In-Depth F2P Ironman Guide v2.0.1 (last updated 05-06-18)

https://pastebin.com/raw/FuTEC8eB

In-Depth F2P Ironman Guide v2.0.1 (last updated 05-06-18)
By Asura Zoma

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NOTE: Tannerdino has updated this guide and covered new meta changes.  You can find the updated guide here:

https://pastebin.com/ytWpivkL

It's been a while since I've updated this guide.  Some new meta changes that this guide doesn't take into account, as of 8-24-19:
-New methods that make use of PVP world bank chests
-F2P Edgeville Furnace
-F2P Rings of Forging
-Much more generous hop timer
-Development of the nat telegrabbing meta (more practical due to faster world hopping)
-Varrock west mine as a superior silver mining spot (due to faster world hopping)
-Faster boneyard xp rates due to faster world hopping
This isn't an exhaustive list, and there's also lots of new non-meta content that's been released since this guide was updated (Like beginner clues).

The skills most affected by these meta changes are generally Smithing and Crafting.  As for other skills, what's currently written in the guide should be fairly accurate.  The current most efficient Smithing path is to telegrab nats in wildy and superheat iron at the Dwarven mine.
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This guide aims to give the most efficient approach to maxing an F2P ironman.  It's written for greyhelms specifically (sorry, ults), but some of the XP rates and training methods apply to ults as well.  It assumes you'll be playing with efficiency in mind, and that you aren't imposing any artificial restrictions on your account (ie. no skillers, pures, or any other silly account builds).

Special thanks to UncleTomas for his help developing, testing, and optimizing skilling methods <3

Table of contents:
1. OVERVIEW
 1.1. Introduction
 1.2. Maxing Order
 1.3. General Efficiency
 1.4. Changelog
2. SKILLS
 2.1. Ranged
 2.2. Crafting
 2.3. Smithing 
 2.4. Magic
 2.5. Runecraft
 2.6. Melees
 2.7. Prayer
 2.8. Fishing & Cooking
 2.9. Woodcutting & Firemaking
3. MISCELLANEOUS
 3.1. Bandit Camp
 3.2. Castle Wars
 3.3. Random Events
 3.4. Completionist List
 3.5. FAQs
 3.6. Useful Links

1. OVERVIEW


1.1. Introduction
If you're really interested in maxing an F2P ironman, you should know what you're getting yourself into.  It takes at least 8,300H assuming you're always focused and at 100% efficiency, which means you'll be playing this account for a reasonable fraction of your total time on this earth.  In contrast to that, most new F2P ironmen burn out or go P2P within a few months.  It can definitely be done, but you'll have to endure the same few low XP/H tasks for sometimes thousands of hours at a time.  If you hate change and enjoy numbingly repetitive gameplay with a near-total lack of high level content, this is the perfect game mode for you.  This is an advanced guide; the early game will only be covered briefly.


1.2. Maxing order
While there's a lot of flexibility in the path you take to max total, there's generally a particular order in which you should complete goals in order to maintain your efficiency.  This is a rough outline of how your account should progress; credit to Autumn Elegy for his work on optimizing the early game.  He has a UIM startup guide on YouTube which covers the early steps in detail.  It's linked at the end of the guide.
NOTE: If you're starting a fresh account, it's crucial that you don't progress at all in Rune Mysteries.  If you stay on the first step of the quest, you can collect air talismans from Duke Horacio.  This will save you about 600 hours getting 99 Runecraft, but you'll have to do some other things differently as well. If differences in training methods occur, they're explained under a "Talisman Farmers" heading.

1. Multiquest most of the F2P quests (SKIP Rune Mysteries).  There's a link at the end of the guide to a video on multiquesting.
2. Train Crafting to 16 with leather, then craft silver symbols in the Al Kharid mine to 23.  Stay at the mine and get 40 Crafting with tiaras.
3. Mage Ankou to 37 Magic for teleports.
4. Train Crafting 40-50 at Crafting Guild with teles (60 laws)
5. Train Magic 37-49 for ruby enchant
6. Make a strength amulet, and train melees to sufficient levels for Elvarg
7. Do Dragon Slayer.
8. Get 40/40/40 melees if you haven't already so you can equip rune pickaxe and armor.
9. Get your Ranged to at least 50, then kill ogresses until you have at least 518 laws (bank your runite drops and sell them to bandit camp later if you don't have the Magic level to high alch.)
10. Bank 13K rune essence, then get 70 Crafting with fally tele tiaras.  You'll also finish with 45 Runecraft.
11. It's time for 99 Ranged with your new power amulet.  Invest all the GP you made from your previous time at ogresses into addy arrows, and head back to Corsair Cove (buying arrows is covered in 2.1. Ranged).
11.5 Once you can afford 223K feathers, get 99 Fishing and Cooking with trout and salmon. (can be completed at any point)
12. Use the nats from 99 Ranged to superheat iron.  You should run out around 74 Smithing.  You'll also finish with 78 Magic.
13. Start fally tele iron and keep smithing till 85.  You'll finish with 79 Magic.
14. Boost to 86 Smithing with a dwarven stout and smith a rune axe.
14.5 Get 99 Woodcutting and Firemaking. (Can now be completed at any point)
13. Continue fally tele iron until you reach 89 Smithing.  Boost to 90 and smith yourself a rune scimitar.  You'll finish with 80 Magic.
14. Max melees at ogresses.  You'll reach 81 Magic through alchs.
15. Time for some fire blasts: bring 75K casts to ogresses and use them all. This won't get you to 99 mage, but you'll get the rest of the XP you need passively through other skills.  You'll finish with 90 Magic.
15.5 Get 99 Prayer at the Boneyard. (can now be completed at any point)
16. Bank 23.7K rune essence, then mine and bank 22.7K gold ore.  The route is identical to fally tele silver, just don't stop at the furnace.  You'll finish with 91 Magic and 55 Runecraft.
17. Cut and craft all your gems into unstrung amulets. (more detail on this in 2.2. Crafting.)  You'll finish with 87 Crafting. 
18. Bank 173.8K rune essence, then get 99 Crafting with fally tele tiaras.  You'll finish with 73 Runecraft.
19. Take all your nats to the dwarven mine and superheat iron. (a video performing the method is linked at the end of the guide)  You'll finish with 94 Smithing and 96 Magic.
20. Do fally tele iron to 99 Smithing.  You'll also finish with 97 Magic.
21. Do Varrock tele earths to 99 Runecrafting.  You'll finish with 99 Magic.  Mining and HP will also be far past 99 by now.

