OSRS Mining Guide 1–99: Fastest XP and AFK Training

Why Mining Is Worth 1–99

Mining is the gathering skill where the fastest method and the productive method point in opposite directions, and almost every argument about how to train it comes back to that. Three-tick granite is the quickest experience in the skill from level 45 onwards, and it hands you nothing you would keep: granite is dropped on the ground between mines, and the pickaxe most people use for it destroys a third of what it produces on purpose. The methods that fill a bank instead (pay-dirt at the Motherlode Mine, gem rocks under Shilo Village, runite out of the Blast Mine) are all slower. So the first question is not which method is best. It is whether you want a level or a stockpile, because Mining feeds Smithing and the ore you drop today is the bar you do not have later.

The second oddity is that your pickaxe does not make you better at mining. Tier only changes how often the game rolls to give you a rock: eight ticks apart with a bronze pickaxe, three with a rune one, and 2.83 on average with a dragon. The chance on each of those rolls comes from your Mining level alone, so a bronze pickaxe and a rune pickaxe succeed equally often per roll. Tick manipulation is built on exactly that gap: use swamp tar on a clean herb to set up a three-tick cycle, step to the next rock, and the roll timer is bypassed, which is why the wiki notes that a bronze pickaxe can be made to roll every three ticks instead of eight. It is also why the crystal pickaxe, the best tool in the skill, does nothing at all for the fastest method in the skill.

The rest is geography and admission fees, and they are decided before you mine anything. Granite comes from the Bandit Camp Quarry, which damages you with desert heat until you carry a specific counter for it, or from the Cape Conch mine, which does not, provided you have partly finished Troubled Tortugans. Volcanic Mine wants Bone Voyage and thirty numulites every time you walk in. Gem rocks are barely worth mining until the medium Karamja Diary opens the underground part of the Shilo Village mine. And the prospector kit is not a drop at all. It is a purchase: 180 golden nuggets from Prospector Percy, roughly ten hours of Motherlode Mine, for two and a half per cent.

Bils Services offers hand-done Mining training if you would rather not do the grind yourself. Everything below works without it.

The XP rates below are the OSRS Wiki's figures for efficient play, taken from Pay-to-play Mining training, Motherlode Mine and Volcanic Mine. Expect the low end of each range while you are still learning a method. Grand Exchange prices move daily, so where a method pays we give you quantities (ores, gems, stardust) and leave the pricing to the day you sell.

Pick Your Method

Every rate above comes from the wiki's Pay-to-play Mining training tables, except the Motherlode Mine row, which uses the level table on the Motherlode Mine page. Those are efficient-play numbers: the granite figures assume Varrock armour 2 or better and an uncharged celestial ring, with the full prospector bonus from 75, and the gem rock figures assume a charged glory and the prospector kit. Read the table as a ranking first and a promise second.

Two rows decide most accounts. Granite is two to three times the Motherlode rate at every level where both are available, and Volcanic Mine sits between them for players who will not tick manipulate. For the profit side of the same rocks (gem rocks against the Blast Mine, Motherlode ore values, amethyst), our Mining money making guide does the GP maths so this page can stay on experience.

Quest XP and the Unlocks That Matter

The six-quest opening is the one piece of Mining advice that is almost universal, and it is worth understanding why rather than just doing it. Copper and tin give 17.5 experience a rock and iron gives 35, so levels 1 to 37 are the band where each individual click is worth least. Handing that band to quests you would probably do anyway costs you nothing and skips the part of the skill nobody defends.

Enakhra's Lament deserves a separate mention because its reward is a route rather than a number. It gives the camulet, which teleports you to Enakhra's Temple, a short run north-east of the Bandit Camp Quarry and the standard way in for anyone three-ticking granite in the desert. Finish the hard Desert Diary and you can switch the teleport to the temple entrance beside the quarry instead.

One thing to check before you plan around a diary: the Varrock armour tiers and the Mining cape both grant an extra-ore chance, and neither works everywhere. The armour's double-ore roll does nothing at seven of the methods on this page (Motherlode, the Blast Mine, Volcanic Mine, gem rocks, calcified rocks, crashed stars and infernal shale), and the cape's bonus applies to ore up to adamantite, which means it stops mattering at runite and amethyst.

