Farming Guide

Skills guide · Updated September 2025

Farming is the passive skill - you plant seeds, walk away, and come back to harvest XP and produce while patches grew offline. Eleven crop types across twelve patch implementations cover everything from allotments to spirit trees, with disease, cures, compost, and protection payments all working.

Growth keeps ticking while you are logged out - the patch simulation catches up on your next login - so a farming run every few hours compounds faster than any other skill in the game.

Patches and crops

Each patch runs the full lifecycle: weeds to rake, soil to plant, compost to boost, water to speed, growth stages, disease to cure or lose, harvest to collect, and clear to reset. Patch groups are bounded areas - Varrock, Falador, Ardougne, Catherby, Zeah, Trollheim - each with its own varbit-driven objects.

The crop list covers allotments, flowers, herbs, hops, bushes, cacti, calquat, mushrooms, spirit trees, wood trees, and fruit trees - each carrying its own level, XP, stage times, disease chance, and produce table.

Leprechauns, storage, and farmers

Sixteen tool leprechauns are placed beside the patches (the generic id-0 leprechaun plus the Trollheim id-757 variant). Talk to one for tool storage - a separate inventory for rakes, dibbers, spades, secateurs, watering cans, trowels, buckets, compost, and plant cures that persists between sessions - or use the Exchange option to note your produce.

Twenty-eight named farmers stand at their patches with the Pay option: hand them the required produce and they protect your crop from disease for that growth cycle.

Compost and bins

Compost bins accept 15 fillable items and rot for 30 minutes into regular compost, supercompost, or rotten tomatoes depending on what went in - supercompost is the yield-boosting standard for serious runs.

Ultracompost and the bottomless bucket are supported in the tool storage too.

Spirit trees and travel

Growing a spirit tree at its patch unlocks that destination on the spirit-tree network - the teleport system that links the four patch locations. It is the long game of Farming: the tree patch is one-time work for a permanent travel node.

Farming cape perk

The farming skillcape teleports you to the Farming Guild at 1248, 3721 - the central patch hub - and any max-cape variant inherits it. The tangleroot pet rolls on harvests throughout.

The patch run

Farming is the slow-burn skill - plant at a patch, go boss or skill elsewhere, come back to harvest. The efficiency is in the run: a herb run hitting all six patches takes ten minutes and banks a full inventory of herbs for herblore.

Magic secateurs from the quest add a 10% yield boost that pays for itself within a few runs. The farming cape perk at 99 gives the teleport, which turns the run into a five-minute loop.

Tree runs vs herb runs

Tree patches are the XP route - high XP per check but days between harvests. Herb patches are the money route - 15-minute cycles, herbs every run, and the volume that feeds your herblore grind for free.

The smart play is both: trees planted for the long XP, herbs farmed between the tree timers. The patches are spread across the map, so a teleport route is the whole game.

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