~Congratulations on maxing your F2P ironman!~


1.3. General Efficiency
An important aspect of efficient play that's rarely brought up is pathing and energy management.  Since run energy takes 12 minutes and 40 seconds to fully restore from 0, and considering you have over 8,000 hours of gameplay ahead of you (the majority of it being travel time), running as efficiently as possible saves a lot of time in the long run.  As a general rule, run whenever you're carrying the least weight possible.  For example, if you're making trips from the Rimmington mine to the Port Sarim deposit box, walk there when your inventory's full and run on the way back once you're empty again.  If you're smelting iron from Al Kharid bank, run on the trips back, since the bars weigh much less than the ore.  If you have 100%, you should run, at least for a bit, regardless of your weight; you want to keep it recharging at all times.  It goes without saying, but you should avoid wearing any unnecessary gear that adds to your total weight.  That means avoiding all weighted cosmetics unless you'd rather look cool at the expense of macro-efficiency.
Closely related to energy management is pathing.  If you're walking a route that has multiple potential paths, give some thought as to whether the path you're taking is actually the shortest.  Even a difference of a few tiles adds up significantly over thousands of trips.

A few pathing tips:
When walking north to Edgeville bank, the west path around the building is a few tiles shorter than the east.
When walking south to the Body altar, it's exactly the same distance regardless if you enter the altar from above or below.  Once you're inside however, you should manually path past the west side of it and craft as you walk by; if you just click the altar you'll walk onto the north side and lose a few ticks walking back around to the portal.
While mining silver at craft guild, you'll complete a faster circuit by manually pathing to certain rocks rather than just clicking them directly.  Similarly, when mining iron at the Dwarven mine, once you've mined all 3 ores, you save a tick by manually pathing back to the first before the iron reappears.
When crafting earth runes, the shortest path leads between the city wall and the large guard tower outside it.

1.4. Changelog
v2.0.0:
Added Changelog :^)
Recalculated XP Breakdowns in all sections
Revised Introduction
Rewrote Maxing Order
Revised General Efficiency & pathing tips
Rewrote Ranged section
Rewrote Crafting section
Rewrote Smithing section
Rewrote Magic section
Rewrote Runecraft section
Rewrote Melees section
Rewrote Prayer section
Rewrote Fishing/Cooking section
Revised WC/FM section
Added tasks to Completionist List
Added Castle Wars section
Updated Useful Links section
Improved formatting
v2.0.1:
Fixed typos, edited Ranged section



2. SKILLS
NOTE: XP breakdowns are provided for some skills.  These aren't meant to tell you in which order you should be doing things, just where you should expect your XP to have come from by 99.  

2.1. Ranged
Once the kings of the F2P meta, ankou have now been dethroned by ogresses.  Despite being only a bit beefier than ankou, their drops are so much better that there's not much reason to visit ankou at all anymore outside of putting together a skull sceptre.

Buying Arrows:
Bronze/Iron: Buy bronze until a bit after they hit 6 GP, or just around 100 if they're already at 6.  Then buy irons until they hit 7 GP before hopping worlds.  Only buy bronze/iron if you're a very low level or have almost no GP.  
Addies: Buy 100 per world until you've gone through every world once.  While you wait for the shop to restock, mine rune essence.  The shop will be restocked in 20 minutes, or about 11 essence mining laps.

Here is an outline of how your Ranged training should go.  Note that these levels are approximate: you can switch mobs earlier or later depending on your preferences.
 1-20: Minotaurs
 Minotaurs will get you some iron arrows, which is nice for brand new accounts.
 NOTE: During the early game when you're likely to be using bronze/iron arrows, it's most efficient to switch between them at certain levels depending on their max hit.  There's a spreadsheet on arrow max hits linked at the end of the guide that will be useful for you.  Essentially, if at your ranged level both bronze and iron have the same max hit, use bronze.  If iron hits higher than bronze, you should use iron until bronze catches back up.
 
 20-40: Hill giants
 Good prayer XP and low defense make these a good pick for low level ranging.  Killing them north of the chaos temple in the wilderness is best if you can teleport out or aren't afraid of losing a few hundred arrows, since you'll get much more frequent giant keys from their 1/64 droprate.  You could also try the hill giants at the lava maze, you're less likely to find PKers but more likely to die if you do find them.
 
 40-50: Moss giants
 Basically just hill giants with more health and better drops, these are a good choice now that you're hitting a bit harder and more accurately.  It's up to you how long you want to stay here, since XP/H will drop as soon as you go to ogresses. The XP/H drop will be more significant the lower your Ranged level is.  You should use the moss giant spot on Crandor.
 