Mining 1–99 Level Path

Read the fork at 45 as the real structure of this table. Everything above it is agreed on by everyone: quests, then copper or tin for a few minutes, then iron at a triangle. Everything below it splits into a route built around hand speed and a route built around unlocks, and the two never rejoin. Players who drift between them tend to arrive at 70 with neither the Volcanic Mine access nor the three-tick muscle memory.

There is a cheap way to test which side you belong on before you commit fifty levels to it. Three-tick iron works at the Legends' Guild mine and the Isle of Souls mine, both of which have four iron rocks close together, using a herb and tar to start the cycle while you move between rocks. The wiki recommends it specifically as practice for granite, and iron is forgiving: a botched cycle costs you a rock rather than a session. If it feels impossible after an hour, take the iron-to-70 route and stop reading the granite section.

The low-attention bands are deliberately listed as overlapping rather than sequential, because that is how people actually use them. Motherlode from 30, calcified rocks from 41, rubium from 48, stars from 60 and amethyst from 92 are all things you drop into for an evening when the granite cycle is not happening, and none of them is a route to 99 that anyone would defend on speed.

1. 1

   1–37: the six quests, 27,525 XP, no pickaxe needed.

2. 2

   37–45: iron at a triangle spot, dropped, at 45,000–55,000 XP an hour.

3. 3

   45–99, fast route:

   3-tick granite, 87,000 rising to 126,000 XP an hour.

4. 4

   45–70, no-tick route:

   iron, moving into the members' Mining Guild at 60 for 70,000–80,000 an hour.

5. 5

   70–99, no-tick route:

   Volcanic Mine, 68,000 to 84,000 an hour with a dragon pickaxe.

6. 6

   Side tracks for the evenings you cannot concentrate:

   Motherlode from 30, gem rocks from 40, stars from 60, the Blast Mine from 75, amethyst from 92.

Fastest XP Methods

The fastest route has three parts and only one of them is difficult. Clear the six quests for 27,525 experience and level 37. Mine iron at a triangle spot to 45. Then three-tick granite ("3t4g", three-tick four granite) at the Cape Conch mine or the Bandit Camp Quarry, for the remaining fifty-four levels.

The cycle itself is mechanical. Use swamp tar on a clean herb to start a three-tick action, then click a granite rock; timed correctly you skip the delay that normally comes from walking to a rock, and you get a roll every three ticks. Four rocks is the number that keeps the cycle fed. The pieces of granite go on the floor between mines rather than into a bank trip, which means starting the three-tick action, clicking the next rock, dropping the granite and clicking the rock again. Do it one or two pieces at a time rather than in batches, because a late click on the next rock is what breaks everything.

That late click costs more than it looks like it should, and this is the mechanic worth internalising. Moving to the next rock grants you a second roll if the first one failed, so a clean cycle is effectively rolling twice per rock. Click late and you forfeit the extra roll. It is a separate system from the extra-ore effects: Varrock armour and the like apply after a successful roll, not instead of one, so the two do not compensate for each other.

Equipment on this route is mostly about not wasting slots. An infernal pickaxe is strongly recommended if you can afford it: it combusts a third of the granite so you have less to drop, and it pays out passive Smithing experience while you do it (7,700 an hour at 65, 9,700 at 99). A full charge lasts around 960,000 Mining experience and is topped up with smouldering stones or dragon pickaxes. If you are still learning, the wiki's advice is an adamant pickaxe: after a mistake it corrects the skilling timer by itself, so you can move straight to the next rock, where a rune or better pickaxe makes you pause before the cycle resumes. Pickaxe tier otherwise does not matter here, because tick manipulation bypasses the roll timer that tier controls, which is also why the crystal pickaxe brings no benefit whatsoever to this specific method.

The last few percent comes from the client rather than the game. Shrink the window, use the resizable Modern layout, zoom in and turn the camera south so the trip from your inventory to the rocks is as short as possible, and turn data orbs off so they cannot eat a click aimed at the southernmost rock. Bird snares, box traps or rabbit snares work in place of tar and herbs for the three-tick action, and snares have the advantage of stacking in large quantities cheaply, so a mistimed cycle costs you almost nothing.

