How To Make Money in Runescape with Smithing

Part 1 of a 2 part Smithing Calculations Guide

If there’s one RuneScape skill that’s just flat out cool, it’s Smithing. You take bars and make armor to protect you from baddies, and swords to kill ‘em with. Smithing was my favorite skill when I first joined RuneScape, and my first goal was to make myself some rune armor. But as anyone who’s ever tried to max out their Smithing, it’s a tedious process, and often very difficult. The fact of the matter is that in order to train smithing, you’ll require either a lot of patience, or a lot of money. This is part one of a two part guide which will detail both of these methods.

This first way will be the slow process. You may be asking me why I would even need to explain a slow process to you; it’s because this is how you can make money. Obviously if you mine all your ores and smelt all your bars, you will turn a profit. But leveling your Smithing in this manner will take all but eternity, and for this reason, it’s not a good idea. Truth be told, it’s almost impossible to make money through Smithing. Sure combat items are always in demand, but the money required to smith those goods far surpasses the money you’ll see from selling your products - almost every time. So if you’re looking to make money through Smithing, this guide is for you. If you’re looking for experience, stay tuned; the next guide will be out soon.

The only way to earn money through Smithing (save for mining everything yourself) is to smelt bars. All bars are constantly in high demand for they give quick and easy experience, and ores are always plentiful, so doing the slow job that nobody wants to do will always make you money. In order to earn money, you’re going to buy ores off of the Grand Exchange and smelt them into bars. Then you’re gonna put those bars right back on the Grand Exchange and turn a profit. But what exactly should you be smelting? After all, there are so many types of bars to smelt. How do you know which will be the most profitable? And which will result in the most experience? Moreover, which bar is the best compromise between experience gained and money earned? The following is a list of the different ores and how much it will cost you to buy each, based on current Grand Exchange prices (note: These WILL fluctuate, and when you read this, prices will likely be different. But unless an item crashes completely, or spikes in price, the ultimate decision you make should still be the same):

Copper Ore: 113
Tin Ore: 93
Iron Ore: 223
Silver Ore: 298
Coal: 270
Gold Ore: 319
Mithril Ore: 311
Adamantite Ore: 1357
Runite Ore: 17.3k

Note that although Silver and Gold are used for Crafting, you will still gain experience for the Smithing skill by smelting their bars. In this next table, I’ll show the core value of each bar. Basically what I’ll be doing is taking the sum of the materials required to make a bar. So since making a mithril bar requires 1 mithril ore and 4 coals, the core value of a mithril bar is the sum of the costs of all five items. The table is as follows:

Bronze Bar: 206/bar
Iron Bar: 223/bar
Silver Bar: 298/bar
Steel Bar: 716/bar
Gold Bar: 319/bar
Mithril Bar: 1391/bar
Adamantite Bar: 2977/bar
Runite Bar: ~19460/bar

Now that you know how much each bar will cost to make, let’s show you how much each bar costs on the Grand Exchange, so you can see how much you’ll be making. Since Iron Bars are unreliable for most, they have been omitted from the following table.

Bronze Bar: 364/bar
Silver Bar: 313/bar
Steel Bar: 1041/bar
Gold Bar: 109/bar
Mithril Bar: 1565/bar
Adamantite Bar: 2998/bar
Runite Bar: 19.6k/bar

As you can see, you’ll always take a huge hit smelting Gold Bars, so forget about that. Also, the core values and actual values for Silver, Adamantite, and Runite, are pretty close, so those of you who were worried that Runite would be the best bet for this method can breathe a sigh of relief; you’ll never be smelting Runite Bars for profit. So since we’re able to knock off a few bars from our list, we’re left with Bronze, Steel, and Mithril. But which one is the best bet?

Now you need to remember that the raw profit that you make from each bar is not important; the percentage of profit is. So let’s check the profit of each of our remaining bars. This will be done by dividing the core value from the actual value and using a percent representation. I’ll explain more later, but for now, here are the calculations:

Profit(Bronze): 158/bar (76.7%)
Profit(Steel): 325/bar (45.4%)
Profit(Mithril): 174/bar (12.5%)

See how although Mithril boasts the largest amount from each bar at a hefty 1.5k, it also offers the least profit? This is very important to keep in mind. Now let’s decide which bar we want to make. Since mithril still offers a lot of experience, we’ll keep it in play for now. Everything we’ve done thus far is basic calculations. This is the real meat of the guide.

For the intents of this guide, let’s say you have 500k that you’re willing to use here. Basically we need to determine which bar is going to yield the most money from that 500k that you’re going to spend. We’re going to divide the core value of each bar from 500k to see how materials you’ll be able to buy with your money. You’ll be able to buy the following:

The materials for 2427 Bronze Bars for 499,962 gp.
The materials for 698 Steel Bars for 499,768 gp.
The materials for 359 Mithril Bars for 499,369 gp.

Once you smelted your bars, you’d sell the bars for:

2427 Bronze Bars at 883,428 gp, gaining 15,047.4 Smithing experience.
698 Steel Bars at 726,618 gp, gaining 12,215 Smithing experience.
359 Mithril Bars at 561,835 gp, gaining 10,770 Smithing experience.

Smelting Bronze Bars earns the most money by far, and gains a lot of experience too, so it’s the best option, right? Well, we still can’t say that for sure. Why? Time. Time is a huge factor, and work involved. You see, a trip to the furnace takes time, and it’ll take hours to smith all those bars. Especially since you can’t smith more than 14 bars with one inventory. So let’s add that into the equation. For each inventory, you’ll be able to smith 14 Bronze Bars, 9 Steel Bars, and 5 Mithril Bars. This means that to smith all of the above bars, it will take the following number of trips to the furnace:

Bronze: 174 trips
Steel: 78 trips
Mithril: 72 trips

Okay, I think we have more than enough evidence to bury Mithril as a plausible option. Basically this means that Smithing can be profitable at a very low level. Awesome!

You’re going to get over 150k from smelting Bronze Bars than Steel Bars, but think about it this way now. If you decide on Steel, make your 78 trips and sell your bars, you’ll make 226k. Now put that in your bank and put the other 500k back on the Grand Exchange and repeat the process. You’ll make another 226k, and you still won’t have made 174 trips to the furnace yet. In fact, in 174 trips to the furnace smelting Steel Bars, you’ll make 1566 Steel Bars, earning you 1,630,206 gp, and a crapload of extra Smithing experience. So let’s ask the question again. Starting with only 500k, would you rather make 330k or over 1 million gold? The choice is clear. Smelt steel.

I hope this guide helped in alleviating some of the apprehensions players might have had. If you have more questions, feel free to post. And definitely stay tuned for part two, where I’ll do some more calculations in helping you decide what bars to smith in order to earn the most experience.

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