 50-99: Ogresses
 As with melee, you'll be spending a long time in the ogress caves.  The nats/laws pile up and you get to alch rune items left and right, so it stays entertaining.  The efficient method is explained below.

Efficient Ogresses:
There are two caves at Corsair Cove where ogresses can be found, one is freely accessible and one is locked behind completion of dragon slayer.  Unfortunately, the best spot to kill them is in the first cave, surrounded by noobs and even worse, pures.  After going down the ladder, head down to the south-eastern tunnel branching off the main cave.  There are two warriors close together with a single shaman that sometimes wanders into range; use the rocks to the east to safespot.  With high HP and a good magic level, the shaman isn't too difficult to tank until it loses agro, but keep an eye on your health anyway since AFKing can always get you killed.  If an ogress is very far away, it can end up out of range of a rapid shortbow.  In that case, you can cast a spell to lure it over: curses, fire bolts, and fire blasts are all good.  Fire blasts are probably the best choice, since they'll give the most XP and do some extra damage to it before it's brought over to you.
There's an alternative to that spot, as well.  In the resource area cave, stand against the addy rock to the northeast of the entrance.  From there you can reach both the nearby warriors, and also safespot the shaman to the south if it wanders into place on its own.  This spot isn't quite as good as the one in the other cave, since it's further from the bank and the warriors can wander into spots that will force you to leave your safespot to agro them.  It's much less crowded though, so it's a tradeoff you may be willing to make.
Collect deaths, chaos, laws, nats, gems and limpwurts for your later melee training.  Alch the runite drops, but don't bother with the mithril kiteshields: you already get plenty of GP, and the extra nats are better put towards superheating iron.  The arrow drops aren't worth collecting either, since you'll never use them and they aren't worth much.  The GP you make from ogresses should be invested back into addy arrows, at least until you've already gotten all the arrows you need for 99 Ranged (about 140K arrows if you start ogresses at 50, which will cost 16.73m).
During peak times, it'll be almost impossible to get a world with both spawns to yourself if you're using the regular dungeon.  Sharing a world means awful XP/H, and that's obviously unacceptable.  What you can do to fight crashers is bring an alt to splash on the warrior you aren't currently fighting.  Since the alt does no damage, you'll still get the drops after you kill it with your main.  Splashing alts are very quick and cheap to set up: go with air strikes if you value lowest possible cost, or fire strikes if you want to level their Magic faster.

Loot from ogresses: 39,430 kills
 591K Prayer XP
 26,110 nats (after alchs)
 26,530 laws
 24,310 deaths
 28.20m GP (alchs + GP drops)
 1530 limpwurts
 42 Shaman Masks
 NOTE: These are just the most important drops, a more complete ogress droprate table is linked at the end of the guide.


2.2. Crafting
Crafting, like almost all other skills, is approached differently due to ogresses.  Crafting for GP is no longer necessary, so silver tiaras are made all the way to 99 Crafting.  It's fine to dump what you've made while working for 70 Crafting at the Bandit Camp if you need early game GP before starting ogresses.  Silver should be mined and smelted at Al Kharid if under 40 Crafting, and at the Crafting guild if above it.  
When starting a lap at the crafting guild, wield a water staff, wear a brown apron and air tiara.  Your inventory should consist of a tiara mould, law runes, a pickaxe, and 25 rune essence.  Craft air runes on the way to the guild, you'll use those airs for the falador teleport back.  After filling up with silver, fally tele back, craft the tiaras, and head to the bank to repeat the process.  It's worth your time to set up bank placeholders so you can click the deposit inventory button on the bank interface and immediately store the tiaras, air runes, and any gems you had without affecting the other items in your inventory.
A new and fairly large source of Crafting XP comes from ogresses in the form of gems.  The total gem count from ogresses along with what you get through 99 Crafting and Smithing is about 22.7K.  To maximize the Crafting XP from these gems, we'll make unstrung ammies.  First, mine 22.7K gold ore from the crafting guild, and bank it with falador teleports.  The route is very similar to silver crafting: you should still craft air runes on the way, just skip the furnace on the way to the bank.  Once you have the gold ready, make the ammies at Al Kharid.  Your inventory should consist of a chisel, amulet mould, 13 gems and 13 gold ore.  Cut the gems while walking to the furnace, and smelt the gold ore before casting the ammies.  Head back to the bank and repeat.
NOTE: you should do your running on the way back, since amulets are weightless and gold isn't.

Talisman Farmers:
If you can farm air tallies, you'll be using the crafting guild slightly differently.  Instead of air runes, make air tiaras during each crafting trip.  Replace the typical water staff with a staff of air.  With water runes, laws, tiara mould and pickaxe, you'll have room to make 12 air tiaras per trip.  Drop them on the way to the guild.  With the 180.8K tiaras from 99 craft, you'll finish at 88 Runecraft.  After that, do varrock tele earths like regular ironmen.

XP Breakdown
9.49m :tiaras (701H)
3.54m :gems + amulets

Rates/info
14,000 XP/H: Tiaras: chronicle tele + falador tele (not worth doing despite XP/H due to lack of RC XP)
13,600 XP/H: Tiaras: crafting guild (11-12K/H at lower mining levels)
ammy (u) rates will vary by gem
 

2.3. Smithing
Smithing's a prestigious and very important skill for F2P ironmen, since you'll need 89 Smithing before you can even begin to efficiently train melees.  Smithing XP is sourced from a few different places: silver and gold ore from Crafting, superheating iron with nats from combat, and fally tele iron from the mining guild or dwarf mine.  Even moreso now that GP from PvM is abundant: ores above iron are NOT worth doing.  Higher shop value doesn't matter if the XP/H can't match up.
The best Smithing XP/H that doesn't require nats is fally tele iron.  Mine iron at the mining guild, teleport to falador and smelt the ores before depositing your bars at the east bank and repeating the process.  Unfortunately, the mining guild is usually extremely crowded so it's difficult to get ideal rates.  A slower but less contested alternative to mining guild is the dwarven mine east of the east bank.  The three iron spot near the stairs as you enter, while often crowded, isn't as bad as mining guild.  The same teleporting process is used there.  If you wanted Smithing XP without using laws, you can mine iron at the mining guild and just bank the ore instead of teleporting to the furnace.  

