Free-to-play Prayer training

This article is about the free-to-play guide. For the members' guide, see Pay-to-play Prayer training.

Prayer is regarded to be the most difficult skill to train in free-to-play due to the expense involved in purchasing large numbers of remains from the Grand Exchange, low experience rates, and the high amount of clicking required to train the skill.

Starting off

The Restless Ghost provides you with 1,125 Prayer experience which allows a player to raise Prayer from level 1 to 9 upon completion. There are no requirements to begin this quest (melee defensive armour is optional but useful) and is strongly recommended for beginning players as it provides a fairly decent amount of experience for relatively little effort.

Camdozaal

Offering fish at the altar in the Ruins of Camdozaal is a less click-intensive method of training prayer, requiring at least 7 Fishing and Cooking and completion of the Below Ice Mountain quest. Having 33 Fishing and Cooking is recommended to fish for tetra, which provide the most prayer experience among the free-to-play fish. Purchasing the Fishing and Preparation buffs from Ramarno's shard exchange slightly increases the experience rates for lower Fishing and Cooking levels respectively.

1. Use a small fishing net to catch fish in the fishing spot nearby. A small fishing net is provided in the space north of the preparation table and altar.
2. Prepare these fish at the preparation table using a knife. You'll gain Cooking experience. A knife lies on the floor nearby the table.
3. Offer the prepared fish at the altar for Prayer experience.

Fish		Fishing		Cooking		Prayer
		Level	Exp	Level	Exp	Level	Exp
	Guppy	7	8	7	12	1	4
	Cavefish	20	16	20	23	1	7
	Tetra	33	24	33	31	1	10

Experience rates are 5,600 Fishing, 7,400 Cooking, and 2,400 Prayer experience per hour or less when offering all fish types with decent efficiency.

Wilderness

Bone Yard

<mapframe align="right" text="The location of the Bone Yard." plane="0" width="300" y="3746" x="3236" height="300" zoom="2" mapID="0"> [] </mapframe> The Bone Yard in the Wilderness (directly north of Varrock) has many spawns of bones and a few spawns of big bones with no killing required.

Recommendations

• Food (optional) - There are multiple level 20–25 skeletons in this area. Be sure to bring enough food to last for a while if you do not wish to fight them.
• Armour - Due to the fact that this is the Wilderness and that there are skeletons in this area, it is recommended that players wear armour they do not mind losing.
• A weapon (optional) - If you choose to fight the skeletons, you can also gain a slight amount of experience just from that. They also drop bones.

Strategy

There are multiple strategies you could use for this method. Any way works, which one is best is for you to decide.

Method one:

1. Run in and collect bones.
2. Run out to safety and bury the bones.
3. Repeat.

Method two:

1. Fight skeletons to obtain their bones as well. A higher combat level would make this easier.
2. Once the area is safe, collect all bones.
3. Bury all bones.
4. Repeat.

Method three:

1. While this method will delay the start of prayer training, if you enter two aggressive areas among the piles of bones, skeletons will no longer be aggressive in those areas after waiting 10 minutes.
   1. Make sure you don't go away too far that would cause you to enter a new aggressive area, otherwise skeletons will be aggressive again for another 10 minutes.
   2. World hopping will not reset the aggression timer.
2. With this method, food and armour will not be needed and without having any weighted items on you (thus, having 0 kg of weight), you can run around burying bones for a longer period of time before running out of run energy.
   1. With this method, while you will have to wait 10 minutes to start training, you can expect a faster experience rate than the other two methods once you start running to collect and bury bones non-stop.

You can always find what works for yourself as well.

Chaos Temple

Burying bones at the south-east Chaos Temple ruins in the Wilderness is more click-intensive but it is located in a lower-leveled Wilderness area (Levels 11–12) making it a slightly safer alternative to the Bone Yard, plus there are no monsters located in this area in free-to-play worlds. The idea would be to bury the bones inside the temple ruins on the western and southern side and hop between two worlds. Ignore the lone bones on the north-eastern side inside the temple ruin (to maintain run energy) and the bones outside the temple ruins.

Combat

Low-level areas

Many low level areas consist of people killing monsters. People often do not pick up the bones that lie on the ground, therefore there is often an endless supply of free bones.

Areas and enemies include:

• Lumbridge Swamp
• Chicken pens
• Cow fields
• Goblins (e.g. near the gate to Al Kharid)
• Imps (commonly found south of Falador) drop fiendish ashes that give 10 Prayer experience when scattered.

There are of course more spots, but these are amongst the most common spots for people to be leaving loot on the ground.

High-level areas

Big bones are dropped by the following monsters in free-to-play in these areas.

• Giant frogs (Lumbridge Swamp)
• Hill giants (Edgeville Dungeon or Giants' Plateau)
• Moss giants (Varrock Sewers or Crandor)
• Ice giants (Asgarnian Ice Dungeon)
• Ogresses (Corsair Cove Dungeon)

Vile ashes are dropped by the following monsters in free-to-play in these areas.

• Lesser demons (Crandor and Karamja Dungeon, Lava Maze, or Demonic Ruins)
• Greater demons (Demonic Ruins)

Among the higher-level monsters that drop big bones or ashes, killing giant frogs is the fastest due to their low hitpoints and defence. Killing lesser demons at higher levels would give more profit, but has a lower prayer experience rate.

Power-burying and scattering

The best prayer experience rates for prayer in free-to-play are achieved by burying large numbers of bones and demonic ashes bought from the Grand Exchange. This is a click intensive and expensive method for training the skill. The high cost can be offset by a focus on efficiently making money.

The fastest method of training Prayer would be burying big bones and scattering vile ashes at the same time as bones and ashes can be buried and scattered simultaneously, granting the player 40 Prayer experience in a single tick within two quick clicks, up to a little less than 116,000 experience per hour within a combination of 2,900 buries and scatters per hour. However, players realistically won't achieve that high with the amount of clicking and banking, realistically reaching around ~100,000 experience per hour. From Levels 1 to 99, this method would require 325,861 big bones (109,489,296) and 325,861 vile ashes (94,825,551).

Ash/bone type	Experience	XP/hr	Hours to 99	# for 99	Cost	Cost for 99	GP/XP
Bones	4.5	13,050	~1000	2,896,541	113	327,309,133	-25.11
Monkey bones	5	14,500	~900	2,606,887	531	1,384,256,997	-106.20
Fiendish ashes	10	29,000	~450	1,303,444	113	147,289,172	-11.30
Big bones	15	43,500	~300	868,962	336	291,971,232	-22.40
Vile ashes	25	72,500	~180	521,378	291	151,720,998	-11.64

Buying a bond

It should be noted that training Prayer as a member is significantly more cost-effective, so you may want to postpone training until after you become member. One could consider buying a bond and using a members method of training prayer. With the current price of a bond at 13,817,692 and dragon bones at 3,164, getting to level 99 would require one bond and 51,724 dragon bones when using a gilded altar. The total price would be 177,472,428, which is 114,498,804 cheaper than using big bones. When compared to burying and scattering this would save the player about 92 hours (20 hours compared to 112 hours).