One of the things that every gamer needs to deal with is inventory space, especially with consumable items. Even with backpack upgrades, chests, and other ways to raise exactly how much you can carry and store, there’s always too many pieces of gear and not enough space. This is especially true with consumable items.
Potions, runes, and metals can easily overwhelm a player’s inventory space in Old School Runescape, often leaving the room for other items. However, the Rune Pouch is an item that can help you take control of your inventory and give you space for the things you really need. Here’s our guide to the Rune Pouch!
What Is a Rune Pouch?
The Rune Pouch is a pouch that has a limit of 1 in your inventory at a time, and it can hold up to 3 different kinds of runes in the pouch, with a 16,000 limit of each.
There are three ways to get the rune pouch for your character, The first is getting the pouch through a Slayer Master if you are a slayer. This is arguably the easiest way, and it only costs 750 Slayer reward points.
The second way is trying your luck with the Grand Exchange. The rune pouch itself is not a tradable item, but the ‘rune pouch note’ item. You can buy or trade this note at the Grand Exchange or buy it at ‘Justine’s Stuff for the Last Shopper Standing” for 75 last man standing points.
If you purchase it at the Grand Exchange you can buy the note for about 1.4 million gold. Once you have the note, you can use it on a banker or a bank booth/chest to get the rune pouch.
Finally, you can get the rune pouch by being a bounty hunter in PVP combat. Since the Rune Pouch doesn’t return to the player upon death during PVP, you will be able to get it cheap. You just need to grab an antique emblem and then upgrade that emblem to tier six.
Once the tier six emblem is in your possession, you can sell it for 1,200,000 bounty hunter reward points and trade those points for the rune pouch.
What Does the Rune Pouch Do?
The rune pouch allows you to store several copies of three runes. You can store any of the runes in the game in the pouch, except for the runes found in the Nightmare Zone. Now, every single spell in the game uses a combination of runes, and casting spells consume different types of runes.
For example, the spell ‘Wind Strike’ costs 1 air rune and 1 mind rune. The spell ‘water strike’ costs 1 air rune, 1 mind rune, and 1 water rune, and so on. You will be consuming runes every single time you use a spell, so if you use the spell ‘Wind Strike’ ten times, you will be using 10 air runes and 10 mind runes.
So instead of having to store 20 runes to use the spell and take up 20 spots of inventory space, you can instead place up to 16,000 runs into the pouch and cast the spell to your heart’s content.
The rune pouch does have some limitations though. For starters, you can only store three different types of runes inside the pouch, making it so you can only cast one or two spells depending on your composition.
Additionally, while it will be restored to you if you happen to die fighting a monster, you will lose out if you die during PvP combat. It’s much safer to just leave the pouch at home if you plan to battle other players.
Now that we’ve covered the rune pouch, let’s take a look at what goes inside the rune pouch and how you can use the various runes in the game to your advantage.
Runes and Runecrafting
A rune is a weightless and magical stone that has an icon on it, and each of these icons represents an element. You can find these runes sold in various magic shops, on the bodies of slain monsters, during and after the rogue trader minigame, in predesignated spawn points, or you can craft them yourself. You just need rune essence and the runecraft skill.
The types of runes, and by extension spells that you can get are dependent on whether you are a free to play player or a member. For free to play, you can only craft runes up to body runes, and the two free to play magic stores sell the basic elemental runes, death runes, and chaos runes.
Players who are members can use these runes:
- Astral Runes: Astral Runes are used to cast Lunar Spells
- Blood Runes: Blood Runes are used to cast the high level missile spells, such as wave spells
- Soul Runes: Soul Runes are used to cast high level curse spells and teleother spells
- Wrath Runes: Wrath Runes are used to cast very high level missile spells, such as surge spells
Members can also take advantage of combination runes, which combine two runes together and use them as a substitute for spells that require either of those runes. For example, a mist rune combines air and water runes together, so any spell that requires either an air or water rune can use a mist rune instead.
Crafting Your Own Runes
Of course, if you don’t want to buy or farm runes from monsters, you can also focus on creating the runes yourself using the Runecraft Skill. Runecraft is admittedly a slow skill to train so it isn’t the most economical way to create runes if you are primarily fighting with magic.
However, it is a great avenue to make money due to the constant demand for all types of runes, so you can sell them on the market and make a large profit. Lamps, books of knowledge, and the effects from the Tears of Guthix minigame can help you train your skill. This is much faster than training everything on your end.
