Hey, I'm the guy writing all these esoteric essay-length blog posts about a video game stock market. You can call me Mal or Stonks.
I'm an old hand when it comes to OSRS. I've been playing since I was ten, way back in 2005, and I've had an account on OSRS since... 2015-ish? I'm not some hardcore God Mode player with maxed stats or whatever, my current grind is getting all my skills up to level 70. I only have twelve more skills to go.
A few things up front:
My interest in the OSRS Grand Exchange - and by proxy digital stocks, value trends and profit margins - is confined solely to the MMORPG game Old-school Runescape. I would rather delete all of my social media and spend the rest of my life as a lighthouse caretaker than touch anything crypto-related with a ten foot pole; my nerdery is explicitly and solely focused on Runescape and its own unique, self-contained video game stock market, because I enjoy playing the game so much.
The charts and figures shown in each post are accurate - at least in an approximate sense - at the time of that post's writing. Historical figures are... well, not entirely immutable, but immutable enough. "Current" figures are destined to fluctuate.
This is a fun fandom sideblog, not a hardcore financial science paper authored to the highest scrutiny. I graduated high school and I have a blue-collar job; I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything. I'm just nerding out.
I'm gonna be honest, I'd be pretty surprised if I had more than twenty of these extensive ultra-niche video game stock market posts in me. If I were you, I'd fully expect this blog to burn out and become defunct hard and fast.
Suggestions are a bit of a grey area right now. I kind of want to bumble through the wiki or find something in the game that gives me an idea, but honestly if someone is so enthused by the concept of this blog that they contact me going "hey hey I want to see a post about this thing!", that's cool too. I also wholeheartedly encourage other users to write their own posts if they end up enjoying this blog.
The general tags I use are underneath this post, and each post will be tagged with the item's name. Not that it'll help with how terrible the website's search function is, but it's the thought that counts.
Coal prices on the GE are inching lower and lower from its height of 254gp. At the moment it's sitting at 238, and I'm hoping it begins to freefall as soon as possible.
I've got a coal listing up on the GE for when it hits a certain price, because I'm not paying a thousand coins for four pieces of coal y'know.
I like enchanting jewellery. Or to be a bit more accurate, I get a lot of superfluous currency to buy bags of gems with, so I like to make time to enchant jewellery for profit. It's only been recently that I've learned the value in teleportation jewellery like the games necklace or the digsite pendant, usually I'm just trying to make a buck.
I will say though - heads up to anyone who isn't very enthused about training their Hunter skill, birdhouse traps on Fossil Island give out a lot of XP and a lot of extremely valuable bird nests. Digsite pendants are your friend if you've unlocked the Fossil Island location. Again, teleportation jewellery is a fairly recent appreciation of mine.
I don't know why I was looking up enchant spells, but I came across the wiki page for Lvl-3 Enchant and came across the Necklace of Faith. And after checking some of the other enchanted jewellery, this thing just kinda sucks.
Now, granted - I'm not familiar with the necklace of faith. I tend to make bracelets of slaughter because they're worth more on the GE. And while I could say that they're the least valuable item as far as enchanted red topaz jewellery goes, that's technically not true - Efaritay's aid has more of a value drop on the GE than the necklace of faith:
But Efaritay's aid - as limited as it is - lets you use non-silver weaponry to fight vampires. Your damage cap is stuck at 10, but I still think that's kind of a neat effect.
The effect of the necklace of faith, verbatim from the wiki, is:
"When worn, the necklace will restore the wearer's prayer points by 10% if their hitpoints drop below 20%. Once the effect takes place, the necklace will degrade to dust. However, if the player is reduced to zero hitpoints from above 20%, the necklace will have no effect and the player will die as usual."
Personally, I think that's a weak-ass effect. You might get enough oomph out of this if you're at level 70 prayer or so, where you get a measly SEVEN prayer points to work with, but at the lower levels this item is genuinely useless imo. You also have to get whittled down to 20% health before it kicks in, at which point it's entirely possible that the next hit from the opponent will kill you, rendering the effect meaningless. They even accounted for the possibility that the player would be killed with a hit that damages them for more than 20% of their HP. If you're at 20% health and you've already burned through 70+ prayer points, chances are you're hosed.
I did introduce this item by saying that it sucks, but I can see how going into combat with this could help you pull a hail mary if you're good enough at the game. But I feel like it's not particularly appreciated anyway, which is why I wanted to cover it.
Looking at the value chart, this item's value peaked at almost 2,000 gold pieces when it was introduced:
Went into freefall and bottomed out at 628 gold pieces two years later - seemingly due to high demand, which didn't even breach 500 daily trades on the Grand Exchange:
Then hit a peak in 2020:
After which it fizzled out and maintained a steady value - it ebbs and flows, but it's nothing too crazy.
What gets me is that in February 2023, the daily trading volume hit a significant peak of 399 items, but the price was barely affected. You can see how the absolute nadir of the necklace's value was when there was a huge spike in GE sales, and the little anthill where it was briefly valuable again is nestled between two little peaks of GE sales. This thing did numbers - at least compared to its entire life on the Grand Exchange - and nothing happened to the value. Ebbs and flows, but nothing significant.
