Flipping herbs and secondaries
This is the input side of the potion market you met in the last lesson. Herbs and their secondary ingredients are farmed, dropped and gathered by players, then consumed in bulk by anyone training Herblore. The whole category runs on that one relationship.
A grimy ranarr weed is worth roughly 5,700 gp and about a million of them trade every day. A crushed nest is worth about 4,200 gp and does even more volume. Red spiders' eggs cost under 200 gp and move over 1.5 million units a day. These items look nothing like each other on price, but they share a market structure: player-generated supply, one dominant use, and a buyer who is doing the same thing over and over in bulk.
The chain that drives everything
Herbs and secondaries are bought for one reason: to be turned into potions. That makes the category unusually easy to reason about, because you already know the demand side from the previous lesson. If prayer potions are being consumed heavily, ranarr weed is being bought heavily. If nobody is training Herblore, herbs pile up.
The link runs both ways, and the direction matters. Rising potion prices pull herbs up, because the people making potions can afford to pay more for inputs. Rising herb prices push potions up, because the cost floor moves. What breaks the pattern is Herblore experience: when a particular potion is the best experience per gold, players buy that herb and its secondary in bulk and then dump the finished potion at whatever price clears. In that case the input rises while the output falls, and the gap between them compresses. Anyone flipping herbs and potions at the same time should watch for that squeeze, because it is the one condition where both halves of the chain move against a naive position.
One question answers most of this category: is the demand coming from people who want the potion, or from people who want the experience? Those two crowds push prices in opposite directions.
Grimy against clean
Nearly every herb exists in a grimy form and a cleaned form, and both trade separately. Cleaning a herb takes one click and a level requirement, so the two prices are tethered by the effort of a single inventory action.
In practice the grimy version is the more liquid of the two. Grimy ranarr weed does around 950,000 units a day against roughly 700,000 for the clean version, and the gap is wider still on herbs like torstol and snapdragon. The reason is simple: herbs enter the game grimy, from farming and drops, so the raw form is what most sellers actually hold. Buyers who need clean herbs will often buy grimy and clean them.
For a flipper this means two things. Prefer the grimy side when you want a reliable fill, because that is where the trade is. And do not read a price difference between grimy and clean as free gold: the gap is usually the market pricing the click, and it closes fast when it opens too far. If you flip both forms of the same herb at once you are also doubling your exposure to one supply story, which defeats the point of spreading across items.
Where secondaries come from
Secondaries are the second ingredient in a potion, and they are the most scattered group of items in the game in terms of origin. Each one has its own supply engine, and that engine is what you actually need to watch.
- Crushed nests come from bird nests dropped while Woodcutting, so supply tracks how many people are cutting trees.
- Zulrah's scales come from a single boss and carry a large 30,000 buy limit with tens of millions traded a day, which makes them behave more like a rune than like a herb.
- Amylase crystals come from Marks of Grace, so supply is tied to Agility training and the price has swung across a wide band in recent months.
- Red spiders' eggs and potato cactus are gathered from fixed spawns, which means supply responds to how worthwhile the gathering is at the current price.
- Wine of Zamorak comes from a telegrab spot, which links its supply to the price of law and air runes.
None of these engines has anything to do with the others. That is the useful part: a basket of secondaries is genuinely diversified in a way that a basket of runes is not, because no single update hits all of them.
Limits, and the capital they demand
Herbs carry a four hour buy limit of 11,000 or 13,000 depending on the herb, and most secondaries sit in the same range. Those are generous limits attached to items that can cost several thousand gold each, and the combination produces some very large capital requirements.
A full 11,000 limit of grimy ranarr weed at 5,600 gp is more than 61M of gold committed to a single item in a single window. A full limit of crushed nests is over 45M. Very few players are running a bank where that is a sensible single position. So in this category, unlike runes, the buy limit is usually not your binding constraint. Your bank is. Size to what you can afford to have sitting in an offer, and accept that you will rarely take a full limit on the expensive herbs.