In numbers, the wiki's granite table runs from 87,000 XP an hour at 45 to 109,000 at 75 and 126,000 at 99, and it puts an experienced player who makes the odd mistake at 120,000–125,000 at 99. The tick-perfect ceiling is about 134,000. Without tick manipulation granite manages about 63,000 at best, which is below the 70,000–80,000 that plain iron gives in the Mining Guild, so if you will not tick manipulate, the fast answer is iron to 70 and then Volcanic Mine, not slow granite.

Motherlode Mine vs 3-Tick Granite

This is the question most players are really asking when they search for a Mining route: the AFK method or the fast one. The two sit at opposite ends of the skill, with Volcanic Mine in the middle for anyone who wants speed without the three-tick cycle. Here is the 70–99 stretch, where most of the experience lives.

Verdict: pick 3-tick granite if you will sit in a three-tick cycle and want 99 in about half the hours; pick Motherlode if you want low attention and ore in the bank and can accept roughly twice the time; pick Volcanic Mine from 70 if you want neither extreme.

The hours come from dividing each level band's experience by the wiki rate at its start and end, so the low figure assumes you hold the top rate. Motherlode numbers are from the Motherlode Mine page and assume the upper level from 57, a dragon pickaxe from 61, the prospector kit as soon as you can buy it and the upper hopper unlocked. Granite numbers assume Varrock armour 2, an uncharged celestial ring and the full prospector bonus from 75.

Motherlode earns its place for reasons the hours do not show. It is the only one of the three that funds itself: nuggets buy the prospector kit, the coal bag and the gem bag, and ironmen get coal, gold and mithril for the Blast Furnace. A golden nugget turns up once per 32 pay-dirt on average, which is why the 180-nugget kit takes about ten hours. If you go the Volcanic Mine way, pay the one-time 3,000 numulites rather than 30 a game: it breaks even after 100 visits, which a 70–99 run passes many times over.

Hours to 99 Mining

XP figures come from the wiki's experience table: 27,473 for level 37, 737,627 for 70 and 13,034,431 for 99. The 3-tick and no-tick totals add the iron bands (about 0.6–0.8 hours from 37 to 45, about 4.5–5.5 hours from 37 to 60, then 5.8–6.6 hours in the guild to 70) to the granite or Volcanic Mine bands. Halfway to 99 is level 92, so most of every number in that table is spent above 90.

The practical reading: the fast route is roughly a hundred and fifteen hours of play after the quests, and the no-tick route adds about fifty-five more with a dragon pickaxe, or closer to forty with a crystal one. Stars and Motherlode are not routes to 99 on their own so much as hours you collect on evenings when nothing else is happening.

Cheapest / Budget Approach

Mining is close to free to train, and the interesting thing about its budget route is that the usual sacrifice, a worse tool, costs you less here than in any other gathering skill. Pickaxe tier changes only the interval between rolls, never the chance on a roll, so a cheap pickaxe makes rocks arrive less often rather than less reliably. The gap is real at eight ticks against three, but it is a speed penalty, not a competence one, and it disappears entirely the moment you tick manipulate.

Beyond the pickaxe the affordable route has almost no bill. The 27,525 experience from the opening quests costs time you were spending on quests anyway. Copper, tin and iron need nothing. The Mining Guild costs 60 Mining and a run from Falador. Crashed stars cost nothing but the scouting, and hand back stardust you can spend on a celestial ring (2,000 stardust, about two and a half hours of stars at 60–70 with a dragon pickaxe). The wiki says the ring is worth owning uncharged, because the invisible +4 to your level applies whether or not you feed it.

If you do tick manipulate, the consumables are the only real line item, and bird snares are the answer rather than logs: they stack in bulk for very little, so you can afford to fumble cycles while you learn. The genuinely expensive optional purchase is the infernal pickaxe, which needs 85 Smithing to make and is charged with smouldering stones or dragon pickaxes. It is a convenience (fewer pieces of granite to drop, some free Smithing experience), and skipping it slows you rather than stopping you.