XP Breakdown
 6.16m: fally tele iron
 3.89m: superheating iron
 2.48m: silver ore
  511K: gold ore

Rates/info
 27,000 XP/H: Superheating iron
 8200 XP/H: fally tele + mining guild iron
 7500 XP/H: mining guild (banking ore)
 7100 XP/H: fally tele + dwarven mine
 6500 XP/H: Rimmington mine + Sarim deposit box
 3500 XP/H: silver ore (through Crafting)


2.4. Magic
Magic was formerly the most expensive skill, but due to ogress' enormous rune drops, there's now very little that needs to be bought.  Compared to other skills, it sees little direct training.  A lot of Magic XP comes from superheating iron, teleports from Crafting and Smithing, and alchs during combat.  The rest is obtained by fire blasting ogresses.  This also means that if you're playing efficiently, Magic will be one of the very last 99s obtained.  It will be much more difficult if you try to max Magic before at least doing melees and Ranged first, since rune drops are what allow for so much 0 time XP and PvM GP is necessary if you plan to buy death runes.
While you will end up with 99 Magic by following the steps listed in Maxing Order, you'd get 99 Runecraft and Magic at the same time, and it's understandable if you'd like to max Magic a bit sooner than that.  It's fine if you want to do this, it just means you'll have post-99 Magic XP once you're 1493 total.  If you want to get 99 Magic right away, buy 228.4K deaths instead of the suggested 75K.  You'll be able to fire blast straight to 99 Magic.
NOTE: along with deaths, you also end up with 208.5K chaos runes by the time you've maxed combat.  Since they're outclassed by deaths and therefore not worth using at ogresses, it's probably most efficient to just splash fire bolts when you'd like some easy AFK XP.  If you splashed away every chaos rune you'd get 4.69m Magic XP.

Buying deaths:
Buying deaths is similar to buying arrows.  In this case, just buy out Aubury's entire stock on each world; the average price is 202.5 GP/rune.  Mine rune essence while you wait for the worlds to restock.  It will take 37.5 minutes, or about 21 laps of essence mining.

Efficient ogresses:
As stated above, always use fire blasts.  If you can't afford them, do Ranged/melees until you can, don't downgrade to fire bolts.  Magic is definitely the most AFK PvM option of the combat triangle, since you don't have to pray flick or go out of your way to pick up any arrows.

Loot from ogresses: 4812 kills
 72K Prayer XP
 3190 nats (after alchs)
 3240 laws
 2967 deaths
 3.44m GP (alchs + GP drops)
 8 Shaman Masks

XP Breakdown
5.50m XP: Superheating iron
3.50m XP: Fire blast
2.58m XP: Varrock teleport (earth RC)
 630K XP: Falador teleport (iron)
 419K XP: High alch (through combat)
 405K XP: Falador teleport (silver+gold)

Rates/info
(Curse, fire bolt rate assumes 1200 casts/H, 1150/H for combat spells)
 51,700 XP/H: Fire blast
 43,700 XP/H: Crumble undead (not recommended, but an interesting way to use chaos runes)
 38,160 XP/H: Superheating iron
 34,800 XP/H: Curse splashing (excellent for early Magic levels, since XP/H doesn't depend on high accuracy)
 27,000 XP/H: Fire bolt splashing (acceptable way to use up the chaos runes left from maxing combat)
 19,600 XP/H: Fire strike (not recommended)


2.5. Runecraft
Runecraft is the slowest skill for F2P ironmen by quite a bit, so if you plan to max you'll be working on it for a very long time.  Early Runecraft gains come from air runes during crafting guild trips, but once you've gotten 99 Crafting (or just want to train Runecraft independently) you'll move on to Varrock tele earth runes.  Lots of ironmen assume body runes are faster than earths, however earth runes are faster XP/H than body runes for both regular ironmen and UIMs.  Expect 900 rune essence per hour if banking at Varrock east.  99 Runecraft requires 2.05m rune essence: 1.84m for earths, 212K for air runes.

2-tick essence:
It's possible to tick manipulate with a tinderbox + logs and mine double ess with a 4-tick cycle, which averages to 2 ticks per rune essence; the exact process is demonstrated by a video at the end of the guide.  You can expect about 1,030 essence per hour with this method.  Note that while it's faster than typical mining and therefore efficient to do, the Runecraft XP rates in this guide assume typical essence mining, since doing such a high APM method for almost two thousand hours for only a 15% increase in essence mining speed is unrealistic for the vast majority of players.

