Fast and Free Ways to 99 Farming in OSRS
- Theoatrix
- 21 minutes ago
- 5 min read
What's going on guys, my names Theoatrix and today I'm going through the fast and free ways to 99 farming in Old School Runescape.
Guide Outline
If you would prefer to watch a video-version of this guide, I have linked that below. Otherwise, continue scrolling to read the written-version of this guide.
Tithe Farm
The absolute fastest way to 99 farming, in terms of real time, is by farming at the Tithe Farm. This takes 5 days of nonstop farming to reach 99, whereas with tree runs, you need to wait at least a month.
At the Tithe Farm, the XP rates cap out at 110k XP per hour if you're wearing the full farmers outfit. Without the outfit, its more like 105k XP per hour.
A major benefit of the Tithe Farm is that it doesn't cost anything to train there… You get all of the seeds given to you, and over the years, Jagex has updated the Tithe Farm to make it easier. In may of 2023, solo instances were added, then in may of 2024, Jagex made it so plants no longer decay, which is huge. With these updates, they also added herb and seed boxes to the rewards shop, which makes it a potentially profitable mini game to play.
Tree Runs
While Tithe Farm is the fastest in terms of actual time, completing tree runs is effectively the fastest way to level up efficiently.
This is because you can spend a few minutes each day doing a tree run, for a massive chunk of experience. At high farming levels, the XP rates are effectively over 1 mil per hour, but can only be done in bursts.
Fruit Trees
Fruit trees are particularly cheap and fast, where every fruit tree is profitable to plant if you pick the fruit, except for dragon fruits.
Papaya fruit trees are quite profitable, where you'll make over 20 mil getting to 99 with them, as long as you pick the papayas.
Regular Trees
In terms of regular trees, magics are extremely expensive, and yews are semi expensive, but maple trees are only 1 GP per XP, so about 13 mil cost for 99 if you solely did maples. Maple trees give over 3k XP per patch, and they grow faster but provide less experience.
Hardwood Trees
Hardwoods are another set of trees that don't cost a lot of money. with mahoganies, they cost under 1 GP per XP, so about 10 mil for 99 farming, and they give 15k XP per patch. There's also the new hardwood patch in Varlamore, which can increase the amount of XP you can get from these trees. Teaks are also very cheap, but give less experience when compared to mahoganies. The only downside of hardwood trees is they take a long time to grow, with 74.6 hours for teaks and 85.3 hours for mahoganies.
Special Trees
There are some special trees you can plant that are also great XP and are cheap.
calquat trees is one of them, unlocked at 72 farming and with completion of the Tai Bwo Wannai trio quest. These give 12 thousand XP per harvest, and a calquat seed currently costs 132 GP, so they are super cheap. The downside is that there's only 1 calquat patch in the entire game.
Celastrus trees, unlocked at 85 farming, are another very cheap tree to plant if you harvest the celastrus bark. Using ultra compost, you can guarantee at least 3 bark per growth, and each growth brings in 14 thousand experience, with a 13.3 hour growth time. So these can be added to your tree runs for extra XP, with almost no cost.
Best Tree Run
So overall, this is the best tree run to do for fast XP and low cost. It involves maple trees, papaya fruit trees, calquats, celastrus, then planting redwood trees at 90 farming when you unlock them.
Doing these trees is going to cost only 5 mil for 99 farming, and is going to take a total of 122 tree runs. So that's about 4 months of tree runs, doing 1 run per day.
Compare that to doing the absolute best trees you can, it takes 59 days to reach level 99, but at a cost of 114m.
So yes, doing the expensive trees is faster, but the amount of GP saved is something to consider.
Tree & Herb Runs
But, if you want to train the fastest, you can offset your losses by completing herb runs in between the tree runs. Completing 5 herb runs per day can net around 2 mil in profit daily, which is enough to cover the cost of magic and dragonfruit trees. It takes only about 5 minutes to do a herb run, so if you spend about half an hour a day farming herbs, you can train with the best trees at minimal cost.
Speaking of herb runs, if you went from level 30 farming to level 99 solely farming ranarr herbs, your profit will come out at around 2.6 bil. But, its going to take 5349 herb runs to reach 99, which is a lot. That converts to about 500 hours of in-game play time, just doing herb runs.
This guide is specifically about FAST ways to 99 farming, and herbs definitely aren't one of them, but mixing them with your other patches can save a lot.
The most profitable herb to plant right now is the new huasca herbs, which nets over 3 mil GP per hour at high farming levels. Ranarrs are up there too, giving around 2.5 mil per hour at high levels.
Farming Contracts (Ironmen)
Within the farming guild, you can speak to guildmaster Jane to receive a farming contract. This essentially tells you what to plant, and once you have grown the plant, you speak to the guildmaster to claim a seed pack. These seed packs range from an average of 17k in loot from the easy contracts, up to 73k with hard contracts.
So I suppose that hard contracts could be a decent way to offset the costs of farming, but in reality, farming contracts are only useful for Ironmen. If Ironmen maintain their farming contracts, they can expect a solid supply of tree seeds and various other seeds.
Anyways those were the fast and free ways to 99 farming. Thanks for reading.