To craft runes, you will need to get magical stones called essence and then bind the magical energy from runecrafting altars to the essence to craft runes. There are two types of essence, the normal essence, and the pure essence.
Normal essence is available for the common 6 runes (air, mind, water, earth, fire, and body.) Pure essence is available for the members only runes, and you also need dark essence to make blood and soul runes.
For the normal rune essence, you need to either farm monster drops or you can complete the ‘Rune Mysteries’ quest and then you will be able to get the rune essence mine . You will be able to mine the essence yourself. If you are a member player, you can mine and farm pure essence as well.
There are also two other mines, and the first is the Daeyalt essence mine that can get you daeyalt essence. All you need to do is complete the ‘Sins of the Father’ quest. You can also get to the Arceuus Essence Mine and mine the dense runestones to get dense essence blocks. Take the blocks to the Dark Altar and then bind the dark energy into then bind the two together.
Then you will get dark essence blocks, and with a chisel, you can obtain dark essence fragments. It’s a few extra steps, but the blood and soul runes are worth it entirely.
Getting to the Core of the Problem
Finally, you can craft runes using colors, and you can find the colors in the Ruins of Camdozall. You just need to battle the golems that live in the ruins, and if you destroy them, you will receive colors that can be used to craft mind runs.
The Mind Golems drop mind colors, the Body Golems drop Body colors, and Chaos Golems drop chaos colors. Then each core acts like 10 runes essence, allowing you to craft your runes.
Speaking of Ruins, you can find the various runecrafting altars that lets you turn your essence into runes. All of the various types of ruins will be accessible through mysterious ruins, and you can find them by using a talisman, runecraft cape, or tiara to locate the ruins.
The only altar that you will not find in the bad is the astral altar, the blood altar, and the soul altar.
The astral altar is accessed from the Abyss, and you need to complete the ‘ Lunar Diplomacy’ quest to activate the altar and create lunar runes. The blood and soul altars are found in our dimension and do not need to be entered. Instead, they are at the Arceuus essence mine.
Once you click on whatever altar you are in front of, then all of the essence in your inventory is converted to the corresponding type of rune.
The ZMI Altar and the Abyss
The ZMI (or the Ourania) altar, is only usable if you are a members only player. You will be able to convert pure essence into a mix of random runes, and it also gives 70% more experience for each pure essence that is used. The only ruin that cannot be crafted this way is a wrath rune.
Finally, you can use the Abyss, which is accessed by the Enter the Abyss miniquest, which lets you have access to all the runecrafting altars without the need for a talisman.
However, you do not have the ability to make astral runes and wrath runes. The Abyss is a very dangerous location, but if you are prepared for it you can use the various runes by crafting altars there to quickly craft all your runes.
Rune Pouch OSRS FAQ
Question: When Would I Use a Rune Pouch?
Answer: A rune pouch is great whenever you have one or two spells you are using as your main spells. For example, if you are using ice spells a lot for offense, you will need a lot of water, blood, chaos, and death runes. You can store the water and death runes, which are used for all of the four ice spells into the rune pouch and have a ton of them.
Then, depending on if you are using ice blitz and ice barrage as your main spells, you can store blood runes. If you are using ice rush and ice burst, you can store chaos runes.
No matter what you do, you can easily store the other rune inside your inventory to have access to all four spells. However, the rune pouch’s use does save space as you only need to pack your inventory with one rune instead of 4.
Question: Can I Bank a Rune Pouch Note If I Lose It?
Answer: Since a rune pouch will be lost if you have it in your inventory and then die during PvP combat, some people do have insurance against losing the pouch. If they get a rune pouch note from the Grand Exchange or the Last Man Standing points, and they still have a rune pouch, you can still keep the note.
On the off chance that you lose the bag, you can easily redeem the note for another one. The runes inside the bag will be lost, but you will still get to keep the bag.
Question: Is Filling The Bag Worth It?
Answer: While a 16,000 limit each on three different gems sounds like a lot, well… it is, and if you fill the bag to your capacity can basically cast any spell that uses the three runes without having to worry about running out.
Still, it will take a lot of gold and essence to make 48,000 runes and keep yourself from using them until the bag is filled to capacity, so most of the time you won’t get even close to filling the bag.
But every rune you can put in the bag is one less rune clogging up your inventory space, so using the bag is still worth it.
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