Welcome!

By registering with us, you'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

Sign up now!

How do gold farmers make it work?

cuppa.drink(java);
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
6,966
ACTUAL TL;DR: I did heavy botting (3-4 mem accs) and made like 100m in a few weeks. Even peak possible rates seem bad (~33m-50m members, 5m ftp, per account per 2 weeks). Is there something I'm missing or how do gold farmers make it work? The gp/week(s) seems low for setup time & risk.



Ah christ, this post got really long. Sorry m8.


So I've been trying to do some small scale gold farming using @SilenceP44 's BF bot (shoutout to him, great bot all around). I was averaging about 350-400k/hour on a members account with fairly minimal setup. But I got too cocky and got banned (again, it's a great bot, I only blame myself and my insane hours) with a ton of money on the accounts, majorly cutting into profit. So now I'm looking at a retrospective here. Let's run some numbers.

I'd say 400k/h is pretty peak for a moderately simple gold farming account. Yeah you could definitely make/buy a zulrah bot or something, spend days to get the requirements, and make around ~1.5m+/h, but that's a lot less scalable anyway. So let's assume 400k/h per account.

Let's assume a generous 10 hours a day on each account in periods of 2 weeks (length of a bond). I was doing nearly that much sometimes (which is probably why I got banned).

Blast Furnace:
Generous estimate: (2 weeks) * (7 days a week) * (10 hours a day) * (peak of 0.4m per hour) - (~3.8m bond) = ~52m/2 weeks - (~0.01$ per bot-hour, about $1.50 cost to runemate)
Realistic estimate: (2) * (7) * (7.5 h) * (0.35m per hour) - (~3.8m bond) = ~33m/2 weeks - (~0.01$ per bot-hour, about $1.00 cost to runemate)

Let's say you're being risky, running 4 accounts this much on 1 ip, you could make ~200m peak, 130m realistically per 2 weeks, assuming no bans or hiccups in the bot. Minus about $5 in runemate costs.

If you want to get fancy, you can buy proxies for 50 cents ish a proxy and you could scale a few accounts on each. But you'd start to need better hardware, requiring you to run more computers, or a VPS, which gets expensive.

FTP Method, eg. Fishing Lobbies:
Rough estimate (I don't know the numbers): 2 weeks * 7 days * 10 hours * ~40k per hour (?) = ~5.6m per 2 weeks.

FTP is obviously more scalable (for fishing, not mining or WC), but 5.6m per 2 weeks is nothing.


Longer Tl;dr/Conclusion:
I don't understand how gold farmers make gold farming substantially profitable. A moderately risky setup with 4 members blast furnace bots running an entire work day would only net you ~125-200m every TWO weeks, which is only a potential profit of ~$85 - $140 USD every two weeks assuming you don't get banned or anything. FTP gold farming is even more trash as running 4 accounts only gets you ~20m every two weeks (or less). You could obviously scale these, but then you have to mess with proxies and more machines to run on which costs more. Even with 10 ftp accounts, for example, you'd only make about 50m every TWO weeks, which is garbo. With 10 BF bots you'd make about 330m to peak of 400m per TWO weeks with massive risk.

Is there something I'm missing here? Is the feasible cap only a couple 100$ a week if you bot hardcore hours? How do people make gold farming worthwhile?

Edit: Also, I recognize a couple $100 a week is good for a teenager or a venezuelan gold farmer, but I work full time (so I'm gunning for the big bucks here) and the botting maintenance time has been a pain in the ass. Plus somehow over the last month I didn't even meet my expected results above, I'm only up about ~150m in a month and I lost about 50m on banned accounts, so. I only made about 100m heavily botting for a month.
 
Last edited:
Java Warlord
Joined
Nov 17, 2014
Messages
4,906
Wtf
 
LOL. I'm not very good at tl;drs. I'm a little verbose.

Added a shorter tl;dr to the top.
The trick is to find a method that is either very safe or very underpopulated. Furthermore most goldfarmers use private bots tailored exactly for their needs to automate as much of the process as possible. The ultmate goal is to have a completely self sufficient network of accounts that take care of making money, creating and setting up accounts, and muling. so that you only personally have to care about selling the gold from one of the mules.
 
cuppa.drink(java);
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
6,966
Wtf
 

The trick is to find a method that is either very safe or very underpopulated. Furthermore most goldfarmers use private bots tailored exactly for their needs to automate as much of the process as possible. The ultmate goal is to have a completely self sufficient network of accounts that take care of making money, creating and setting up accounts, and muling. so that you only personally have to care about selling the gold from one of the mules.
Hmm, good point. I guess I've been focusing too much on the GP/h when I should be focusing more on automating the entire process for scalability. Also I'm having a lot of trouble finding an underpopulated and/or safe method. Especially since it seems ALL of ftp is overpopulated.

