Money making guide/Catching dark crabs

The methods in this guide may involve considerable risk

Risks including, but not limited to: loss of money/items, unstable prices, and/or slow GE resale. Test sales and prices with small amounts. Use this method at your own risk.
Reason: Takes place in the Wilderness

Dark crabs are located in the Resource Area and are most easily accessed by using the Edgeville lever. Dark crab fishing spots never move. Fishing dark crabs is very low intensity, but fishers must remain aware of player killers. The elite Wilderness diary greatly improves the catch rate (at level 99, the chance to catch a dark crab increases from 12% to 34% with the diary completed). The listed profit and catch rate per hour is with the diary. Once a full inventory has been caught, the dark crabs should be noted with Piles.

Take three (3) or four (4) expensive defensive equipment items. Dinh's Bulwark is a good choice. Black dragonhide armour is suitable for the remaining slots.

Non-noting strategy

Recommended items: Fish barrel, Wilderness sword 4, Cooking cape (optional), Rada's Blessing (optional), Clue box (optional)

Enabling PK Skull Prevention is strongly recommended.

		54

Although still slower than noting the fish, players can catch and bank dark crabs at a fairly fast rate without Piles if using a fish barrel.

In this setup, players equip a Wilderness sword while bringing an inventory consisting of the fish barrel, a lobster pot and 54 dark fishing bait (28 for the barrel and 26 for the inventory). Note that when the last piece of bait is consumed, the last dark crab will fall onto the ground instead of appearing in the players' inventory; quickly pick it up. After filling an inventory and the fish barrel, run to the Deserted Keep, teleport to Edgeville, bank and repeat. Remember to right-click "empty" on the fish barrel when banking.

If players chose, they could cook the dark crabs as part of this process. However, this is not recommended as the gp/hour is lower than dark crabs and dark crabs burn easily without a cooking cape.

Should the player fall victim to a player killer, they will keep any fish stored in their barrel but will lose their dark fishing bait, Wilderness sword and non-stored crabs. As such, it is recommended to collect several inventories of replacement swords from the Lesser Fanatic before employing this strategy.

Rada's Blessing will make runs faster, but due to the inherently unpredictable nature of the double fish bonus it is difficult to predict the exact number of dark fishing bait pieces required when restocking at the bank. As such, players who use it will likely either have extra fishing bait in their inventory or run out before all inventory spaces are filled if less than 54 are used (depending on the success rate of the bonus). Like the Wilderness sword, Rada's Blessing is lost on death.

Players who value clue scroll drops may want to bring a Clue box to protect any potential clues discovered via clue bottles on death.

Note: A dragon or infernal harpoon may be substituted for the Wilderness sword for boosting purposes, but this may slow you down due to the potential to fail the Web slash. Players can instead boost with the harpoon, re-equip the Wilderness sword and bank the former before leaving Edgeville, though unless you are fast the level boost will have decreased by 1 by the time you start fishing.

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