XP Breakdown
11.97m: Varrock tele earth runes (3,017H)
 1.06m: Air runes while crafting (800H)
 
Rates/info
 3,970 XP/H: Varrock tele earth runes (UIM method, dropping crafted earths)
 3,800 XP/H: Earth runes (UIM method, dropping crafted earths)
 3,800 XP/H: Suiciding body runes (obsoleted but an interesting skilling technique; a video demonstrating it is linked at the end of the guide)
 3,650 XP/H: Earth runes (UIM method, keeping crafted earths)
 3,550 XP/H: Body runes (standard method)

Talisman farmers (Rune Mysteries unfinished):
Crafting air tiaras is faster than earth runes, but the talismans need to be collected first.  The important thing to note is that the Duke won't give you a new talisman if you currently have any in the bank.  To deal with this, withdraw all your current talismans as notes and keep them in your inventory; the game doesn't check for that when deciding to give you a new talisman.  With noted talis and nothing else in inventory, talk to the Duke, drop the new tali, and repeat the process.  Shift drop makes this much easier than it used to be.  After you get 26 on the floor, collect one more, pick them all up and take them up to the bank to note them.  Repeat the process.  As long as you're reasonably quick, none should disappear from the ground.  You can bank about 485-500 air talismans per hour.
When training Runecraft independently: craft air tiaras at the altar, Falador teleport back, bank, and repeat the process.

XP Breakdown
8.51m: Varrock tele earth runes (2,144H)
2.53m: Air tiaras while crafting (800H)
1.99m: Air tiaras (independent) (318H)

Rates/info
 6,250 XP/H: Air tiaras (Falador teleport)
 5,550 XP/H: Air tiaras (no teleport)


2.6. Melees
With the release of Corsair Cove, the previous melee meta has been made mostly obsolete.  Ogress' drops are so good that the only reason to stay at moss giants past midlevel stats is if you have no interest in drops/later smithing XP and care solely about melee XP/H.  It goes without saying that you should get a rune scimitar before spending too much time on melees, but it's okay to do early levels (up to around 70) with rune sword.
NOTE: Strength amulet is not always better for melee than power amulet.  Which one to use depends on your strength level and attack style, similar to how bronze arrows are sometimes superior to iron when ranging.  You'll find a spreadsheet detailing which amulet to use at each level in Useful Links at the end of the guide.

Here is an outline of how your melee training should go.  Note that while you should keep your Attack and Defense fairly even, Strength should always be at least 5-10 levels ahead of the others.
 1-20: Cows/Chickens/Minotaurs
 Cows for crafting, chickens for feathers, minotaurs for arrows.

 20-40: Hill Giants
 The Prayer XP will go a long way at earlier levels.  Killing these in the wilderness is best since you'll be able to bank more future Obor kills.  Note that you won't lose giant keys on death, so you don't have to bank often.  I recommend HCIM stick to Edgeville, since you're very vulnerable to PKers at early levels.  However, if you have the magic level to teleport out the hill giant spawn in level 19 wilderness is quite safe.  You can also come back to wildy hill giants at any time if you want to do more Obor kills.

 40-70: Moss Giants
 This will continue to build up your prayer level, and you'll end up with a good amount of prayer points when you start ogresses later.  The in-depth process for killing moss giants is explained below.  This is as far as you should go with a rune sword; I strongly recommend getting a scimitar before going to ogresses.

 70-99: Ogresses
 These are what you'll spend the large majority of your time killing.  How to efficiently melee ogresses is explained below.

Efficient moss giants:
Crandor is the best spot to kill mossies.  It's single combat, has 3 spawns, and isn't as crowded as Varrock sewers.  The drops worth picking up are gems, coins, steel bars, arrows, and all all non-elemental, non-cosmic runes.  You should kill them till you run out of food, then minigame teleport to clan wars.  Restore health/prayer with the portal, bank your loot, withdraw your strength potions and some logs, and take the shantay pass transport to Port Sarim jail.  Buy a lobster pot before you take the boat to Karamja.  Buy a tinderbox at the general store before fishing and cooking an inventory of lobsters.  Drop the lobster pot and tinderbox before heading back to Crandor to repeat the process.

Efficient ogresses:
When meleeing ogresses, you have a few options.  You can kill the same warriors as you do for Ranged in the first cavern: this is the best possible XP/H, but you'll see a lot of competition there since it's a contested spot.  If you melee here, you'll likely need to use a splashing alt to deter crashers, the same as is used for Ranged.  Another option is the two shamans in the little cave directly north of the warrior spot.  Shamans have +2 higher melee Defense bonuses, which equates to about 500 XP/H less when meleeing.  The advantage to shamans is there's very little competition there so you rarely have to compete for spawns.  An option is to do shamans during the daytime and move to warriors later at night.  A disadvantage to shamans is that they hit much more accurately than warriors even when you have max mage defense, and with a 20 minute deagro period you'll probably have to bring a lot of food even when flicking protection prayers.  I recommend pray flicking during your trips, since even with maxed melees it's difficult to fill your inventory before running out of food if you're just AFKing.  If you're determined not to flick, there's a cage fishing spot just west of the resource area that you can visit after banking, but it takes a lot of extra time to go all the way out there, fish/cook a lobster inventory, and come back to the first cave.
Refer to 2.1. Ranged to see drops discussed in detail.  The initial 1.5K limpwurts from Ranged will start you off with plenty of strength potions, so don't be stingy with them, and repot as soon as you lose your boosted max hit.  Use a DPS calculator to find what Strength levels increase your max hit after boosting so you know exactly what level to repot; w385.altervista.org/meleedps.html is a good site.
NOTE: The fastest way to collect red spider eggs for your strength potions is to use the Varrock sewer spawn in combination with a Varrock tele after you fill your inventory.

Loot from ogresses: 112,471 kills
 1.69m Prayer XP
 74,460 nats (after alch)
 75,670 laws 
 69,340 deaths
 80.43m (alchs + GP drops)
 4,380 limpwurts
 121 Shaman Masks

For reference, this is what the loot from max melees previously looked like.  RIP all the poor ironmen that got 99s here:
Loot from moss giants: 162,465 kills
 2.44m prayer XP
 22,850 nats (3/128)
 15,230 laws (1/32)
 35,540 chaos (1/32)
 3,810 death (1/128)
 5,080 steel bars (1/32?)


