OSRS Hunter Guide 1–99: Rumours, Birdhouses and Fast XP

Why Hunter Is Worth 1–99

Hunter is the only skill where the correct use of an hour is sometimes ninety seconds of work followed by nothing at all. A birdhouse run on Fossil Island takes somewhere around 73 to 90 seconds of actual play, and the four traps then need fifty minutes to fill before there is anything to collect. That is not a training session in any recognisable sense; it is a farm run. Played as one — set, walk away, come back when the timer says so — birdhouses give the fastest Hunter experience in real time effectively as far as level 80, and they stay viable all the way to 99 for anyone who is not racing.

The second thing that separates Hunter from the other gathering skills is that your level is not just a permission slip for better creatures. It is also the number of traps you are allowed to lay: one at level 1, two at 20, three at 40, four at 60 and five at 80, with one extra than usual anywhere in the Wilderness. Four specific levels therefore change how a hunting spot physically plays, and every level between them changes almost nothing about it. That is why the levels immediately below 20, 40, 60 and 80 are the ones worth drinking a hunter potion through rather than earning honestly.

Then there is the Hunter Guild, which opens at 46 Hunter in the Avium Savannah and brought rumours with it. A Guild hunter names a creature, you hunt that creature until it drops a rare creature part, and you hand the part in for experience calculated from your level and the tier of the hunter who set the task. Rumours gave Hunter something it had never had: an assignment, a way to block the assignments you hate, and a reward stream you accumulate rather than sell — the quetzal whistle, the guild hunter outfit, quetzal feed, and Quetzin from expert and master tiers only.

What the skill still lacks is a comfortable middle. Birdhouses, herbiboar and maniacal monkeys ask almost nothing of your attention; black chinchompas with tick manipulation, a shooting alt and a Wilderness escape plan ask for all of it. Working out which of those two you will genuinely sit down and play is most of what planning a Hunter 1–99 actually involves.

Bils Services offers hand-done Hunter training if you would rather outsource the grind. This article stays educational first — use the service link only if it fits your plan.

We have not put XP per hour or supply costs in this guide. Hunter rates move whenever Jagex adjusts a method, and the cost of the hunter supplies below moves with the Grand Exchange — a frozen number here would mislead you into budgeting the wrong bank. The OSRS Wiki carries live figures.

Quest XP and the Unlocks That Matter

The Hunter experience from quests totals 209,500 on the wiki's own reckoning. That is a meaningful shove through the early levels and close to irrelevant by the eighties, so treat the table above as an access list first and an experience list second. Three entries genuinely reorder the guide: Bone Voyage, because Fossil Island is where the passive route lives; Eagles' Peak, because a box trap is the gate on every chinchompa in the game; and starting Fairytale II - Cure a Queen, because a surprising number of the hunting areas below are addressed by fairy ring code rather than by teleport.

Two more are worth settling before you commit to a high-level method rather than discovering them at level 60. Maniacal monkeys need Monkey Madness II and the greegree, full stop. Carnivorous chinchompas at the Tlati Rainforest spot need Varlamore through Children of the Sun, and the quetzal to Tal Teklan through Twilight's Promise; without both you are running to a worse spot with sparser spawns.

Diaries are a smaller but real part of this. The hard Wilderness Diary is the recommended access for black chinchompas, and the skill is itself a requirement on a long list of diary tasks — 5 for Desert easy, 9 for Western Provinces easy, all the way up to 69 for Western Provinces hard. If you are diary-hunting anyway, several Hunter levels are already spoken for.

Hunter 1–99 Level Path

Read that table as the active column of a two-column plan. The other column is birdhouses, and it runs from level 9 to whenever you stop caring, independently of everything above. Four traps, fifty minutes, roughly a minute and a half of play — you can lay them before a Slayer task and collect them after it, and the experience arrives regardless of what the rest of your evening looked like.

The trap breakpoints deserve to be planned around rather than noticed in passing. Twenty, forty, sixty and eighty are the levels that change a spot's layout, and a hunter potion taken in the levels just below any of them buys you the extra trap early. Blackbird red and Trapper's tipple do the same job with a smaller boost and a single dose each, which makes them situational — worth it when the next level is a breakpoint, not worth it as a habit. The same potions also let you catch creatures a few levels before they are properly available, which is how the awkward bands between methods get shortened.

