If you could work out sulliusceps that would be absolutely amazing. It blows most conventional methods out of the water for exp/hour and you get a nice bonus from the fossils which can be traded in for exp in other skills. There is definitely some risk involved especially for low levels with multiple sources of moderate damage, but overall the risk should be quite manageable.
From a developer perspective my presumption is that sulliusceps would require a lot of iterative testing, in the sense that it is a series of multiple sequential tasks. However each task itself shouldn't be particularly hard to deal with, and there is minimal "decision making" involved other than managing HP. A potential complication is world hopping but that is not strictly required.
I don’t see any reason why sulliusceps can’t be botted, but in my non-technical opinion creating a bot for sulliusceps would be somewhat more challenging, and much more time consuming than say implementing cutting teaks/mahoganys.
As for other fossil island attractions, by far the most appreciated is birdhouses, and in my opinion also has the most potential with relative ease of implementation. There are other unique resources and activities on the island which might be useful for ironmen, such as herbiboars for high level herbs, but otherwise have limited value.
As mentioned before birdhouses are a periodical task for hunter xp and birdnests, which are worth more than 4.5k each at the moment. It takes 50 minutes for a birdhouse to fill up (conveniently just under an hour for billing purposes), and they cannot be "harvested" before they are full. In many ways birdhouses are similar to farming, but with much smaller scope, less time, and fewer variables.
Unlike farming, the duration begins once the birdhouse is completed, instead of following global ticks like farming cycles, which is arguably easier to track/schedule. Once you unlock the system of teleportation (which requires minimal effort), completing a birdhouse run to all 4 birdhouses requires less than a minute.
As an example I use yew birdhouses which require 59 hunter, and every 50 minutes I get just over 4k hunter exp and an average of 9 bird nests, which is worth more than 40k gp in total, as well as assorted seeds and jewelry, requiring less than a minute of time and no more than 30 clicks in locations that never change.
Birdhouses are created with crafting, and each tier of birdhouse requires a similar crafting level as the hunter level required. Crafting a birdhouse requires a hammer and chisel in inventory, a piece of clockwork and the corresponding tier of log. Once the birdhouse is placed it must be loaded with seeds, and will then be ready to “harvest” in 50 minutes.
Harvesting a birdhouse refunds the piece of clockwork while the log is consumed. Typically players reuse the clockwerk and bring logs and tools to craft the birdhouse right after harvesting it.
A player may wish to use prebuilt birdhouses instead of crafting them on the fly, for example if they have a low crafting level and cannot build the birdhouses themselves. They would then require a stock of completed birdhouses in their bank, but otherwise in practice there is little difference.
Generally speaking, automating a birdhouse run can be broken into a few tasks:
- Bank withdrawal possibly including charge-based teleportation jewelry
- Using unique “magic mushtree” teleportation system
- Short pathing between mushtrees and/or birdhouses
- Emptying, replacing and putting seeds into birdhouses, with variation on pre-built and building on the fly
- Depositing bank/resetting
The only user settings/input required would be the tier/type of birdhouse used, the seeds used, and whether to use prebuilt birdhouses or crafting on the fly, and perhaps some options with teleport jewelry.
In a similar way to the teak/mahogany trees discussed earlier, you would be dealing with unique entities in the birdhouses, as well as a unique menu system for the magic mushtree teleports. Once again, my understanding is that most of the work is to establish these components, but getting them to move shouldn’t be too hard. But that’s just my lay opinion so take it with a grain of salt.
Back to the original topic, I think a package of cutting teaks combined with birdhouse runs at regular intervals makes a lot of sense. If all activities are on the island, instead of using teleportation jewelry, you would be looking at some 30 extra tiles of pathing to the bank on the island. The way I see it is the woodcutting is a great low-risk low-intensity activity to fill time in between the birdhouse runs; and the birdhouse runs would also function as a sort of anticheat/antipattern to break up the woodcutting. This is all packaged in just-longer-than-50-minute cycles for easy billing.
Just as easily you could replace the 50 minutes of woodcutting with any activity that sits in front of a bank, using the bank at the fossil island camp, such as fletching or herblore. There is also a permanent fire a modest 10 tiles or so away from the bank. All said I feel like there is a lot of potential for birdhouse runs to add value to and leverage your preexisting resources.
I’m not exactly sure how this works but if at any point you feel confident that you could implement this I would be happy to put a down payment of say 50 hours, and help with whatever testing. I am on an asian timezone so it shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate.