2.7. Prayer
Prayer XP will come from two sources: ogresses and boneyard.  Some people choose to exclusively train Prayer through combat, but since even the best possible rates in that case are extremely low, boneyard is the only feasable method if you're aiming for 99 Prayer.
The boneyard is just slightly southeast of the wilderness canoe pond, so taking a waka canoe will get you there quickly.  When going to the boneyard, travel light: you want the most efficient use of run energy possible, since you'll be making LOTS of laps.  That means no armor and as little food as possible.  You'll need to tank the skeletons there for 10-15 minutes before they deaggro; expect to take 50-100 damage in that time depending on your defense, and bring some food.  It's important that they remain unaggressive, since you need to hop worlds constantly to get the best XP rates.  PKers are fairly rare, but if you run into them, there's no point in running away: you shouldn't be risking anything on death, and regardless of whether you make an escape and leave the area or get killed and have to canoe back, you'll have to reset aggro again either way.
The most efficient path to follow is demonstrated by the "Efficient Boneyard" video at the end of the guide.  There are a few things to note about the video: Big bone respawn time, unlike anything else in OSRS, is still tied to world population.  That means you should only be switching between worlds 301 and 308 to maintain the best possible XP/H.  Also, due to the release of Corsair Cove and ogresses, cursing at boneyard is NOT efficient.

XP Breakdown
10.68m: Boneyard
 2.35m: Combat (ogresses)
 
Rates/info
 9,300 XP/H: Boneyard
 5,500 XP/H: Multi-world chaos temple bones (definitely don't do this)
 1,500-3,000 XP/H: Combat (varies depending on DPS/focus) 


2.8. Fishing & Cooking
NOTE: Fishing and cooking are listed together, as are Woodcutting and Firemaking, since they're trained in conjunction.  
Fishing's another straightforward skill.  You should fish trout and salmon from 20 to 99.  The only reason to fish lobsters and swordfish, aside from restocking during mossy/ogress trips, is to have food for Obor or trips to the wilderness.
There are a few different fishing methods, which come with progressively higher XP/H and levels of difficulty.  Demonstrations of the last three methods are linked at the end of the guide.
Firstly, there's regular fishing and cooking with no tick manipulation involved.  It's easy and very AFK, but it's not very efficient.
Second is 3-tick eating.  This is the method I'd recommend to players new to tick manipulation.  Turning on XP drops and zooming your screen in by the fishing spot will make this easier.  To start, get an inventory of cooked fish with a space or two left in your inventory.  Start fishing, and as soon as you catch a fish, eat a cooked fish from your inventory and click the fishing spot again.  Repeat the process until you've filled your inventory.  Normally there's a 5-tick interval between chances to catch a fish, but this will shorten the interval to 3-tick.  Not catching a fish doesn't mean you did it wrong, just that you didn't happen to get anything that roll.  There's a visual indicator of whether you're doing it correctly: on a successful 3-tick eating cycle, your character will skip part of the casting animation.
Third is Ironagnusdei's method.  This is basically 3-tick eating, however it saves time and increases XP/H by skipping the Cooking menu entirely (since you only have a single raw fish in your inventory at a time).
Fourth and most difficult by far is Eirerie's method.  Cooking is done entirely during the 3-tick fishing cycle, so XP/H is far faster than any previous method (as much as 75K/H Fishing and 120K/H cooking).  Leather crafting is also used to start fishing every time the 3-tick cycle is broken, saving a tick over the usual 5-tick fishing cycle.


2.9. Woodcutting & Firemaking
WC/FM is generally very similar to fishing and cooking, with comparable XP rates and training methods.  Always burn your logs where you cut them; it's never efficient to bank logs.  Stick to willows, the maples in the corsair cove resource area are slower XP/H.  The ideal thing to do would be stopping at 41 WC until you have a rune axe, but if you value quicker total level over minimum possible time to max, it doesn't waste too much time getting 60-70 WC/FM with an adamant axe.  I recommend 3-ticking, which you'll need snow for.  Hope you did that Christmas event!  Good spots to WC include the willows just northwest of the Rimmington church, the ones south of Rimmington, and the ones north of the crafting guild.  
In Useful Links, you'll find Pawz's video on 3-tick WC with snow, and Disziple's video on efficiently Firemaking while Woodcutting.



3. MISCELLANEOUS

3.1. Bandit Camp
NOTE: with GP through PvM so abundant now, Bandit Camp is obsolete, and therefore this entire section is just a relic from the past.  I've left it here, since if for some reason you need to sell items for GP you should know how it's done efficiently.
Because the bandit camp store buys all items at high alch value, it's generally the only place you should be selling your stuff.  Thanks to bandit camp, you make 33% better GP/H than ults for the same gathering time, so learn to appreciate it.  The best way to sell items is a stack of 5 to each world.  Any more than that and you'll be stuck waiting for the stock to clear out after selling on all 12.  This way, you can sell items forever without the average price dropping.  Since all items despawn from the shop at a rate of 1 per minute, you can sell a stack of 5 to a shop 12 times in an hour.  Taking all 12 F2P worlds into account, you can sell 720 of any one item per hour.  This puts a hard cap on how quickly you can sell items; however, you can get around this by selling multiple different items at the same time.


3.2. Castle Wars
Now that Castle Wars has been made F2P, it holds an interesting position in comparison to other F2P content.  It's the first piece of F2P content since Obor that has a significantly time consuming cosmetic reward, but it has far more (and more time consuming) cosmetics than the Giant Club.  While the PvP aspect of the minigame has it's own merits, I'll be focusing on the rewards.