One thing the level bands hide: falconry ignores the trap count entirely, because your hands have to be empty to carry the bird. That is why it slots neatly into 43–49 despite sitting either side of no breakpoint at all, and why it feels so different from the trapping methods on either side of it.

1. 1–9/20: quest XP + early catches
2. Birdhouses: start as soon as unlocked and never stop on a main
3. Mid: butterfly/bird/chinchompa ladder depending on goal
4. Rumours: use as structured progression + reward loop when available
5. High: maniacal monkeys / herbiboar / red chins style methods by preference

Fastest XP Methods

The fastest route splits at level 73, and the split is about where you are willing to stand rather than what you are willing to click. Below that, it is the active ladder above — weasels, ruby harvests with snares running, red crabs, jerboas, falconry, razor-backed kebbits — with birdhouses collected alongside because they cost you almost no time to run.

From 73, black chinchompas in the Wilderness Hunter area are the fastest experience in the skill, and the method is a genuine technique rather than a location. Traps go down a tick faster with tick manipulation, and with correct timing you can lay a trap immediately after picking one up, which the wiki calls trap resetting: check a filled trap, delay the skilling timer with a knife on a teak or mahogany log, cancel by clicking under yourself, lay the trap, and walk to the next one on the same tick. A knife and logs need two inventory slots where herb and tar need three, which is why that particular combination is the recommended one.

Two supporting habits carry more weight here than they look like they should. Shooting stray chinchompas with a ranged weapon forces a new one to spawn, and the fresh spawn walks into a trap far faster than the wanderer did — which is the whole argument for a second account holding a crystal bow or a magic shortbow. That alt can also carry your box traps, brews and spare logs, freeing inventory space on the account actually doing the hunting.

If none of that appeals, expert and master rumours are the wiki's stated alternative for players who will not tick manipulate, will not enter the Wilderness, or will not run an alt. You give up the chinchompas and their profit; you keep almost all of the speed.

Maniacal monkeys and other intensive methods define the XP ceiling.

Red chinchompas are the classic mid/high XP + profit hybrid.

Herbiboar is excellent XP with Herblore side benefits for many accounts.

Cheapest / Budget Approach

Hunter's costs are unusually easy to control, because most of the equipment is either permanent or nearly free. Ropes, small fishing nets, box traps, bird snares and butterfly nets come back to you when you pick them up. Crab traps at the Pandemonium and on the Crown Jewel are built once and stay built. The falconry costs a flat 500 coins per rental and nothing else. There is no consumable equivalent of bars or herbs anywhere in the skill except drift nets, which are destroyed on collection.

The one recurring bill is birdhouse seeds, and it is a bill you choose the size of. Each birdhouse takes forty seeds of any kind, or twenty if you use wildblood seeds or herb seeds of ranarr and above — so the cheap play is to feed them potato or onion seeds and keep the valuable ones for the Farming patches they belong in. The other input is a clockwork, and the clockwork comes back every time you collect, so you are really only buying logs and seeds.

The genuinely budget route to a high level is birdhouses and nothing else, and it is a legitimate plan rather than a consolation prize: the wiki describes them as viable to 99 provided you are not in a hurry. The cost is calendar time instead of gold, which is a trade a lot of accounts should take.

Where money quietly disappears is transport. Digsite pendants are the fast way onto Fossil Island and they are charges you spend, though you can make them yourself by enchanting ruby necklaces with Lvl-3 Enchant once you have shown a clean necklace to a Varrock Museum archaeologist. Stamina potions are the other recurring cost, and they matter most on the running-heavy methods — herbiboar, falconry and the kebbit tracking bands.

Birdhouses are among the best passive GP/XP habits in OSRS.

Chins can be sold or used for ranged — decide before you dump inventory space.

Do not ignore hunter potions/boosts for milestone creatures.

AFK & Lower-Intensity Options

Hunter's low-attention options are unusually good, and they are low-attention in three different ways worth telling apart. Birdhouses are not AFK at all — they are absent. You are not at the keyboard during the fifty minutes; you are doing something else entirely, and the experience accrues because the traps are filling without you.

Maniacal monkeys are the closest thing the skill has to conventional AFK. One deadfall trap, one banana, and an interaction every twenty-five to thirty seconds. Because an inventory of banana baskets lasts around fifty minutes before you bank, the trip length lines up neatly with a birdhouse cycle, which is a pleasant accident rather than a design.