The item that most often gets bought when it should not is the prospector kit. It is 180 nuggets for 2.5%, and the wiki's own verdict is that it does not pay for itself in time if your plan is 99 by the fastest methods. If you happen to be at Motherlode for the ore anyway, the nuggets accumulate for free and the maths changes; going to Motherlode specifically to buy an experience bonus for granite mining is the classic budget mistake in this skill.

If you would rather the skill paid for itself, bank instead of dropping and accept the slower bar. Motherlode is the comfortable version, at about 570 ores an hour at level 70 and 845 at 99 on the wiki's assumptions, coal, gold and mithril, with adamantite and a little runite joining as your level climbs. Banked iron is the false economy: the wiki notes it slows your experience a lot and iron is not worth much. Crystal pickaxes and expert mining gloves are the long-term purchases, and both only pay back if you mine for many hours with them.

AFK & Lower-Intensity Options

Crashed stars are the lowest-attention Mining in the game, and by some distance. Each tier of a star can be mined for a full seven minutes without any input, and you only click again when it degrades a tier. A star lasts 42 to 63 minutes depending on how big it was when it landed, which means one find can cover most of an hour with a handful of clicks in total.

The catch is finding one. Stars fall at a random spot from a fixed list, roughly one per world every ninety minutes, and some of those spots are in the Wilderness or otherwise unpleasant. An oak telescope or better in a house study gives you a window and a region to work from, and world-hopping or a clan that shares scouting fills the rest. You also need something planned for the moment a star runs out, because the method has hard stops built into it in a way that a rock face does not.

For uninterrupted low-attention hours, the Motherlode Mine is the sensible default from 30 upwards. Veins last 36 to 40 seconds on the upper level, the sack collects the output while you work, and the only rhythm to keep is vein, hopper, vein. Calcified rocks in Cam Torum give around 50 to 60 seconds of AFK per vein, and they occasionally ooze water. Mining a vein while it oozes raises your success rate, so the one thing worth watching for is the only thing you need to watch for.

Rubium rocks and amethyst round out the quiet end. Rubium splinters stack in your inventory, so you can ignore the bank chest on Charred Island entirely and just keep mining. Amethyst at 92 is the slowest experience worth naming and the least demanding: expert mining gloves save the crystals from depleting, which means longer stretches at the same spot.

Put numbers on that list and the trade is plain. Stars give 24,900–29,800 XP an hour with a dragon pickaxe, Motherlode 48,000 at 70 and 64,000 at 99, calcified rocks 23,500–49,000 when mined normally, rubium about 39,000 to 64,000, and amethyst 20,000–25,000. None of them comes near granite's 126,000; they compete on how little they ask of you, and Motherlode is the only one of them that also builds a bank of ore.

The Profitable Route

The profitable methods in Mining are a different list from the fast ones, and the divide is unusually clean. Nothing about three-ticking granite produces income: the granite goes on the floor, and an infernal pickaxe deliberately burns a third of it. Volcanic Mine pays in reward points rather than goods. If you want the skill to fund something, you have to choose against the experience.

The Blast Mine is the method built for this. From 75 you start pulling runite out of it, and runite is what makes the method worth the dynamite, the chisel and the tinderbox you have to bring. It is also unusual in treating you as ten levels higher than you are, which is exactly why runite arrives at 75 instead of 85, and the dragon pickaxe special attack is worth carrying purely to nudge that roll upward, even though you do not otherwise need a pickaxe there. The wiki's rates assume around 330 dynamite an hour.

Gem rocks are the other serious answer, and they are the one method where fast and profitable overlap: with tick manipulation they are comparable to granite while also producing gems. The prerequisites are specific: the medium Karamja Diary for the underground part of Shilo Village, a charged amulet of glory for the best rates, and a gem bag or the upgraded gem sack so you are not constantly banking. At top rates the wiki counts about 1,650 uncut gems an hour, roughly 47% opals, 23% jades and 12% red topazes, with sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds making up the rest. They are also, on average, the quickest route to the rock golem.