Reward Tickets and Cosmetics:
The first thing to know is that how many tickets you get at the end of a game is unrelated to how you spend your time each round: a high number of kills or flag captures won't get you more tickets.  Tickets are awarded at the end of each game for each team like so:
1 ticket: your team lost, regardless of final score, or tied with any score besides 0-0.
2 tickets: your team won, or you tied 0-0.
3 tickets: your team won X-0.

You can expect anywhere from 3-5 tickets/hour playing or AFKing on W383, the active Castle Wars world.
A faster and more reliable method is boosting with an alt on an empty world.  This works because only a single player on each team is required to start a game.  This method is 7.2 tickets/hour.  If you plan on doing this method, however, you should know that according to the official game rules, using alts to help you fix minigames is not allowed.  That being said, it's very unlikely you'd see any sort of punishment for it, since Jagex has better things to do than monitor inactive F2P Castle Wars lobbies for potential boosters.

Here are the tickets and time required for all F2P cosmetics:
35 tickets for full T1 armor set (Steel equivalent)       —5H boosting
350 tickets for full T2 armor set (Mithril equivalent)    —49H boosting
3500 tickets for full T3 armor set (Adamant equivalent)   —487H boosting
240 tickets for all other rewards                         —34H boosting for other rewards
4125 tickets for all F2P rewards                          —573H boosting for all F2P rewards

Castle Wars is also an excellent place for Curse splashing.  Including lobby time and time spent running the flag each game,  you can expect an ideal Magic XP rate of ~24K/H.  Unfortunately, since you can't wear helmets in-game, you can't achieve the Magic bonus necessary to splash with a staff. That means cursing in Castle Wars will cost significantly more runes than typical splashing.  This is no big deal considering how much GP you get from combat, however.


3.3. Random Events
Random Events are a classic part of F2P, and range from extremely important to totally useless.

Old man (Maze): 
	Do every maze you get, they have fantastic rewards.  Once you've done a few mazes, you'll remember the general path to take.  The trick to getting good times (70%+) is getting through the doors quickly.  Clicking directly on the door, for some reason, takes 4-5 ticks, which is way too long.  It's much faster to click on the tile directly in front of the door, then click the door as you arrive on the tile.  You'll run straight to the door and open it instantly, saving time.  Expanding the client and playing in a bigger window makes this easier.  Also, you should know this already but within the maze you have infinite stamina, so run the entire time.
Old man (Mime show):
	Do it until you have the full set, then ignore.  Note that as with all random event cosmetics, you can get duplicate items if you carry a piece with you and drop it on the ground before doing the event.
Old man (gift):
	Worth doing since he sometimes gives single gems.  Regardless, you'd talk to him since he could be giving a different event.
Drill Demon:
	Do it until you have the full set, then ignore.
Freaky Forester: 
	Do it until you have the full set, then ignore.
Leo:
	Do it until you have the full set, then ignore.  Note that doing this random event gives you access to a deposit box, so in some situations it can be efficient to do this event just for a chance to quickly clear your inventory.
Certers (Niles, Miles, and Giles): 
	Worth doing since they sometimes give single gems.  If they give small GP, it's usually easiest to just drop it rather than waste time stopping at a bank.
Evil Bob (Prison): 
	Do it.  It gives noted uncut Rubies or chaos/law runes.
Evil Bob (Island): 
	Do it if your Fishing or Magic levels are very low, since it gives a fixed amount of XP in either skill.
Molly: 
	Do it, it gives 2-4 of any noted uncut gem.
Pinball (Flippa and Tilt): 
	Do it, it gives either 5 noted cut Sapphires/Emeralds/Rubies, or 2 noted cut Diamonds.
Frog Prince/Princess: 
	Do it at least until you have all the cosmetic rewards.  Frog tokens make an excellent collectable, since the random event is basically 0 time.
Capt' Arnav: 
	It might be worth doing if you're fresh off Tutorial Island and have almost no cashstack, but the rewards become worthless very quickly.
Sandwich Lady: 
	Do it if you need some extra food on a melee trip, or if you like collectibles.  Many of her foods are unobtainable anywhere else in F2P for ironmen.
Rick Turpentine: 
	Do it, since it can give single gems.
Pillory Guard: 
	Do it, since it can give single gems.
Quiz master: 
	Do it.  Newer players would probably benefit most from the guaranteed 1K, while more established players should take the Mystery Box for a roll at the Stale Baguette.  It also gives you a chance at a cut Diamond if you need one.  Note that the Mystery Box is bankable.
Genie & Surprise Exam: 
	Do it.  It's most efficient to put the XP towards Runecraft, but Smithing and Prayer are also acceptable.  While neither the XP lamp or book are bankable, it's possible to hold multiple lamps in an inventory.  It does not apply to books, though.
Drunken Dwarf: 
	A free kebab, up to you if it's useful when he shows up.
Beekeeper: 
	Don't do it.  Beekeeper is undoubtably the worst Random Event in OSRS: it's arguably broken, since it's impossible to consistantly complete.  Even if you manage to complete it, the rewards are extremely poor.  


3.4. Completionist List
Since there's hardly anything to do in F2P, here's a list of completely arbitrary tasks that won't benefit you at all, roughly ordered by difficulty.  Have fun!

