Complete 1-99 Thieving Guide for OSRS
- Theoatrix
- Oct 31, 2018
- 15 min read
Updated: Apr 14
What’s going on guys, my name’s Theoatrix and welcome to my complete level 1-99 Thieving guide for OSRS.
Table of Contents
Changes To Thieving
There’s been a number of updates to the skill since my last guide.
In May of 2024, jagex reduced the pickpocketing fail rate for some npcs, as well as increased the xp rates of stealing from stalls.
Also in 2024, jagex introduced Varlamore, bringing citizen pickpocketing and house robbing to the game.
Rogues chests in the deep wilderness also got buffed, and are now the fastest experience in the game if uninterrupted.
Why Train Thieving
Thieving is one of the essential skills in progressing your account.
The Ancient Magicks spellbook is locked behind level 53 thieving, and a number of other quests and unlocks require thieving. Also, the best skilling money makers involve pickpocketing.
Useful Unlocks
There’s a range of important unlocks that you should aim to get before levelling up.
The Ardougne achievement diary increases your chances of pickpocketing npcs, where with medium, its a 10% increase on any npc within ardy, and with the hard diary, it becomes 10% on any npc in RuneScape.
This is a must for pickpocketing methods, and you dont have to wear the ardy cape to get the effect.
If you don’t have the diaries, then you should at least get some gloves of silence, which increase your pickpocketing success rate by 5%.
These do require 54 Hunter to wear though.
The gloves of silence do not stack with the ardy achievement diary effect, so gloves of silence arent necessary after completing the diary.
Dodgy necklaces, which are enchanted opal necklaces, provide a 25% chance of avoiding the stun when failing to pickpocket, and it holds 10 charges per necklace.
This is another essential when doing pickpocketing methods, and works together with gloves of silence or the diaries.
There’s also the shadow veil spell on the Arceuus spell book, requiring 47 Magic to cast, as well as completion of the kingdom divided quest.
This spell provides an extra 15% chance to not get stunned while pickpocketing, stacking with dodgy necklaces.
For most pickpocketing methods, shadow veil can improve the xp rate by quite a lot.
The final important thieving unlock, is the rogues outfit, which is vital for money making with thieving. With the full rogues outfit, your loot is doubled, and without the full set, each piece gives a 15% chance to double the loot.
The set is obtained from the rogues den minigame, which requires 50 Thieving and agility, and it takes an average of 12 runs to get the full rogues set if youre on rate.
Pathways To 99
On your journey to 99 thieving, its helpful to visualize your entire pathway from 1 to 99. In this section, ill show you 2 suggested pathways, along with some profitable and AFK training methods.
The first pathway I’m showing is the fastest possible pathway in the game.
This involves a lot of blackjacking, then most of your experience is done at the rogues castle chests. Overall, this pathway is going to take approximately 50 hours to go from level 1 to 99.
The second pathway is my recommended pathway to 99, which involves a lot of thieving at ardy knights, and can also be done at pyramid plunder for slightly faster experience.
With this pathway, its going to take about 70 hours if you focus on ardy knights, whereas if you do pyramid plunder, you’ll save around 7 hours of time.
Making money while you level up is always good, so these are some of the most profitable thieving methods in the game.
Pickpocketing vyres from 82 to 99 is going to net 230 mil in profit at this point in time, which makes it the most profitable pathway to 99.
With the introduction of varlamore, we received an AFK thieving training method, which is stealing from houses.
These let you afk for around 60 seconds at a time, which isn’t very long, but its easily the most AFK thieving method in the game. If you choose to become a house burglar, its going to take a bit over 130 hours to reach 99.
Low Level Training
From level 1 thieving, you realistically have 3 training options. You can either pickpocket men or women, you can do quests, or you can partake in the thieving room in chambers of xeric.
Lvl 1: CoX Thieving Room
The fastest method is within chambers, where you can get over 30k thieving xp per hour at level 1.