But yeah, I see your point.
 
Java Warlord
Joined
Nov 17, 2014
Messages
4,906
Hmm, good point. I guess I've been focusing too much on the GP/h when I should be focusing more on automating the entire process for scalability. Also I'm having a lot of trouble finding an underpopulated and/or safe method. Especially since it seems ALL of ftp is overpopulated.

But yeah, I see your point.
I personally only have farmed incandescent energies on rs3 to supply my main with gp. incancdescent energies are very stable so my (very small) goldfarm will have no impact on the prices, and on the same time it seems to be very safe in terms of bans. Only downside is, it takes weeks to setup accounts. after that they require little to no maintenance though.
 
cuppa.drink(java);
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
6,966
I personally only have farmed incandescent energies on rs3 to supply my main with gp. incancdescent energies are very stable so my (very small) goldfarm will have no impact on the prices, and on the same time it seems to be very safe in terms of bans. Only downside is, it takes weeks to setup accounts. after that they require little to no maintenance though.
Out of curiosity what's the GP/h of that once setup? I know nothing about RS3 right now.
 
Java Warlord
Joined
Nov 17, 2014
Messages
4,906
Out of curiosity what's the GP/h of that once setup? I know nothing about RS3 right now.
Prices go up and down, but i think last time i ran my bots for longer periods of time, the GP/hr must have been around 1.7-2m/hr. There are tons of better methods, but considering how little maintenance the accounts take and how low the chance of ban is, it was most worth it for me.


Just to showcase the safety of this method: after reaching 95 divination, it's about 15k xp/hr, and my accounts are all somewhere around level 102 divination. which means they got ~7m experience at 15k/hr, or ~450 hours each account without ban. Other people here have reached 106 (107?) divination on their accounts, so an additional 10m+ experience they've earned over time.
 
cuppa.drink(java);
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
6,966
Prices go up and down, but i think last time i ran my bots for longer periods of time, the GP/hr must have been around 1.7-2m/hr. There are tons of better methods, but considering how little maintenance the accounts take and how low the chance of ban is, it was most worth it for me.


Just to showcase the safety of this method: after reaching 95 divination, it's about 15k xp/hr, and my accounts are all somewhere around level 102 divination. which means they got ~7m experience at 15k/hr, or ~450 hours each account without ban. Other people here have reached 106 (107?) divination on their accounts, so an additional 10m+ experience they've earned over time.
Hmm, that's actually really comparable to what I've been getting through blast furnace on OSRS (after a rough conversion), although I assume that's more ban-resistant. Though my bots were all around 95 smithing before they got banned (lmao).

I guess I'll revisit my moneymaking options. Maybe even look into making some high level accounts for botting bosses, since RuneMate seems good about avoiding bans generally.
 
easily triggered ✌
Joined
Dec 31, 2015
Messages
4,583
  • So your first problem is that you’re running accounts on the same IP. You need residential IPs (Cost about $1-$3each)

  • Your accounts need to be rested and not fresh, as well as some quests and other skills up.

  • You’re using a saturated method, find a different method, especially if you’re only making 400k/hr.
 
cuppa.drink(java);
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
6,966
  • So your first problem is that you’re running accounts on the same IP. You need residential IPs (Cost about $1-$3each)
  • Your accounts need to be rested and not fresh, as well as some quests and other skills up.
  • You’re using a saturated method, find a different method, especially if you’re only making 400k/hr.

Thanks, all good points.

I'm looking into VPS options currently. I know it'll cut into my hourly profit a lot, but it also makes this all much more scaleable, if I automated more of the maintenance. Does anyone have any experience using Amazon AWS? There's so many options I'm unsure exactly what would be useful for me.
 
Joined
Apr 14, 2018
Messages
8
Thanks, all good points.

I'm looking into VPS options currently. I know it'll cut into my hourly profit a lot, but it also makes this all much more scaleable, if I automated more of the maintenance. Does anyone have any experience using Amazon AWS? There's so many options I'm unsure exactly what would be useful for me.

AWS is pretty pricey and I've noticed higher ban rates on datacenter IP addresses.
 
Top