Skill Bonanza: Urns, Ashes and Shortcuts

Today's update is a skiller's paradise, with updates for crafters, prayer-lovers and agility fanatics. Make urns that benefit a number of other skills, scatter demon ashes, and build permanent agility shortcuts.

Urn Crafting

No matter what your Crafting level, you are now able to make urns for Cooking, Fishing, Mining, Smithing, Woodcutting and Prayer (but more on the Prayer urns later) at any pottery oven. Form it, fire it and attach an appropriate rune to it and you’ll be able to carry the urn when training the related skill. There’s no effort required, as your urn will fill up passively as you train, until it becomes full and you can teleport it away for a tidy batch of XP.

Urns can be made from Crafting level 1 all the way up level 81; the higher your Crafting level, the higher quality your urns will be. Higher quality urns are able to collect by-products from a wider range of fish, logs, ores, etc. For example, a cracked fishing urn (made at level 1 Crafting) will fill up if you're fishing catches below Fishing level 10; however, a decorated fishing urn (made at level 76 Crafting) will fill up when you are catching any type of fish.

Urns are made just like any other pottery, but require two pieces of soft clay. Once it has been fired, you can either trade it or add a rune to 'activate' it. You can then start to fill up activated urns – with the ability to check how full they are – and then teleport them away once full. Wondering where all your urns go? In south-east Varrock there is an interesting newcomer: Ernie, the urn collector. Ernie will offer help on making or using these urns.


Pottery Improvements

To ease the pottery process, you can now make soft clay directly at a water source (you no longer need a container for the water). Additionally, new clay mining sites have been discovered south of Barbarian Village and near Draynor Village, and there is also a new pottery building in south-east Varrock, on the bottom floor of Ernie's house.

Demon Ashes and Prayer Urns

Demon slayers will find that, from now on, their demonic prey has a new 100% drop. These will be impious ashes (from imps and fiends), accursed ashes (lesser and greater demons) or infernal ashes (black and abyssal demons, nechryaels, boss demons), depending on the demon defeated. Any ashes you currently own will remain as just that: ashes, like you get from burning logs.


Much like bones can be buried for some immediate Prayer XP, these ashes can be scattered (including at a POH altar). Alternatively, you may want to keep hold of ashes to use at the Ectofuntus, where they effectively work as pre-ground bones, which will save you a bit of grinding... To tie in with the pottery crafting update, you’re also able to make prayer urns – urns that automatically collect the ash of any demons you defeat, and which can be teleported away for bonus Prayer XP in the same way as the other urns.

Shortcut Improvements

Finally, we've made some changes to a handful of shortcuts and transportation methods to streamline their use. First off, we've made the River Lum canoe system available to free-players. At points along the Lum, you can build canoes to take you on a one-way trip into the Wilderness. You can even now borrow a hatchet off one of the canoe tutors.

Members can also use their Construction skill to build hidey-holes at crossbow shortcuts and rope racks at eagle eyries/Baxtorian Falls. In these will be stored crossbows/grapples and ropes, so you won’t need to carry these items in order to make use of these shortcuts and transport methods.

Mod Ana (urns and pottery updates) and Mod Dylan (ashes and shortcuts)
RuneScape Content Developers



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In other news...

The legendary wolf, Hati, has retired to a colder land, so players will no longer be able to hunt him. The gloves fashioned out of his paws still have his lingering magic effects on them, but this will disperse on Tuesday 10th May, so make sure to use their power up if you haven't already!

An exotic delicacy awaits you near a banana plantation...

