Train with a Complete RuneScape Cooking Guide

Cooking is a unique skill in that no matter what a player’s style, preferences, or focus, everyone trains their cooking at some point in the game. Everyone from Strength pures to utility skillers to mining alts needs food, and cooking is a cheap and easy way to acquire it. The other neat thing about Cooking is it’s one of the only skills that’s remained almost identical between the Old School Runescape gameplay and Runescape 3. What’s more, cooking is probably the easiest skill to train in both games – at least, it’s definitely one of the fastest.

Check out our Runescape Cooking Guide for the best methods to train your cooking skill – for both Runescape 3 and OSRS. If you’re a member, head out and buy some cooking gauntlets before you get started. If you haven’t already *checked out our Quest Guide* and completed the Cook’s Assistant quest, go ahead and do that before you get started as well, as this allows you to use the Lumbridge range which lowers your burn rate for foods up to raw salmon. We’re writing this guide assuming you don’t have the gold to buy all your raw ingredients outright, so we’ll include some strategy for acquiring them and profiting from your resulting food. This will include a bit of fishing as well, so make sure you pick up a small net, fishing rod, and feathers. Once you’ve done all of this, you’re ready to dive in:

Level 1 to 15: Shrimp and Anchovies           

From levels 1 to 15, hang around Lumbridge and cook shrimp and anchovies caught from the river. Hitting 15 with this method won’t take you very long at all, and make sure you’re using the range in the kitchen of Lumbridge Castle as it will boost your exp per hour by reducing the amount of food you burn. You can either sell you anchovies for GP now to get materials for your leveling, or, if gold is less of an issue for you and you’re a member, bank the anchovies to save them for making anchovy pizzas later on. Whenever you get bored of fishing, head up to the chicken coups just north or east of lumbridge to collect feathers and raw chicken. You can cook the raw chicken and use the feathers for fishing in our next steps (we said fishing would be handy!) Your fishing should level close to parallel with your cooking, so you may have to fish a little more to reach level 20 and move onto the next training method, and take some time to collect feathers for bait for your next levels. If you’re buying your own materials or can find powerfishers in your world you need not worry about this.

Levels 15 to 32: Trout and Salmon

At level 15 (or so) head up to the Barbarian Village and start cooking trout in the fires next to the powerfishers. Given recent trends, you’re most likely to find several powerfishing bots that will drop all the trout and salmon you can cook, so if your fishing isn’t up to par you won’t need it. However, if you’d like to fish yourself, make sure you’ve bought a fishing rod and collected some feathers to get started. With a few inventories of fish, you’ll be able to buy enough feathers to keep fishing continuously, but if you ever run out you can just head back down to the chicken farms in lumbridge. You can powertrain and drop your food or bank them at the Grand Exchange if you’ll have a use for them later. At 32 it’s onto the Cooks Guild!

Level 32 to 55: Cooks Guild

Buy yourself a Chef’s Hat and head to the Cook’s Guild in Varrock. Here you’ll be making apple pies and wine. You can make your flour with the grain, mix with water for dough, collect cooking apples, and cook at the range all within the building’s first and second floors. For extreme leveling, you may want to world hop, but the spawns are quick and it isn’t going to make a huge difference. It’s worthwhile for most players to bank their pies. At 35 you can begin making wine as well by combining the grapes found in the guild with water jugs. The grape spawns are slower so you’ll only get about 3 per inventory if you’re banking, but they provide significantly more experience for less effort than apple pies.

Level 55+: High-level Fish or Anchovy Pizzas

At this point, you have two options you can mix and match. The first is to head to Karamja and fish for yourself or cook all the high-level fish dropped by powerfishers. You’ll likely find a lot of tuna, but a lot of bots will drop their Swordfish as well. You can sell these both for a decent profit and make great exp off them at these levels since you have such a low burn rate. It’s possible some of the powerfishing bots will be dropping lobsters as well, so if you see the opportunity to pick them up, by all means, go for it.If you have the fishing level to do so, swordfish and lobsters will provide you the greatest profit per hour and it’s quite easy to hit level 99 just by cooking these two fish.

The second option requires a bit more of an investment, but it’s definitely the fastest way to level your cooking from here on. If you’ve been selling the food you’ve made so far, you should have a good amount of GP saved up which you can use, in addition to your swordfish, tuna, and lobster profits, to invest in pizzas and anchovies (hopefully you saved your anchovies from the beginning!) Anchovy pizzas give you the most exp per hour of any option available to cooks, and they have a 100% success rate since you only have to use anchovies on a pizza to make them. We recommend pouring all the gold you can into pizzas and anchovies and using the fish from Karamja to offset your profit margin and make more gold if need be. From here, it’s smooth sailing to 99!

Tips N4G