The method has no real requirements since anyone can access chambers, although having a lock pick is highly recommended to speed it up. There’s the cox timers and additions plugin which is helpful in knowing which chests have grubs and which ones are poisonous.
Lvl 1: Questing
Questing is another fast way to level up from 1 thieving, and is probably the most efficient, assuming you’re going for the quest cape.
Here are the 5 best quests to complete from an early level, to boost your thieving. Some of these quests have a couple of requirements, but they won’t take long to get.
Lvl 1: Pickpocket Men/Women
Alternatively, without chambers thieving or questing, your only option to train from level 1 is pickpocketing men and women.
For this, its recommended to go into your game settings and hide your npc attack options. There’s many locations to find men and women around runescape, but the easiest would be simply teleporting to lumbridge and finding one near the castle. Overall, pickpocketing from level 1, you’ll get about 5k xp per hour, which is very slow compared to the other options.
Lvl 5: Tea & Bakery Stalls
Once you reach 5 thieving, you unlock tea and bakery stalls, which both give the same amount of experience, and both have the same respawn time.
So you could steal from the tea stall in varrock, on the eastern side.. Or you could steal from the bakery stalls inside the ardy market. It’s important to stay away from view of the guards, and to do that, you can just stand under the stall npc and they wont catch you.
Lvl 25: Fruit Stalls Hosidius
Tea and bakery stalls are the best between level 5 and 25, where at 25, you can start stealing from the fruit stalls in the hosidius house. This used to have a favour requirement, but since jagex removed the favour system, now any player can do it.
In the house to the east of the city, there’s 2 fruit stalls inside. And to get the fastest experience per hour, you should steal from both stalls at once, by running back and forth. You also get strange fruit drops from the fruit stall, and those regenerate your run energy, allowing you to endlessly run between stalls. It’s not a whole lot faster to run between the stalls, so if you want a more relaxed method where you don’t move your mouse, you can just stick to 1 stall.
Fastest Methods
So those were the low level training methods, now lets talk about the fastest possible thieving methods.
Lvl 30: The Feud Quest
At level 30 thieving, you can complete the feud quest, and this unlocks the blackjacking method.
Although, for the most efficient training, you should continue at fruit stalls until level 43, then at 43 you can complete the Feud quest to level you to 45, from the xp reward.
Lvl 45: Blackjack Bearded Bandits
At 45, you can start blackjacking, which provides the fastest xp in the game up until level 84.
So with 45, you can blackjack the bearded bandits for around 100k xp per hour. For all blackjacking methods, this is what your gear and inventory setup should be.
You should bring the full rogues set if you have it, some coins, a weapon switch and noted food. you can unnote the food at an npc called bank exchange merchant, found near the general store. I would recommend using wines as food since they're only 3 coins each.
Bandits are located in pollnivneach, so the fastest way there is using a house teleport, either by moving your house there or using a redirected house teleport tablet.
Alternatively, you can get there by taking the carpet ride from shantay pass to pollnivneach. With 45 thieving, bearded bandits are found on the northern end of the city.
You can right click a bandit to lure them into a house to make sure they dont move. So essentially, you have to knock out the bandit by right clicking, then you pickpocket them twice while theyre knocked out.
If you pickpocket a third time by accident, the bandit will start attacking you.
The menu entry swapper plugin does not work for blackjacking, so you’ll have to manually click everything. This means its a fairly difficult method to do on mobile, but it is possible. In your in-game settings, its important to hide npc attack options to avoid attacking the bandit.
If the bandit does gain aggression, so if you accidentally pickpocket 3 times, you can go up and down the nearby ladder to lose the aggression and continue training.
Alternatively, you can bring any weapon switch and just change weapon then try to knock them out, and the bandit will stop attacking you.
Lvl 55: Blackjack Non-bearded Bandits
Once you reach level 55 thieving, you can start blackjacking the non-bearded bandits, and at these, youll already get 130k xp per hour when you unlock them.
