnerable.

5. 5

   Eat through the tentacle chip rather than dealing with it, and keep your health above 45.

6. 6

   Collect the food drops between kills.

   The instance timer means you can do this at your own pace.

7. 7

   Slip on a bracelet of slaughter before the last hit if you are extending the task.

The whole fight is one decision repeated: keep attacking the boss and stop worrying about everything else on screen. Four tentacles hitting you for 2 apiece looks alarming in the chat box and amounts to very little, while the Kraken's 28 arrives rarely enough that the strategy page describes killing you as requiring extreme bad luck.

If you arrive without an explosive, the fallback is a chore rather than a challenge. Disturb the four small whirlpools, each of which spawns an Enormous Tentacle, and only then disturb the large one. Reaching the back two from the bridge without walking needs a ranged weapon with at least seven tiles of range, which is the one situation where a bow earns its inventory slot at this boss.

Positioning and Movement

There is no positioning to speak of during the fight, which is unusual enough to be worth saying explicitly rather than leaving as an absence. Nothing the Kraken does is affected by where you stand, and there is no safespot to find because there is no attack to hide from.

The bridge only matters before the fight starts. If you are disturbing whirlpools manually, the back two are the reason range matters: a weapon reaching seven tiles or more covers them from where you are standing.

Where you should be thinking about position is the ground. Loot piles up quickly at this boss, and in an instance you have three hours to sort it out. Outside one, you have two minutes before it disappears and one before somebody else can see it.

Beginner Plan, Then the Advanced One

Your first trips

1. 1

   Buy a stack of fishing explosives from your Slayer master before you go.

   At 60 coins each they are the cheapest quality-of-life purchase in the game, and without them every kill starts with a four-whirlpool errand.

2. 2

   Wear ranged armour with an occult necklace rather than a full set of robes.

   It is counter-intuitive and it is what the strategy page recommends for anything below virtus.

3. 3

   Turn Auto Retaliate off, then check that it is actually off.

   Nearly every complaint about slow Kraken kills traces back to this.

4. 4

   Stay above 45 hitpoints and otherwise ignore the tentacles entirely.

   Killing them is a trap: they have high hitpoints and your Slayer bonus does not apply to them.

5. 5

   Pay for the instance on your first proper trip.

   It is worth it for the loot timer alone, and it removes the world-hopping that makes this boss tedious.

Once the kill is boring

• Let your special attack weapon dictate the inventory rather than the other way round. An Eldritch nightmare staff restoring prayer means almost no prayer potions; a blowpipe restoring health means almost no food and a stack of restores in the space it saved.
• Consider blood spells for the long trips. Blood Barrage or Blood Blitz makes food optional, costs more and deals less than earth spells, and can be cast on the Kraken even while it is submerged, so the heal is available at moments when nothing else is.
• Track your food drops rather than your food supply. Five sharks or five edible seaweed arriving regularly means a well-run trip is limited by prayer or by boredom, not by inventory space.
• For the stamina Combat Achievements, build for uptime rather than damage. A Sanguinesti staff healing roughly 21 hitpoints per kill is doing more for a hundred-tentacle attempt than a slightly higher maximum hit would.

Drops and What Kraken Is Worth

The trident of the seas and the kraken tentacle are the reason this task gets extended rather than skipped. Both are the kind of drop that changes what an account can do rather than what it is worth, which is why the Kraken keeps showing up in progression guides long after players have outgrown its difficulty.

The steady drops matter more here than at most bosses because they fund the trip directly. Five sharks or five edible seaweed arriving regularly is the reason a Kraken trip can outlast the food you brought, and it is the argument for the instance in one line.

No values or rates are printed here. Both change, and the wiki's drop table is the version that stays current.

Drops worth the trip: trident of the seas and kraken tentacle. Whether that is worth your time depends on how many kills an hour you get, and that comes down to how quickly you restart each kill and how long your supplies last rather than to your gear list.

Combat Achievements

The Kraken's Combat Achievements are endurance tasks rather than skill tests, which follows from a fight with nothing to execute. One Hundred Tentacles is the representative example, and the strategy page's advice for that family of tasks is specific: run a Sanguinesti staff or blood spells so that passive healing carries you, rather than depending on picking up the boss's food drops between kills.

Task lists move with updates, so read the current list in game.

Combat Achievements guide

Ironman Notes

Slayer masters who assign Kraken: Chaeldar, Konar, Nieve, Duradel. Each kill is 255 Slayer XP.

Without a Grand Exchange, trident of the seas, kraken tentacle has to be earned rather than bought, and this is the fastest table it sits on.

The Kraken is a straightforwardly good Ironman target, because the two things it asks for are things an Ironman can make. Fishing explosives come from any Slayer master for 60 coins, and the food supply is the boss itself: five sharks or five edible seaweed at a time.

The instance fee is the only real cost, and it is the one worth paying. Three-hour ground item persistence means an Ironman can bank the food drops properly instead of losing half of them to the two-minute timer.

On gear, the armour advice works in an Ironman's favour. Ranged armour with an occult necklace beats mid-tier robes here, and most Ironman accounts have the ranged set long before they have anything approaching virtus.

Common Mistakes and Death Causes

If you do die, your carried items go to a gravestone outside the instance, which is a considerably softer landing than most instanced bosses offer. What does not survive is anything you had piled on the ground, so a death costs you the loot you were saving up more often than it costs you your gear.

Because there is no attack pattern to lose track of, there is also no such thing as a fight that has gone wrong here. If your supplies are thin, finish the kill, pick up the drops, and teleport. Nothing escalates.

FAQ

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