The Motherlode Mine occupies its own category, because its output is ores you did not choose plus nuggets you spend inside the mine. Crushed infernal shale is the high-effort extreme: untradeable until you crush it with a hammer and chisel, worth carrying only if you are willing to run Jim's wet cloth and tick manipulate, and worthless as an experience method otherwise. The wiki puts the tick-manipulated version at more than 1,600 crushed shale an hour. For GP per hour on each of these, and the head-to-head between gem rocks and the Blast Mine, see our Mining money making guide.

Equipment Progression

The prospector kit has an internal order that is easy to get wrong when you are buying pieces one at a time. Per nugget spent, the jacket is the best value, then the legs, then the helmet, then the boots. The boots cost 30 nuggets for 0.2%, which is the worst rate in the set. Buy in that order if you are buying at all. And if you own Varrock armour 4, it counts as a prospector jacket, so the 60 nuggets you were going to spend on the jacket should go somewhere else.

Desert heat is the piece of equipment logic unique to granite, and it only applies at the Bandit Camp Quarry. The counters are a Desert amulet 4, a Hitpoints cape with a regen bracelet, which simply outheals the damage, humidified waterskins, or the circlet of water. The circlet is the trap: it occupies your head slot, which costs you the prospector helmet's 0.4% and the set bonus of 0.5%. Cape Conch sidesteps all of this, which is most of why it is the recommended granite spot.

The celestial ring has one trap of its own. Charged, it adds roughly 10,000–14,000 XP an hour to efficient level-99 granite, but that play burns about 1,700–1,900 charges an hour, and an hour of stars at the best rate (961 stardust) refills only 30–34 minutes of them. The wiki's conclusion is that collecting stardust purely to charge the ring does not raise your combined rate over granite with an uncharged ring. Own it; do not farm charges for it.

Read the pickaxe table as a table of intervals, not of power. Every tier from bronze to crystal has exactly the same chance of producing a rock on any given roll; what you are buying is a shorter wait between rolls. The Attack level listed against each pickaxe is only needed to wield it as a weapon: you can mine with a pickaxe you cannot equip, sitting in your inventory. And the entire column stops mattering if you tick manipulate, because the three-tick cycle overrides the interval the tier controls.

Where to Train

Which Route Should You Actually Pick?

Answer one question honestly and most of this guide collapses to a single route: are you actually going to tick manipulate for fifty-four levels? Not whether you can learn it (nearly anyone can) but whether you will sit in a three-tick cycle with four rocks and a drop between each mine, for the length of a 99. If the answer is yes, the route is quests, iron to 45, granite to 99, and you do not need to read about anything else. If it is no, the route is quests, iron to 70 with the Mining Guild from 60, then Volcanic Mine. Those are the two spines. Everything else on this page is a detour.

Test the answer rather than guessing it. Three-tick iron at the Legends' Guild mine or the Isle of Souls mine uses the same cycle on cheaper rocks, and it is explicitly recommended as practice before granite. An hour there tells you what fifty levels of granite would feel like, and it costs you almost nothing because iron is fast anyway at those levels.

The second question is what you want in your bank at the end, because Mining is the skill where that changes the method rather than the mood. If you need ore for Smithing, three-ticking granite gives you nothing and an infernal pickaxe actively destroys a third of what you mine. Motherlode gives you ores you did not pick, the Blast Mine gives you runite from 75, and gem rocks give you gems that are worth banking with a gem bag. Choosing the fast route and then regretting the empty bank is the most common version of this mistake; choosing the profitable route and then resenting the slower bar is the second. Our Smithing guide shows how much ore the other skill actually wants.

The third question is which unlocks you already hold, and it decides more than people expect. Bone Voyage or no Bone Voyage is the difference between the non-tick route working at 70 and stalling on iron. Medium Karamja Diary or not is the difference between gem rocks being a real method and being a waste of an evening. Troubled Tortugans decides whether granite involves a head-slot compromise. Before you plan around a method, check the requirement line: the level is rarely the thing standing in your way.