Two worked flips
Expensive herb. Grimy ranarr weed, limit 11,000, recent band roughly 5,300 to 6,000 gp.
Buy at 5,600, sell at 5,850. Tax = floor(0.02 × 5,850) = 117 gp.
Net per herb = 5,850 − 5,600 − 117 = 133 gp, about 2.4% on capital.
At 2,000 units rather than the full limit: 266,000 gp on 11.2M committed.
Cheap secondary. Red spiders' eggs, limit 13,000, trading around 170 to 180 gp.
Buy at 168, sell at 178. Tax = floor(0.02 × 178) = 3 gp.
Net per unit = 178 − 168 − 3 = 7 gp. Full limit: 91,000 gp on 2.18M of capital.
Return on capital: about 4.2%, nearly double the ranarr flip, on a twenty-eighth of the gold.
That contrast is the lesson. The expensive herb pays more gold per window if you can fund it; the cheap secondary pays a far better rate on the gold you actually have. A player with 5M should be looking at the bottom of this category, not the top, and should feel no envy about it. The rate is better down there precisely because fewer large banks bother to compete for it.
The weekly and seasonal rhythm
Herb supply arrives in waves. Farming runs complete on their own timers and players tend to do them at the start and end of a play session, so herb prices sag slightly during peak hours as harvests hit the market and firm up overnight. It is a small effect, a percent or two, but on a category where you are hunting two or three percent it is not nothing.
Larger swings come from events. A double experience weekend, a new Herblore-adjacent update, or a popular content creator recommending a training method can lift a specific herb by double digits for a few days and then let it fall back. Bonus experience periods are the clearest of these: inputs spike before and during, finished potions sag, and both drift back over the following week.
Risks specific to this category
- Player supply is elastic. If a herb price rises, more players farm it. Gains get competed away faster here than in categories where supply comes from a fixed drop table.
- Content changes the drop table. A new boss or a change to an existing one can add a herb source overnight, and the price adjusts before most people read the notes.
- Thin clean-side books. Clean herbs trade less than grimy ones, and the less popular clean herbs can leave you holding stock for hours.
- Correlated positions. Holding grimy and clean versions of the same herb, or a herb and the potion it makes, is one bet wearing two hats.
- Wide historical bands. Some secondaries, amylase crystals in particular, have traded across enormous ranges. A price that looks low against a recent band may just be the new level.
Finding live herb flips
The Margins board is the better tool for this category, because you usually arrive with a shortlist of herbs and secondaries in mind and want to see which of them currently has room. Filter Buy price under 10,000 to stay inside the herb band, add a Trades an hour floor so the thin clean herbs drop out, then sort by ROI high to low. ROI is the right primary sort here rather than Profit@Limit, because you are almost never taking the full limit anyway. Save that as a view called something like Herblore inputs and it is one tap next time.
The Flip Finder is useful in the other direction: set your real capital and let it size positions for you, which stops you from talking yourself into a 60M position in a single herb because the percentage looked good. Both tools work out the after tax number for you, which matters more here than the raw spread, since a 117 gp tax on a ranarr weed is most of a thin margin.
Because this category's supply story is written by game updates rather than by traders, the third page worth keeping open is Market news, which collects recent updates and the items they are expected to move. A change to a herb source or to what a potion is used for lands here before it has finished working through the price, and herbs are slow enough that noticing a day late is still noticing in time. Movers answers the same question from the other end, showing what is actually moving hardest right now whether or not anyone announced it.
Next, a category with a completely different supply story: logs, ores and bars are gathered rather than farmed, and their prices are anchored by what a skiller can earn per hour.
Herb and secondary pages to watch
Live prices, volume and buy limits for the items named above: Grimy ranarr weed, Grimy snapdragon, Crushed nest and Red spiders' eggs.
GE Uncut is an unofficial, fan-made tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Jagex Limited. RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are trademarks of Jagex Limited; in-game content and item images are the property of Jagex Limited, used for reference only. Price data is from the OSRS Wiki real-time prices API. See data attribution.