Patches (Click to View)

Graphical


* The Lunar spellbook’s Heal Other and Heal Group spell icons have been updated from using a red cross to a purple cross.
* Spiritual mages will no longer play a melee attack animation when attacking familiars with magic.
* A female NPC in the Mountain Daughter quest has had her chat head updated to match her hood.
* The will o' the wisps in the elf lands no longer appear on top of players.
* A torch's flame in Varrock sewers is once again attached to the torch.
* Some floating rocks near a winch in the Digsite have been removed.
* The crests attached to a Varrock’s guard tower have been properly aligned.
* A few more gnomes have been updated, such as Junior Cadet Nirol in Mobilising Armies.
* Mayor Hobbs’s hat now has the correct colour when speaking to him.
* Gravedigger Leo has had some chat animations updated.
* The novite arrows inventory icon no longer shows broken arrows.
* The utuku longbow inventory icon no longer shows a broken string.
* The talon beast charm inventory icon once again has the design on the front.



Quests and Tasks


* Teleporting to Waterbirth Island using the Fremennik sea-boots now works correctly.
* The mining juju potion now works correctly with the Varrock armour.
* The TokTz-Ket-Dill quest now refers to dragon pickaxes as the most powerful pickaxe.
* The Mining requirement is now taken into account if levelling-up when checking the Curse of Arrav requirements.
* Summer's End can now be completed if a player dies as they bless the final grave.
* The earth mound in Grim Tales now has an increased clickable area for planting the vine.
* All different hastae (kp) now damage the Shaikahan.


Miscellaneous


* The bank pin system has had a major overhaul, making it slightly faster and safer to use.
* Farmers will watch your second spirit tree correctly from the next spirit tree to be given protection.
* Completing a quest will now turn off the quest tracking system for that quest.
* The Winter Storage special move will once again default to the player's inventory view.
* Ape bones now work correctly with the Dungeoneering bone necklaces.
* Blood Barrage no longer takes an additional soul rune in PvP combat.
* Some stairs in the Blood Pact quest have had their examine information corrected.

New ashes sound good, the urns are basically to store the ashes when you get them as a drop. Let's hope they'll make things like Abby demons better apart from whips and dragon bones go down

Bad update: Urns (Too few exp to bother) - abby's ashes drop (will be camped once more and there goes slayer profit.)

Good: Ashes in general (prayer will be cheaper) - hidy holes (Love shortcuts that are permanent.)

Omg I really hope prayer goes down in price. I was already thinking about getting it

slightly disappointing for me

I wish the urns were more worth it.

Especially since this was meant to be skiller update.

i heard the exp from a full urn is horrible D:

The exp isn't "horrible," it's just not a massive boost. It's meant to be a way to boost exp slightly for those spending a lot of time on those resource gathering skills, not to give massive boosts to powertrainers. They're worth using in my opinion, it's still bonus exp after all.

Bad update: Urns (Too few exp to bother) - abby's ashes drop (will be camped once more and there goes slayer profit.)

Good: Ashes in general (prayer will be cheaper) - hidy holes (Love shortcuts that are permanent.)

I dislike that people jump to conclusions without actually doing the math involved.

Fishing is normally 90k xp/hr max @ 99. So for this purpose we're just going to say an average of 80k xp/hr.

You can fill about 6 decorated fishing urns per hour at 90k. This means you'll fill around 5 per hour at 80k. Which is 9.5k bonus experience bring you to around 90k experience/hr.

From 70-99 at 80,000 experience per hour it will take 153.7 hours of work. From 70-99 at 90,000 experience per hour (using the urns) it will take 136.6 hours of work. Meaning that these urns will save you about 17.1 hours of work going to 99. Say you kill frost dragons in those 17.1 hours of work for 2.5m gp/hr, that's 42.75m profit you could be making instead of spending another 17.1 hours grinding away.

All in all this is a great update for skillers, it provides a method of not gaining extremely fast experience, but will add up to extreme amounts in the end. I'd rate this update a 5/5 just because of it's well rounded usability.

I think the urns are pretty good as long as you're training the skill and need to bank after every inventory (no dopisit boxes though). That way you can always carry 2 urns, fill your inventory with fish or smith an inventory, teleport any full urns, bank and start again with 2 urns. That way you're inventory is done slightly faster but you get experience in exchange.
Note I said 2 urns in your inventory, so the second one starts filling as soon as the first one is full.

As for the ashes, I sure hope they'll make prayer cheaper again