For non bearded bandits, the gear is the same as the bearded ones, so you can skip back to that section if you missed it. The non bearded bandits are located near the bearded ones, on the northern side of pollniveach.
Lvl 65: Blackjack Menaphite Thugs
With 65 thieving, you unlock blackjacking menaphite thugs, located in the southern side of pollnivneach .
At unlock, youll already get nearly 200k xp per hour, and closer to 235k at higher levels.
Lvl 84: Rogues’ Chests
Once you reach 84 thieving, you unlock the fastest method in the game, stealing from rogues chests in the wilderness. This method is only the fastest experience if you steal uninterrupted. So with pkers around, its not likely to bring the best experience. Although, some clans offer protection services, which would allow you to get the max rates, but these are barely worth paying for in most cases.
You can expect to get at least 270k xp per hour here, and up to 300k is possible without interruptions.
The rogues chests are located in deep wilderness, near the chaos elemental, where you need to run to the back side of the castle. You can use the wilderness obelisk to get there, or an annakarl teleport.
So using a lockpick, you steal from all three chests out the back of rogues castle, while using protect from melee. The wilderness player alarm runelite plugin is a useful one here, where it will flash your screen if a pker is nearby.
A cool trick, is if you bring a locator orb, you can sit on 1 hitpoint, then if a pker comes you turn off your protection prayers and die to the rogues.
This counts as a pvm death and you keep all of your loot.
Other Fast Methods
Next im going to cover the other fast methods, and i personally would recommend these methods over the fastest methods, simply because blackjacking is so click intensive, and the rogues chest isnt safe.
Lvl 49: Stealing Artefacts Piscarilius
So first up is a method unlocked at level 49, which is stealing artefacts. This used to require piscarilius house favour, but now it just has a thieving requirement.
Artefacts can be the fastest method at level 49, but if youre a regular player its not the fastest since you need to learn how to do it. Overall, the xp rates range between 130k to 260k xp per hour depending on your level.
To do this method, you need a lockpick, and having kharedts memoirs or a book of the dead is going to greatly speed up your xp rates.
To get started you make your way to the north eastern region of zeah, where you speak to captain khaled in the hall.
He gives you a contract to steal an artefact, then you run to the nearby houses and steal the artefact, and then make your way back to captain khaled while avoiding the guards.
Lvl 55: Ardougne Knights
Next is ardy knights, which is my preferred thieving training method. Ardy knights can be more relaxed and still decently fast. They’re unlocked at 55 thieving, where you can get about 85k xp per hour when you unlock them, and that includes a high fail rate.
You eventually stop failing to pickpocket knights at level 94 Thieving, as long as you have the ardy diaries completed. So overall, your xp rates scale from 85k up to 240k xp per hour.
The method involves just spam clicking a knight, although it is recommended to find a splasher, and to do that, you can either join the theivinghost friends chat, or the splashworlds one.
Then once youve joined, you sort the list of players by world, and you scroll through the world list, and once you find a lot of players on the same world, that is the world that the splasher is on. The splasher is almost always found at the bank near the market, and this allows for easy access to food.
You can turn your npc attack options to hidden to make it so your left click is pickpocket.
Dodgy necklaces help tremendously here, so if youre a regular account, or an ironman with access to supplies, you should definitely make dodgy necklaces.
Having at least the medium ardy diary completed here is also very helpful,which can greatly reduce your fail rate.
The rogues outfit is nice to have here, since it doubles all of the coins you get, and thats obtained from the rogues den minigame.
Now, this is my preferred setup for ardy knights. You firstly, can optionally tag the knight with runelite to outline it. Then you set your camera angle in line with the knight, at the lowest angle possible. Then, in resizeable modern mode, you can drag your inventory over the knight.
And then to empty your pouches, you press the hotkey for your inventory, so f1 for me, then click, then press the hotkey again and keep thieving.