Herbiboar is low-effort in the sense of being forgiving rather than idle. You are tracking constantly, but nothing punishes a slow click, and the harvest gives herbs and Herblore experience for the trouble. Rainbow crabs sit in a similar band: five traps that catch at a consistent rate and cannot fail, with the caught crabs ground into stackable paste so you are not banking.

Drift net fishing deserves a mention here for a different reason. It is not especially AFK, but it is the only method that trains a second skill properly rather than incidentally, and for an account that needs both Hunter and Fishing it removes an entire project from the list.

Birdhouses are the AFK/passive backbone — do them every run.

Some box traps are low intensity compared to active rumour routes.

Goat Hunting on Wyrmscraig is a lure-based option in the 60–80 band, gated behind 60 Hunter and Sheep Herder. It launched in July 2026 and the wiki's Hunter training page had not absorbed it as of our last check, so our Wyrmscraig guide is the more current description of it.

The Profitable Route

Three methods pay while they train, and they pay in different currencies. Black chinchompas are the headline: the fastest experience from 73 and profitable at the same time, sold as ranged ammunition rather than as a raw material. Carnivorous chinchompas do the same thing outside the Wilderness at the cost of some speed, and become properly worth doing at 80 when the fifth trap arrives rather than at 63 when the creature does.

Rainbow crabs are the quiet one. Five permanent traps on the Crown Jewel, fine fish offcuts as bait, and a pestle and mortar to grind catches into stackable paste — a method where the profit is the difference between what the bait costs and what the paste sells for, and where banking the crabs instead lowers your experience substantially.

Then there are the by-products. Birdhouses return bird nests, feathers and raw bird meat every fifty minutes for nothing. Herbiboar hands over grimy herbs, more of them with magic secateurs, and a 1/6,500 chance at Herbi on each harvest. Maniacal monkeys drop a damaged monkey tail on every catch and an intact monkey tail at 1/5,000. Moonlight moths can be jarred for Prayer restoration or sold. Aerial fishing is the only source of the pearl rods, the fish sack and the golden tench.

We have not put a number on any of that, and the reason is specific to this skill rather than a general disclaimer: chinchompa and crab paste values are set by how many people are currently training the method, which changes every time the meta moves. The current figures live on the wiki.

Equipment Progression

Two of those rows correct beliefs that persist anyway. Camouflage gear does not help you catch anything; its value is weight and, for the three big-cat sets, damage reduction from the creatures that fight back. And bait and smoking are real but tiny: bait adds 3% to a trap's catch rate and a lit torch adds 2%, which is generally not worth the inventory space or the clicks except at very low levels where a failed trap is a large share of your session.

The guild hunter outfit is the exception worth chasing. It is the only Hunter clothing with a stated mechanical effect, and its second bonus compounds with the activity that awards it — a better rare creature part rate makes rumours shorter, which makes more rumours, which makes more outfit pieces. If you intend to spend any real time in the guild, finish the set early rather than treating it as a completion goal.

The three Hunter shops — Aleck's Hunter Emporium in Yanille, Imia's Supplies in the Hunter Guild, and the Nardah Hunter Shop — all carry the same stock, so buy at whichever one your route already passes. If you have 71 Magic and Dream Mentor, the Hunter Kit spell on the Lunar spellbook produces a kit containing a bird snare, box trap, butterfly net, impling jar, noose wand, rabbit snare, teasing stick and unlit torch, which quietly solves most of the equipment table above in one cast.

Where to Train

Which Route Should You Actually Pick?

Answer one question first and most of the rest follows: are you willing to hunt in the Wilderness? If yes, your route ends at black chinchompas from 73 and the only remaining decisions are how much tanking gear you are prepared to risk and whether you will run an alt. If no, your route ends at expert and then master rumours, with carnivorous chinchompas as the profitable substitute, and the wiki itself frames rumours as the alternative for exactly this player.

The second question is whether Fishing is also on your list. Drift net fishing splits its experience between the two skills, which makes it a poor Hunter method and an excellent way to close two projects at once. If Fishing is already done, the split is pure loss and you should be somewhere else the moment you notice.

The third question is about your calendar rather than your account. If your play happens in long uninterrupted sessions, the active ladder is straightforwardly better and the trap-count breakpoints are worth potion-boosting through. If your play happens in scattered ten-minute windows, birdhouses are not a compromise — they are the method that best fits the shape of your time, and they are competitive on real-time experience up to level 80 anyway.

