Runescape Tips: Fishing for Profit

In the world of Runescape, pillaging and waging war upon your foes is not always for everyone. Some choose a gentler path: the way of the wealthy meek, those who spend little or no time fighting, but rather spend their time working and furthering their skills in the area of their preference.

When I played Runescape, I was a fisherman. And a good one, at that, if I don't say so myself.

I would go to fishing spots outside of major cities and fish for lobsters and swordfish ('swordies' as the slang goes); I would then sell raw fish to anyone passing by or fishing alongside me for less than I would normally sell them for so as to keep a constant flow of people coming and buying from me, and thus saving me the time of dumping them off individually by myself. In this way, I was able to spend many hours at a pier with my lobster cage and spear, honing my fishing skills, picking up a little extra money for selling raw fish, and picking up a lot more money by cooking the fish I caught by using wood from nearby trees. In this way, I trained my fishing, cooking, woodcutting, and managed to pick up a reasonable amount of cash.

The only things to watch out for, though, are river trolls.

River trolls appear randomly when you're fishing for long periods of time and unless you are heavily equipped with armor and weaponry and can defend yourself very efficiently, I'd suggest running from river trolls if or when they appear--and if you fish for a long time, they will appear inevitably.

An excellent place to fish is Karamja.

And, in addition to this, the fishing market can work reverse for you, too, to make you large sums of money:

Go to the docks of Karamja where there are always a large number of fishermen, and when they drop fish (and they will drop fish--a lot of fishermen there won't care about money, just power-leveling their fishing skills.), pick it up. And when they offer to sell things for very low prices, accept the offers.

As the docks of Karamja are nearby Falador, it is very easy to visit Karamja, fill up on fish, run to Falador's bank to deposit, and return to Karamja in less than a minute or so.

Bulk prices for fish tend to be a bit higher; for this reason, I suggest you save up as much of each kind of fish as you can, assuming you are depositing them in your bank, and withdraw them all at once in the form of certificates when you hit a nice round number (such as 100, 1000, etc.,), as numbers such as these tend to be more appealing to potential buyers.

Back in my hay-day as a Runescape fisherman, I could reel in (literally and figuratively) 50-100k gold or thereabouts on a daily basis by leveling up my fishing and cooking skills to 72 and 70, respectively, and catching and cooking lobsters, which I sold at 200 gold each. For those of you who compulsively just pulled a calculator on those figures: Yes, that's 250-500 cooked lobsters daily.

A word of advice: even if you can fish for swordfish, go for the lobsters instead. Lobsters are much more easily caught, and, though swordfish sell for more, they are more likely to burn. A ton of cooked lobsters are much more valuable to the enterprising fisherman than a pile of burned swordfish.

May the fish flock to you, and may the Runescape fishing market stay strong.

Good luck, fellow fishermen-and-women!