This works best with a wireless or bluetooth mouse, then you cover the movement sensor on the bottom of the mouse, then you can walk around and spam click while doing other things around the house.
Lvl 71: Pyramid Plunder
At level 21 you unlock pyramid plunder and this requires partial completion of the Icthlarin's Little Helper quest. Although, pyramid plunder is only really fast experience above level 71 and becomes one of the fastest methods in the game once you reach level 91 thieving. It provides competitive xp rates for far less clicking compared to blackjacking.
In terms of rates, at level 71, you can expect 120k xp per hour, but once you reach level 91, you can get 270k.
This is what your gear and inventory setup can look like for pyramid plunder.
Bringing a lockpick is helpful with opening the doors faster, and having a pharohs sceptre makes this method easier, allowing you to teleport closeby.
To get there, you can use the pharohs sceptre to jalsavrah or you can alternatively use a nardah teleport and take the magic carpet from there.
The activity involves going through floors and looting objects around the room. At higher levels, you should skip the first few rooms, and focus on the last 2 floors.
Lvl 78: Dorgeshkaan Rich Chests
With 78 thieving, you can start stealing from dorgeshkaan rich chests. These give around 220k xp per hour without banking, and about 190k with banking, while making 300k profit per hour. To be able to do this method, you do need to have completed the death to the dorgeshuun quest, and the training area is within dorgesh kaan.
Each chest takes 5 minutes to respawn, so with that, you can loot chests then hop worlds and repeat.
This is more of an alternative method - it can be pretty fast at level 78 thieving when you unlock this method, but its not really the fastest once you level up a bit.
Lvl 90: Pickpocket Tzhaars
At 90 thieving, you can start pickpocketing from tzhaars within mor ul rek. And to get there, you need to have a fire cape to enter the area.
For this method, you also need ice gloves to reduce the damage when pickpocketing, so this means you cant wear the entire rogues outfit, but you can still wear most of it.
Pickpocketing tzhaar hurs gives you gems, so this means having a gem bag can be handy. If you drop the gems that you get, its possible to reach xp rates of up to 250k xp per hour, however this method is best past level 99 since the fail rates can be high.
Alternative Methods
Its time for some alternative training methods, and these have their own benefits, but aren’t the most efficient way to train.
Underwater Agility/Thieving
Firstly, is underwater agility and thieving, which is unlocked after the bone voyage quest with access to fossil island.
Its a relatively relaxed way to train agility and thieving at the same time, where it scales from 2 to 40k agility, and 9 to 145k thieving xp per hour. Its not entirely an efficient method, but its still a decent way to train.
Squirking
Another alternative method is Squirking, which used to be popular, but nowadays it can be hard to do it effectively.
You can get around 150k thieving xp per hour in the summer garden, with very little attention. But thats only possible on a mass world, and those don't exist anymore since you can get faster thieving xp elsewhere.
Profitable Methods
Its now time to talk about the profitable thieving methods, and ill go through these in level order.
Lvl 38: Master Farmers
The first somewhat profitable method, is pickpocketing master farmers. This requires 38 thieving, although having at least level 50 is going to help a lot with the fail rate.
When you stop failing at level 94, you get 680k gp per hour if you get everything on the drop rate, while getting 130k thieving xp.
At level 70 thieving, its more like 250k gp per hour, and only 50k xp per hour. So while this method is unlocked at low level, its much better at a higher level, or even better for ironmen.
Lvl 82: Pickpocket Vyres
While most methods are profitable, thieving really becomes profitable at level 82, and thats where you unlock vyres.
For pickpocketing vyres, you need to have completed the sins of the father quest, and going from 82 to 99 thieving here, you’re going to make around 230 mil in profit, and its going to take around 60 hours.