Where the answers conflict, let the trap count break the tie. Sitting at 57 with three traps deciding between red salamanders and falconry is a different question from sitting at 60 with four, and the same is true at 79 versus 80 for carnivorous chinchompas. When you are within a few levels of a breakpoint, the correct move is usually to finish reaching it with whatever you are already doing and then reconsider, because the spot you were evaluating is about to play differently.

Finally, if you are within reach of a rumour tier, the tier is worth waiting for. The completion formula multiplies your level by 50 for novice and adept, 55 for expert and 60 for master, so a rumour handed in one level and one tier later is worth meaningfully more for the same hunting. That is not true of any other method here, where an extra level changes nothing until the next breakpoint.

Practical Tips That Actually Matter

• Hunter outfit pieces and magic secateurs-style account habits: small gains, big over 99.
• Rumours add structure; treat them like contracts, not random teleports.
• Track which creatures you still need for diary/collection goals.

Tools worth turning on:

• The Herbiboar Helper plugin on the official client — the only such tool the wiki names outright. It highlights the correct object to search on a herbiboar trail, which is the entire skill ceiling of that method.
• Menu entry reordering, set on the kebbit bushes so the default left click is "attack" rather than "search". At razor-backed kebbits you make that click hundreds of times an hour, and the wrong default costs a tick each time.
• The same reordering on raw beast meat, set to "drop", so clearing your inventory between catches does not open a menu.
• Menu reordering again at net traps, changing the newly-set net's default from "Dismantle" to "Walk here". It stops you accidentally taking down a trap you just reset, and it lets you spam-click under yourself to cancel the set animation.
• Butterfly spawn tile marking at the glacialis and moth spots, so you are clicking a known tile rather than hunting for the creature that just moved.
• The trap-smoking chat message filter, which has been filterable since 2018 and is worth turning off once you have decided that a 2% catch bonus is not part of your method.
• PK Skull Prevention, if you are hunting black chinchompas. It exists to stop you being skull-tricked while you are watching traps rather than watching players.
• A timer for the fifty-minute birdhouse cycle, in whatever form you will actually respond to. The method's entire advantage is that the traps fill without you, and it evaporates if you collect them ninety minutes late.
• Note that most of the list above is client configuration rather than a plugin as such. This is a skill where the winning tools change which menu option sits under your cursor, because the methods that pay best are the ones where a single click is repeated several thousand times a session.

Common Mistakes

Ironman Notes

Hunter is one of the few skills where an Ironman is barely disadvantaged, because the skill produces its own inputs. Bird nests from birdhouses contain seeds, and seeds are what birdhouses need. Ropes, nets, snares and box traps are returned when collected. Crab traps are built once. The only genuinely consumable equipment is the drift net, and Annette will store two thousand of them for you.

The two things an iron does have to plan are Crafting and transport. Assembled bird houses are uncommonly traded, so the Crafting level to build your own is a real requirement rather than a convenience, and it climbs as you move up the birdhouse tiers. Transport means digsite pendants, which you can make yourself with Lvl-3 Enchant on ruby necklaces once a clean necklace has been shown to a Varrock Museum archaeologist — a small errand that pays for itself within a handful of runs.

The Ironman route through Hunter is unusually clean, because almost nothing in the skill has to be bought. What it does need is a short setup sequence done in the right order, and doing it wrong costs you weeks rather than minutes.

Start with Bone Voyage and the initial birdhouse run, and do that run properly: it is not four traps, it is four traps plus three Mushtrees and the Strange Machine. Use the digsite pendant on the southern machine at the House on the Hill to add the Fossil Island teleport to the pendant, and click the Mushtrees at the House on the Hill, Mushroom Meadow and Verdant Valley to register all three. Skip any of that and every subsequent run costs you the walk you were supposed to have removed.

Then solve seeds and logs, since those are the only recurring inputs. Low-level allotment seeds arrive from bird nests, which birdhouses themselves produce, so the loop closes on itself surprisingly quickly. A Crafting level high enough to build the houses matters more for an iron than for a main, because assembled bird houses are uncommonly traded and you will be making all of your own.

After that, the skill mostly funds itself. Rumours are worth taking seriously on an iron for the rewards rather than the experience — the quetzal whistle, the guild hunter outfit, and the Huntsman's kit that comes out of hunters' loot sacks and stores your rings of pursuit. That last one is the difference between razor-backed kebbits being sustainable and being a bank trip every few minutes.

