Nightmare Zone Guide for OSRS

Theoatrix
Nov 8, 2025
6 min read

What’s going on guys, my name’s Theoatrix and welcome to my Complete Nightmare Zone Guide. The Nightmare Zone is an activity where you refight bosses from quests that you've already completed.

This guide covers everything you need to know to effectively train your melee, ranged or magic within the activity, and I’ll show you how to get the most points per hour, as well as the highest XP rates.

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.

Requirements

To be able to partake in the nightmare zone, the only requirement is having completed 5 quests that have bosses.

There’s a lot of quests that fit into that category, but the recommended quests for training here are those on the screen now. Most of those quests have fairly low requirements and are doable on mid level accounts.

In terms of combat stats, having at least level 60s is the minimum recommended level. With 60 attack strength and defence, you can use full obsidian, and 60 ranged and magic is enough to train those stats too.

Having level 43 prayer helps tremendously with getting started in the nightmare zone, since you don't instantly have access to absorption potions. Although, 43 prayer is not fully required.

NMZ Basics

Once you’ve completed 5 applicable quests, you can use the minigame teleport menu to teleport straight to the nightmare zone.

In the Nightmare Zone area, there’s a few key features.

Outside the main area, is the rewards chest, where you can spend your points for the rewards which ill talk more about at the end.

The NPC wearing the green clothing is where you start a nightmare zone game, but this requires money to be in the coffer. The coffer is the small money bag on the border of the closed off area. The potion bottle in middle of the area is where you pick your bosses and enter the nightmare zone. So you talk to the NPC to start a game, then you click on the potion bottle to select the bosses and enter.

The last feature is the potion barrels on the left, and these are absorption, overloads, super magic and super ranging potions, which are all bought with rewards points.

Starting Out

Usually, the best strategy within the nightmare zone is to use absorption potions to stay for a long time. But when its your first time, you wont have any points to buy absorption potions.

So, initially, you should use protection prayers against melee only bosses to earn your points.

When using the nightmare zone, its usually the best to select the “Rumble” game mode, which is just an endless run of monsters until you die.

You can select a customized normal rumble or a hard rumble, and I would suggest choosing customized hard if you have at least 60s in the combat stats. Hard mode monsters give a lot more points so if you can, on your initial Nightmare Zone run, you should select hard mode, and aim to select these bosses.

The bosses on screen are all melee only and are from fairly easy quests.

In terms of armour and weapons, you should bring your best melee strength gear possible, and the obsidian set is a decent option. You should also bring a special attack weapon like a granite maul to use the powerups.

So inside, with prayer potions, you can AFK for around 5 minutes at a time, but if you want the fastest points, its a good idea to go for the recurrent damage, zapper and power surge.

Max Points Per Hour

Next up, is how to get the maximum points per hour within the nightmare zone.

For this, its recommended to have at least a few points already so you can buy overloads and absorption potions, otherwise this method is very difficult.

In terms of quests, the more quests you've completed, the better, and this is because the amount of points you get for killing a boss is dependent on how many bosses you've selected. The more bosses you've enabled, the more points you get per kill within the nightmare zone.

On the right are the best quests you can complete to get the maximum points per hour, and when entering the nightmare zone, you should select all of these bosses to get the best points.

In terms of armour and weaponry, using full Dharok’s on 1 hit point is a great option if you have a high hit points level. Otherwise your best melee combat gear is good enough, and you should also bring a ranged switch, where a blowpipe is a great option.

You can also bring a special attack weapon, and you should bring ice gloves to defeat some of the desert treasure 1 bosses if you've unlocked them.

Inside, your strategy is to prioritize killing the dream mentor bosses as they give the most points. But, there are monsters that interrupt your combat or freeze you, and you should target those first to stop them from interrupting your attacks. Those include Kamil, Karamel, Agrith Naar, Giant Roc, Dad and a few others.

Fastest XP Per Hour

Next I'm going to show you how to get the fastest possible XP per hour in the nightmare zone. For this, its important to have certain quests completed, since some quest bosses have XP boosts for each damage that you deal.

The best bosses you can select for the most melee XP per hour are the trapped soul, King Roald, headless beast, moss guardian and Arrg.

For ranged, there's a few extra bosses you can select with low ranged defence.

And for magic, they’re pretty similar, except for the lunar diplomacy boss.

In terms of armour and weapons, for melee, using Dharoks will give the highest XP rates but only if you have a high hit points level. Otherwise you should just bring your best strength bonus gear. With melee, you should also bring an ornate granite maul, and if you can afford it, dragon claws are used to give the highest possible XP rates.

This is because you can use a dragon claw spec, and a granite maul spec at the same time while you have the power surge power up active, which constantly regenerates your special attack.

For armour and weaponry for ranged, the venator bow is the best to use here since the monsters are close together. You can also use super ranging potions from the barrels outside activity.

For magic, using spells up to fire surge on the regular spell book is a decent way to train here, where ancestral is the best in slot, however using void mage is still very effective here.

If you aren't using a saturated heart, you should be using super magic potions from the barrels outside.

AFK Training

Now, most people train at the nightmare zone AFK, and right now ill show you all of the AFK methods in there.

In terms of quest bosses, you should select bosses that don't interrupt your attacks, and bosses that are weak to your attack style.

Having a rock cake or a locator orb is also a big must for some of these methods, and these allow you to sit on 1 hit point while you have an absorption potion active, and then the monsters can only hit 1s.

For these AFK methods, you should set it to a customized normal rumble

The first AFK method is AFKing with absorption potions, where you can AFK with just absorptions, or you can also add overloads into the mix to get higher XP rates.

With just absorptions, its possible to AFK for 10 to 20 minutes before needing to sip more absorptions. With overloads, you can only afk for 5 to 10 minutes.

The most AFK training method in the nightmare zone is done with the Guathns armour set, which has a chance of healing you for what you hit.

With this, you can AFK for 20 minutes at a time, and after 20 minutes, your character stops attacking and you eventually log out.

You can also AFK with full justiciar armour, and since it has such a high defence bonus, you can AFK for 20 minutes with absorption potions.

With justiciar, you can use ranged as well to AFK for a long time.

Rewards

To finish off the video, I'd like to talk about the rewards from the nightmare zone.

There are 3 key rewards: there's item imbues, herb boxes and redirection scrolls.

You can imbue a number of rings at the nightmare zone to improve their stats. And you can also imbue the salve amulet, or the slayer helmet here too.

The cost of imbuing decreases if you've completed the hard tier of the combat achievements, halving the cost.

Herb boxes cost 9.5k points each and are a decent way to make your money back from the nightmare zone. The average loot per herb box is currently 14k but you can only buy a maximum of 15 herb boxes per day.

Redirection scrolls cost 775 points each, and these are used to redirect house teleport tablets to different house portals, which can be excellent for tree runs.

Anyways, that's my complete nightmare zone guide. Thanks for reading…