If you cannot give the screen your attention, none of the above applies and the answer is a different shape. Crashed stars ask for a click every seven minutes; Motherlode asks for a rhythm; calcified rocks and rubium rocks ask for very little. Those are the methods to use for the hours you have rather than the hours you wish you had, and they are worth treating as a deliberate second track rather than as a failure to do granite.

Practical Tips That Actually Matter

• Learn granite with an adamant pickaxe. The wiki notes it corrects the skilling timer after a mistake, so a fumble costs you one roll instead of a pause; switch to the infernal pickaxe once the cycle is clean.
• Stack the cheap bonuses before the expensive ones: Varrock armour 2 for granite, an uncharged celestial ring for the invisible +4, then the prospector kit only if the nuggets are coming anyway.
• Decide early whether this 99 is for the cape or for Smithing ore. The two routes share almost nothing after level 45.

Tools worth turning on:

• Shift-click dropping, switched on under Options before your first iron trip. Every fast method on this page assumes the ore never reaches a bank, and on mobile the equivalent is the tap-drop toggle.
• The resizable Modern client layout, shrunk small, zoomed in and pointed south. The wiki treats this as part of the granite method rather than as a preference, because it shortens the mouse travel between your inventory and the rocks on every single cycle.
• Data orbs turned off. They sit exactly where a misclick on the southernmost granite rock happens, and one misclick costs you the cycle.
• An oak telescope or better in a house study, if you intend to mine crashed stars. It gives you the window and the region a star will fall in, which converts scouting from luck into a plan.
• The Grouping interface's Volcanic Mine clan chat, and world 323. Solo Volcanic Mine is possible and slower; the whole method is balanced around a team of three to five, so finding one is the first step rather than a nicety.
• Tick counters and timing overlays, if your client's plugin list carries them. Nothing here requires one, but three-tick granite is a fixed cycle and a counter tells you whether your rhythm slipped rather than leaving you to infer it from a bad hour.
• A gem bag or gem sack, and a coal bag. Not client tools, but they do the same job as one: fewer interruptions to bank, which is most of the difference between a good and a bad hour at Shilo Village or Motherlode.

Common Mistakes

Ironman Notes

Mining on an Ironman is the front end of Smithing, so the question of whether to drop the ore answers itself differently than it does on a main. Powermining iron is still the fast route to a level, but the level is not the point if your account needs bars. The wiki's compromise is the members' Mining Guild: a triangle of iron rocks beside a bank chest, with respawns halved so the banking costs you steps rather than trips. Below 60, the Monastery Mine works with an Ardougne cloak teleport in and a ring of dueling out to Castle Wars. The Ironman Mining guide adds that from 61 a dragon pickaxe gets you over 82,000 XP an hour on guild iron, which is also an effective way to earn the expert mining gloves.

A practical iron route: quests to 37, iron to 45, then granite if you will tick manipulate. Spend a block at the Motherlode Mine somewhere after 55, where the wiki calls it moderately efficient, for the coal bag, the gem bag and the prospector kit, and treat the coal, gold and mithril as Blast Furnace stock. The iron guide only calls Volcanic Mine viable from 85 and advises getting the prospector kit first. Its points also buy ore packs at 4,000 points each, and every pack has a 1% chance of a broken dragon pickaxe that Nurmof repairs for 2,500,000 coins; otherwise a dragon pickaxe is a drop from the Wilderness bosses, the Kalphite Queen or, very rarely, the King Black Dragon.

Several methods exist mostly for irons. Gem rocks without tick manipulation are slow and still worth doing if you want opals, jades or red topazes, because there is no other reasonable source, and you will want gems for expeditious bracelets at some point. Calcified rocks in Cam Torum hand you blessed bone shards alongside the Mining experience, which is Prayer training arriving from a skill that has no business providing it. Volcanic ash is a Mining job too, since ultracompost needs it. And the Camdozaal barronite rocks, minable from 14, hand out deposits that break down into the broken Imcando hammer, a permanent quality-of-life item rather than a stat.

Stars matter more on an iron than on a main. The celestial ring is 2,000 stardust, and after that a bag full of gems costs 300 stardust for 40 uncut gems, which the wiki calls a low-risk way to get dragonstones from a low level. Ring first, then gem bags for Crafting.