I'm rather fond of the ensouled chaos druid head, which is why I wanted to talk about it and bring attention to it. The necklace of faith is just kinda silly though. Low value, sucky effect and ridiculously unpopular.
As a postscript, though, I did look into onyx jewellery - and I found an item that increases the damage of all granite weapons by 20%, but it reduces your accuracy and your defense against all styles of attack. The best part is, you can't even use it with the necklace of faith, because they're both necklaces!
I would consider making a regular post about the berserker necklace, especially since it's worth like 500,000 gold pieces less than an unenchanted onyx necklace, but that side of things is way out of my wheelhouse. But man, look at that frigging GE value chart - this thing was worth over three million gold at one point.
Moral of the story, the necklace of faith sucks. Let's point and laugh at it.
Old-school Runescape has a mechanic where some enemy mobs drop ensouled heads when you defeat them. Usually enemies will drop some standard items like bones, ashes, coins and/or meat, and then have a small chance of dropping some other stuff like weapons, ammunition, armour or runes. The ensouled head is an occasional drop that - as you've probably guessed - gives you their head with a little bit of their soul inside of it.
The purpose of this mechanic is to help you train your prayer skill. Prayers are basically just buffs, and the higher you make your prayer skill, the more prayers you unlock. You also get an extra prayer point per level so your buffs last longer. Before ensouled heads were added to the game, the primary way to train your prayer skill was to bury bones; you had regular bones, big bones, monkey bones, dragon bones etc. that would grant you higher amounts of prayer experience when you buried them. Other remains came a bit later.
Unfortunately, burying bones is a very tedious task with a very middling XP reward. The lowest class of bones grants you 4.5 prayer experience, and the highest class - superior dragon bones - only grant 150 XP. There are ways to amplify the payoff, but you're still looking at a maximum of 600 XP per pile of bones.
Ensouled heads can be resurrected at an altar, summoning an astral body to be refought so you can gain prayer and combat experience. The "worst" ensouled head, the goblin one, grants 130 experience - again, the bog-standard bones that just about everything drops only grants you 4.5 XP per pile. The best head - a dragon head - gives you a massive 1,560 prayer XP.
The ensouled chaos druid head nets you 584 prayer experience, just shy of the superior dragon bones.
Superior dragon bones - which I might make a post on in the future, because there was a massive dip in value in 2022 - cost 7,861 gold pieces to buy on the GE at the time of writing. These bones are only dropped by a story-relevant boss named Vorkath which has a minimum combat level of 392 (compared to the player character's maximum combat level of 127).
Ensouled chaos druid heads cost 404 gold pieces, and the mob that drops this item seems to only exist at level 13.
The low value of ensouled chaos druid heads has interested me for a while. In this post, I'm going to go deeper into the value of other ensouled heads and speculate as to why the ensouled chaos druid head is the second cheapest head to buy on the Grand Exchange.
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The value chart for the ensouled chaos druid head is interesting, in that the peak of its value is when the item was launched on OSRS:
After which it dipped significantly, and stayed mostly in the same ballpark.
You can see that there was a brief boom in 2020, where the price almost hit 1,700 gold pieces:
After which it hit its lowest value of 352 gold pieces per head:
The ensouled chaos druid head is the second cheapest ensouled head you can buy on the GE, compared to the ensouled goblin head which only offers 130 prayer experience. And sure, it's no ensouled dragon head with its 1,560 prayer XP, but the next best option is the ensouled giant head at 650 XP, and that head is almost twice as expensive as the chaos druid head.
I'm starting to believe that the price for this head is so cheap because of the daily volume of ensouled chaos druid heads being sold on the GE.
Like - unicorns are rare and kind of a pain in the ass to farm for heads. According to the wiki at the time of writing, the daily volume of ensouled unicorn heads being sold on the GE is like 170. Ensouled dog heads only drop from two hostile dog mobs ranging between combat level 44 and 63, and the daily volume of that item is 117.
The daily volume of ensouled chaos druid heads - again, the DAILY volume - is just shy of 6,000:
So case closed, right?
Well, maybe not.
Ensouled chaos druid heads grant 584 prayer experience when you resurrect them at the Dark Altar in Arceuus. They're preceded by ensouled dog heads which grant 520 prayer XP when resurrected and defeated, and they're succeeded by ensouled giant heads which grant 650 prayer XP when defeated.
Over 26,000 ensouled giant heads go through the Grand Exchange every day, and the price is almost double what ensouled chaos druid heads are worth:
And I think I might have an answer for why the figures are the way they are.
Chaos druids are kind of common. There are five or six outposts of them in the entire game, and they're only ever at combat level 13, so they're easy enough to mow down and farm heads. Low combat level, easy to farm, common enough mob compared to dogs and unicorns. I'd imagine they're also a lower level slayer task.
Giants are fucking EVERYWHERE.
You've got hill giants, moss giants, ice giants, fire giants and cyclopes. They're a common slayer task, and they're often a reasonable option to train your combat skills and farm key drops to take on Obor and Bryophyta.
