How to get rune essence?

Free players may mine rune essence in the Rune Essence mine. To reach these mines, players need to be teleported by one of several NPCs. Members will also mine rune essence here until they reach level 30 Mining when they will automatically mine pure essence on member worlds.

Rune essence Detailed Typical Release 1 December 2003 (Update) Members Quest item Tradeable No No Yes Equipable Stackable Disassembly No No Yes Noteable Yes Value High Alchemy Low Alchemy 4 coins 2 coins 1 coin Destroy Drop On death Always kept outside Wild Exchange 32 coins (info) Buy limit 25,000 Weight 0.002 kg Examine An uncharged Rune Stone. Loading...

Rune essence is a raw material used in the Runecrafting skill that can be crafted into low-level runes, namely air, mind, water, earth, fire, and body runes. Unlike runes, Rune essence does not stack. Players need pure essence to craft any other type of rune, which can be bought at the Grand Exchange, or mined by anyone in the Rune essence mine. Rune essence is one of the most commonly traded items in RuneScape.

The Stone of Jas, mentioned in many texts and dialogues in the game, is what gave the rune essence its power.

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Free players may mine rune essence in the Rune Essence mine. To reach these mines, players need to be teleported by one of several NPCs. Members will also mine rune essence here until they reach level 30 Mining when they will automatically mine Pure essence on member worlds. Mining from one of the rocks that have an unlimited supply of essence gives 5 Mining experience per essence.

When mining both rune essence and pure essence each type of pickaxe appears to have a fixed rate of mining which is independent of mining level. Unexpectedly, a bronze pickaxe has the fastest mining rate: it mines 7 essence per 8 game ticks. An iron pickaxe mines 6 essence per 7 ticks, steel mines 5 essence per 6 ticks, mithril mines 4 essence per 5 ticks, adamant mines 3 essence per 4 ticks, and rune mines 2 essence per 3 ticks.

Using a bronze pickaxe the player may gain around 26,000 Mining experience an hour from mining rune or pure essence, at any Mining level, while dropping the essence obtaining using their action bar. No matter what type of pickaxe is in one's tool belt, one may always wield a bronze pickaxe to force using it over the pickaxe on the tool belt.

On free-to-play worlds, a number of rune essence is given to each player throughout The Great Orb Project activity depending on each round's scores. Free players may also buy rune essence as a reward from the activity at a cost of 1 Runecrafting Guild Token per rune essence.

Rune essence may also be obtained as a monster drop. Notably, minotaurs, catablepons, and ankous drop rune essence on non-member worlds. These creatures can all be found in the Stronghold of Security.

To discourage Real world traders and macroers, Jagex introduced a Rune Essence adjustment update on 20 April 2006. As of then, rune essence was split separately into two different items: Rune essence and pure essence (with an automatic conversion from rune to pure essence for members). Previously, rune essence could be used to craft all runes. However, since the update, the runes only craftable by members required Pure essence, now it could only be mined on member worlds. Rune essence could still be used to craft the first six basic runes, however.

This measure was to try to stop macroers from making a huge profit by simply macroing Rune essence, which was in high demand, especially by free players. However, due to this update, many Rune essence macroers essentially became useless due to a large majority of them being F2P only. After the update, the Rune essence mined without membership would be worthless, since the majority of the buyers would need Pure essence instead to runecraft high-level runes. This caused the demand and price of Rune essence to drop significantly.