Worth knowing about the prospector kit: Prospector Percy is not the only shop that sells it. The Volcanic Mine reward shop will trade the set for 120,000 points, which matters if you were going to be at Volcanic Mine for the experience anyway. The set also sells back to Percy for 144 nuggets of the 180 you paid, so an iron who buys it for the master clue step and the hard Falador Diary helmet is not stuck with it.

The mining gloves are the Ironman purchase most people skip and should not. Bought from Belona at the Mining Guild Mineral Exchange with unidentified minerals from the members' area, each tier stops specific rocks from depleting: the base pair covers iron, silver, coal and gold, the superior pair adds mithril and adamantite, and the expert pair adds sandstone, runite and amethyst while stacking the protection on everything below. For an account that mines to supply itself rather than to level, that is more useful than any experience bonus in the skill.

Ultimate Ironman

The UIM Mining guide is blunt: on an Ultimate Ironman the skill is mostly powermining, because you cannot bank what you mine. Motherlode is not recommended for that reason, since the pay-dirt's ores have nowhere to go. Iron and granite need almost no inventory, so pair them with a Farming run or a Superheat Item session that turns iron ore into bars on a nearby anvil. Volcanic Mine is the low-effort option from 70, but plan the healing: noted Saradomin brews or cooked food, and an ornate rejuvenation pool in your house to save supplies.

Calcified rocks are the friendliest UIM method in the skill. The wiki notes the area is safe and does not need an empty inventory, so you can keep your items on you, and the bone shards stack for later Prayer. Passive Mining comes from elsewhere too: blood runes at the dense essence mine give about 12,000 Mining XP per 100,000 Runecraft XP, and sandstone for lantern lenses about 14,000 per 100,000 Crafting. Our Ultimate Ironman guide covers the storage side.

Hardcore Ironman and free-to-play

On a Hardcore, the wiki marks the Volcanic Mine as a dangerous activity, so falling into lava or a bad game is a real death, status included. Skip the Wilderness star spots and the Resource Area triangle in level 51 Wilderness, and treat the dragons on the way to rubium as a gear check rather than a run-past. Our HCIM guide lists the other activities that count.

In free-to-play, the F2P Mining training route is Doric's Quest (1,300 XP, 1 to 10), copper or tin to 15, then iron to 99. The wiki puts iron at around 50,000 an hour at 41 and 52,500 from 61, when every swing succeeds. That is 372,344 iron ore and roughly 250 hours for 15–99. The same page calls runite at 85 one of the fastest free-to-play money makers, which is the better reason to push the level.

When Paid Training Makes Sense

The case for buying Mining 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: fastest XP and AFK are different jobs on this skill, with different timelines and different supply bills for the same 99. Our Mining page lists what we need from you, and the work is played rather than botted.

FAQ

Still stuck on a mechanic? Ask the team on our Discord, it is free.

Final Takeaway

Mining resolves into two clear routes and a shelf of alternatives. Clear the six quests for 27,525 experience and level 37, mine iron at a triangle to 45, and then decide once: three-tick granite for the fastest 99 in the skill, about 110–116 hours, or iron to 70 with the Mining Guild from 60 and then the Volcanic Mine, about 164–171. Both work. The failure mode is starting one and finishing neither, usually because Bone Voyage was never done and the granite cycle never stuck.

Everything else on this page is a second track rather than a competitor. Motherlode for the evenings you cannot concentrate, crashed stars for the ones where you can barely click, the Blast Mine from 75 and gem rocks from 40 for the hours you want the bank to grow instead of the bar. Keep the two tracks separate in your head and you will stop being disappointed by whichever one you are on. For what those ores and gems are worth, the Mining money making guide has the GP side.

The thing worth deciding before you start is what the level is for. If it is Smithing, mine for ore and accept the slower bar. If it is the cape, the granite cycle is what stands between you and it, and if fifty-four levels of three-ticking is not a thing you will do, our Mining training is the alternative. Tell us whether you want the granite route or the iron-and-Volcanic-Mine route, because they finish in different times and leave different things in your bank.

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