Giant heads might be the single most common ensouled head you can get in the game. And because of that and the slightly superior XP gain, giant heads are always moving through the GE and are always fairly valuable.
In my opinion, chaos druid heads are fairly common compared to its contemporaries, so it faces a sort of mundanity that keeps the value low and the daily volume high. Giant heads are plentiful and popular, so the value remains much higher than that of the ensouled chaos druid head despite not being all that different. Chaos druid heads are mundane, like toilet paper. Giant heads are popular, like McDonalds.
Other heads that grant less XP are more valuable than the chaos druid head only due to not being as common of a drop, presumably due to their mobs not being as common in the game world or not being a popular mob to grind. Like who's out there grinding scorpion mobs? They barely drop anything. Low daily volume, low item reserves, higher price. You can say the same for pretty much every mob with an ensouled head prior to the chaos druids, except for the common goblin.
I like ensouled giant heads well enough, but ever since learning about the ensouled chaos druid head I've come to feel kind of sorry for it. It's not much worse than the ensouled giant head, but it's not nearly as popular and it's extremely cheap on the Grand Exchange. I love an underdog, and honestly using chaos druid heads to train your prayer is probably the best coin-to-XP value due to its reduced value compared to giant heads.
So the next time you're considering training your prayer level, consider the humble ensouled chaos druid head. They're not quite as good as giant heads, but you're not missing out on much and you're getting a fantastic bargain.
The brine sabre is a weapon in Old-school Runescape that allows you to kill a certain slayer creature without the use of its usual slayer tool - in this case, instead of using a bag of salt to kill a rockslug, you can use the brine sabre to kill rockslugs outright and save time and money. The name, description and location of this item indicates that it's been left sitting in salty water for a long time - but instead of rusting, it's been imbibed with the properties of salt, and so you can kill slugs with it.
I'm gearing up to do a brine sabre grind. It has a 1/512 chance of dropping from an enemy called a Brine Rat, which sounds like a lot until you realise that this weapon only drops from brine rats, there's only one area in the entire game world where brine rats spawn and they're definitely not the strongest mob in the game (level 70). Because of its rarity, utility and awesome look, this weapon currently sits at a value of approx. 289,000 gold pieces on the Grand Exchange.
But what's the history of this item's value throughout its lifespan? This post is all about that, at least according to oldschool.runescape.wiki.
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So, the brine sabre is currently coming down from a record peak of its value. Here's the chart for the past month vs the past six months:
So you can see that the brine sabre was at its peak in early-ish September, trading at a value of 310k~. Some time in July, it took a sharp dip to a value slightly north of 170k. The market has been a bit unstable; maybe there was a rash of availability, like someone grinding for brine sabre drops and mass-selling on the GE.
What I find interesting, though, is the lifetime sales of the brine sabre.
The lowest price that the brine sabre ever traded at was 50,000 gold pieces on Wednesday, 31 January 2018.
The highest it ever traded at - leading directly in from its low point - was 700,000 gold pieces on Wednesday, 21st November 2018.
The next highest peak of value was 314k~ on Saturday 9 September 2017:
And the spike in brine sabre's value this past September is the third highest price this item has ever been at, at approx. 310k~.
So why is this the case?
You might think that the brine sabre itself changed - and you'd be right. In July of 2016, the brine sabre gained its ability to kill rockslugs without the use of an extraneous salt item:
But that was in July of 2016. The value of the item reached an all-time high in September 2017, over a year after the change occured, and the price subsequently bottomed out in early 2018. It only reached its all-time peak value of 700k~ at the end of November 2018, almost an entire year after it had cratered to a value of 50,000 gold pieces.
I don't know why any of this happened. Maybe some players grinded brine sabres to the point of deflation, causing ownership to increase so dramatically that the value of the item plummeted. But maybe after the item had lost its value and the glut of brine sabres had dwindled, other players began searching for the sabre on the GE and created new demand, causing the price to surge.
But I'm doubtful of that because the price took eleven months between January and November to go from rock-bottom to all time peak.
A factor that may have played into this is an emote clue for the master clue scroll, requiring you to go deep into the wilderness with the sabre and a bunch of other expensive gear to fight a double agent in the lava dragon pen. That's way fuckin up in the wilderness, close to the very top of it, making you extremely susceptible to pkers as well as risking a violent, dragonfire-fueled death in the search of treasure.
I don't know when the clue was added, but the master clue scroll was added to the game on the 6th of July 2016. At any point past that date, the emote clue requiring the brine sabre could have been added to the game, causing players to look for one on the Grand Exchange.
And why has it peaked again now, six years after it initially broke 300k in 2017? I have no idea, but the value seems to be dropping right now.
What gets me is that the rockslug is a very low-effort and low-value slayer monster. The average value of a rockslug drop is like 112 coins, and the rockslug itself is level 29. To get a brine sabre, you either need to shell out a six-figure sum for it on the Grand Exchange or grind a particular mob that's level 70, over twice as strong as any given rockslug.
I think it's a combination of rarity, its necessity for the master clue scroll and because it looks fucking awesome.