1. Unlock the alternate home teleport animation, Runefest shield, and Premier Shield emote (codes osrsrf14, runefest17, and premierclub18 at Diango)
2. Talk to the woman on the bridge in Falador park
3. Dance with Megan on the second floor of the Party room (1st floor for you brits)
4. Search the bucket in the Port Sarim jail
5. Get a yin-yang amulet from the makeover mage
6. Assemble a skull sceptre
7. Collect all random event cosmetics (Freaky Forester, Leo, Mime, Drill Demon, Frog Prince) 
   (you can also get a set of the opposite gender's clothes if you change sexes before exchanging your Frog Token.  Note that if you try to wear the clothes after changing back, they'll revert to the clothes of your current sex.)
8. Get a rune med helm from lesser demons and a full helm from greater demons
9. Complete the Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Birthday, and April Fools events
10. Unlock all F2P music tracks
11. Unlock all F2P emotes (don't forget Skill Cape)
12. Take a Waka canoe to the wilderness
13. Receive advanced advice from all F2P skill tutors
14. Open the muddy chest in the lava maze
15. Kill the level 159 zombie on the SoS 4th floor
16. Get a shaman mask
17. Fully load your Chronicle book with 1000 charges
18. Get a giant club from Obor
19. Solve the mysterious man's maze with at least 78% reward remaining
20. Collect a 100K stack of something that isn't runes, arrows, feathers, or GP
21. Talk to Hans one year after creating your account
22. Have a skill master tell you you'll need to talk to them on a P2P world to buy a skillcape
23. Pay 5m GP for Edgeville spawn
24. Obtain a full set of Gold Decorative Armor from Castlewars (2,900 tickets)
25. One of every cosmetic reward requires 4,125 tickets. 
26. Recieve a Stale Baguette from the Mystery Box (1/256 chance)


3.5. FAQs
NOTE: if you have a question, first try looking for an answer in the wiki guide; it covers most basic stuff.

Q. Should I use rune sword or "insert weapon here"?
A. Use sword.  Sword is better DPS than any other F2P melee weapon besides scimitar.

Q. Is fishing lobsters to sell to the shop a good moneymaker?
A. It's bad fishing XP/H and an inefficient moneymaker.  Get your GP through combat instead.

Q. I'm planning on killing "insert mob here", is that a good idea?
A. If it isn't ogresses, it's probably not a good idea.  That includes Flesh crawlers/giant spiders; sure, they're AFK and give good XP rates, but you won't have enough runes to efficiently max if you do all your melees there.

Q. I've heard Dark wizards give the best nature runes/H in F2P, is that true?
A. Nope, ogresses are way better.

Q. How should I use my nature runes?  Alching's good, right?
A. It's only good if you're alching runite items during combat.  Outside of that, nats should be used to superheat iron.

Q. Gold amulets are a good source of GP, right?
A. Don't ever do gold on a regular ironman; it takes much longer than silver to mine, and the crafting XP is very poor.  If you need GP, kill ogresses.

Q. Getting around in F2P takes forever, is there anything I can do to speed things up?
A. You can use minigame teleports to get to CW or LMS once every 20 minutes, which doubles as a quick prayer/run% recharge.  If you tell Shantay of Shantay pass you're an outlaw, he'll send you to the Port Sarim prison, which you can then escape from.  Also, whenever you're done playing, leave yourself AFK instead of logging off immediately; you'll log back in next time with an extra ~40% run energy.

Q. In what order should I train my melees?
A. You should generally favor str>att>def.  It's easiest to just keep str 5-10 levels above att and def as you train.

Q. Are there any boosts in F2P?
A. Yep.  Strength potions and beers to boost Strength, Wizard mind bomb for a +2 mage boost when under lvl 50 or +3 above 50, Dwarven stout to boost Mining and Smithing by 1, and Draynor Manor cabbages to boost Defense by 2.

Q. Should I make energy potions?
A. Outside of bringing one or two along for wildy trips to help escape PKers, they aren't as useful as strength potions.  However, if you've already maxed melees, you could make energy potions with whatever limps are left over.  They'll be useful for Runecraft.


3.6. Useful Links
F2P Ironman Startup Guide (by Autumn Elegy): https://youtu.be/MrakJzeKGTc

Multiquesting guide: https://youtu.be/d3zcXf90ODc

OSRS wiki ironman guide (basic guide for noobs): http://2007.runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Free-to-play_Ironman_guide

Bronze vs iron arrows when ranging (by UncleTomas): https://i.redd.it/wbvbp88s4ycy.png

Strength vs power ammy for melee (by UncleTomas): https://i.imgur.com/cNeN6Xd.png

Unabridged ogress droptable/droprates: https://i.redd.it/hbfboi9ia0701.png

2-tick rune essence (by Pawz): https://youtu.be/C-EVCH3q9qc

Body rune suiciding (by ihave10gp): https://youtu.be/ZVKsaywpo_4

Efficient boneyard (by Coldfingers3): https://youtu.be/85lJ9_uxuKc

3-tick WC (by Pawz): https://youtu.be/fAfikm-KXEo?t=7m50s

Efficient WC/FM (by Disziple): https://youtu.be/RfX6MLnbiBI

3-tick Fish/Cook (by Disziple): https://youtu.be/36dhEEy2pJs
NOTE: it's better to do this at Barbarian village now, since there's a permanent fire there.

3-tick Fish/Cook (IronAgnusDei's method) (by Pawz): https://youtu.be/Dt8ABcSIM1c

Fishing + Cooking on same tick (by Eirerie): https://youtu.be/Bt5BlieARmU

Ideal iron superheating route (by Disziple): https://youtu.be/-UhboAnx2zQ

F2P music track list: https://redd.it/44n2tc

CB level calculator, Melee/Ranged DPS calculators, and misc F2P resources: http://w385.altervista.org

Misc useful links (a few duplicate links from here): https://redd.it/68y9vh