When Paid Training Makes Sense

The case for buying Hunter rests on what it is blocking. The cost of a gathering skill is hours rather than gold. Worth buying if those hours are the only thing between you and the content you actually log in for; not worth buying if you find the rhythm of it relaxing, which plenty of people genuinely do.

If you do order it, the thing to specify is the route as well as the level range: rumours and birdhouses and fast XP are different jobs on this skill, with different timelines and different supply bills for the same 99. Our Hunter page lists what we need from you, and the work is played rather than botted.

FAQ

Can birdhouses really take me to 99?

Yes, with a caveat the wiki states plainly: they are the fastest Hunter experience in real time effectively up to level 80, and viable to 99 as long as getting there quickly is not the point. Four traps, fifty minutes, roughly a minute and a half of play per cycle. The limit is calendar time rather than anything mechanical.

When should I start rumours?

The guild opens at 46 and the four tiers unlock at 46, 57, 72 and 91, all unboostable. The wiki recommends ignoring the first two tiers for training purposes and starting with expert rumours at 72, because razor-backed kebbits are the better use of the levels in between.

Do I have to go into the Wilderness?

No. Black chinchompas are the fastest experience from 73 and they are also the only method on this page that puts you in a player-killing hot spot. The wiki names rumours as the alternative for players who will not enter the Wilderness, will not tick manipulate, or will not run a second account, and it treats the two as similar in speed.

Is drift net fishing worth it?

Only if you want the Fishing levels too. It needs 44 Hunter and 47 Fishing, neither boostable, and it splits its experience between the two skills — so as a pure Hunter method it is beaten by things you could be doing instead. As a way to finish two skills in one activity it is the most efficient thing in the game for that pair.

What does the guild hunter outfit actually do?

The full set raises your catch rate on every creature by 2.5% and your chance of receiving rare creature parts from rumours by 5%. The second bonus is the interesting one, because rare creature parts are what end a rumour — the outfit makes the activity that awards it faster.

Should I bait and smoke my traps?

Rarely. Bait adds 3% to the catch rate and smoking with a torch adds 2%, which the wiki describes as usually inefficient given the clicks and inventory space involved. At very low levels, where failures are a large share of your attempts, it can be worth it.

How many traps can I use, and can I cheat the limit?

One at level 1, two at 20, three at 40, four at 60 and five at 80. Training anywhere in the Wilderness grants one more than usual, and temporary boosts let you reach a breakpoint early — which is the standard reason to drink a hunter potion here rather than to catch something.

Which quests should I do before starting?

Bone Voyage first, since Fossil Island carries birdhouses, drift nets and herbiboar. Then at least partial Eagles' Peak for box traps, and start Fairytale II - Cure a Queen for the fairy rings that reach half the hunting areas. Monkey Madness II and the Varlamore quests can wait until you are choosing a high-level method.

What is the lowest-attention way to train Hunter?

Birdhouses, because you are not present for them at all. If you want something to do while they fill, maniacal monkeys need one interaction every twenty-five to thirty seconds and an inventory of banana baskets lasts about fifty minutes — which happens to be one birdhouse cycle.

Final Takeaway

Hunter rewards a plan made of two independent parts. The first is birdhouses, started at 9 and collected on their fifty-minute cycle for as long as you can be bothered; they cost you almost no real time and carry the fastest experience in the skill up to level 80. The second is whatever active method your appetite for risk and clicking actually supports — the kebbit and salamander ladder to the seventies, then either the Wilderness for black chinchompas or the Hunter Guild for expert and master rumours.

Between those two, the numbers to keep in your head are small and specific: 20, 40, 60 and 80 for traps, 46, 57, 72 and 91 for rumour tiers, and fifty minutes for the birdhouses. Almost every real decision in a Hunter 1–99 is a question about which of those thresholds you are closest to.

If the level itself is what is blocking you — a diary task at 69, the Hunter Guild at 46, or the 80 that makes herbiboar and the fifth trap possible — that is a training problem rather than a knowledge one, and our Hunter training is played by hand on the same methods described above. Everything on this page was read from the wiki rather than from memory, and the current experience rates and item values belong there too.

Browse Hunter training, more skill guides, or the full blog for related progression help.