The xp rates scale from 140k to 250k xp per hour depending on your level. In terms of gp per hour, at 82 you can expect 2.5 mil an hour with the full rogues outfit equipped, then that scales up to over 4 mil an hour at 99 thieving.
The shadow veil spell, and dodgy necklaces are highly recommended for this method to reduce your fail rate, as well as the ardy diaries completed.
Lvl 84: Rogues’ Chests
With level 84 thieving, another profitable method is stealing from rogues chests deep in the wilderness. This can be very profitable, however being in the wilderness, it is an unsafe method.
It takes about 34 hours to go from 84 to 99 thieving here, while making 70 mil in profit if you dont get pked.
At maximum, this spot gives 2.2 mil gp per hour, with zero deaths and constantly thieving. If you want a more in depth guide for this method, i spoke about it in the fastest methods section earlier.
Lvl 85: Pickpocket Elves
At level 85 thieving, you can start pickpocketing elves, and that also requires the song of the elves quest. Going from 85 to 99 thieving here, you can expect 125 mil in profit, and thats going to take approximately 70 hours of thieving.
So thats an xp rate ranging from 140k per hour, to a bit over 210k xp per hour, and a gp per hour ranging from 1.8 to 2.8 mil.
Once again, shadow veil and dodgy necklaces are strongly recommended for this method, and having your ardy diaries done will boost your xp and gp rates.
Its best to find an elf in one of the houses near the bank, and you can trap them in there and continuously thieve.
AFK Training
Alright, so every method ive shown so far has been pretty click intensive. There’s only one viable afk thieving method in old school runescape, and that is stealing from houses in varlamore.
Lvl 50: Varlamore Houses
This requires level 50 thieving, and there’s 2 parts to stealing houses. You firstly steal keys from wealthy citizens… Then you use those keys to enter houses to loot.
While stealing from wealthy citizens, they sometimes get distracted, giving you a 20 to 25 second afk time where you are automatically pickpocketing.
Once you break into a house, you have 50 to 60 seconds of afk time per hotspot, and about 2 and a half minutes of total afk time per house.
Including the time gathering keys, you can expect xp rates from 60k to 110k xp per hour depending on your level. This means, going from 50 to 99 thieving here is going to take around 140 hours.
For this method, theres a plugin called house thieving varlmore which can help a lot, so i highly recommend that if youre doing this method, although its not required.
Ironman Thieving
So the final section of this video is for ironmen, where ill give a summary of the best ironman training methods. Overall, ironmen can follow the same pathway as a regular account for the thieving skill… there isn't much variation, but there are some methods that are more inviting than others, mostly for the loot.
Bakery Stalls
Cakes are an important food source for the early game, where stealing a couple hundred cakes should last you long enough until you have better food.
Silk Stalls
There’s also stealing from the silk stalls, which can be a decent source of early game cash, although you do have to wait a while before you can sell the silk. Overall, this can bring in over 50k gp per hour in cash, which isnt bad.
HAM Store Rooms
After partial completion of the death to the dorgeshuun quest, you can enter the ham store rooms, and stealing from the chests here can make a couple hundred k per hour in alchables, and is also an excellent source of jewellery for you to enchant.
Master Farmers
Master farmers at 38 thieving are great for all types of ironmen to get the seeds for farming.
Stone Chests
Stone chests are a decent way to get a xerics talisman without having to kill lizardmen, which makes it easier to get one in the early game. Stone chests also give medium clue scrolls.
Gem Stalls
Stealing from gem stalls can be a decent way to collect gems on an ironman for some early crafting training.
Pyramid Plunder
And pyramid plunder is an essential for the pharoahs sceptre drops, where you need 1 for your house altar and 1 for a master clue step.
Tzhaars
And lastly, a method for ironmen which requires at least 90 thieving is stealing from tzhaars, and this can passively give around 50k crafting xp per hour in gems… For these, you do need to be wearing ice gloves…
So that was my updated level 1 to 99 thieving guide. Thanks for reading!