herb-money

A terminal dashboard that ranks Old School RuneScape herbs by how profitable they are to clean with Degrime, using live Grand Exchange prices from the RuneScape Wiki real-time prices API.

Buy grimy herbs, clean a full inventory per cast, sell the clean herbs back. The wiki's own guides tell you which herb was best whenever the page was last updated; this tells you which one is best right now, and what you would actually make rather than what a tick-perfect player would.

There is a longer write-up about why it exists and how it gets used at korvanick.com/projects/herb-money.

DEGRIME PROFIT  ·  Herblore 78  ·  Magic 85  ·  Focus 75%  ·  Capital 50.00M  ·  Nature rune 158gp
───────────────────────────────────────────────────┌─────────┐─────────┌──────────┐──────────────────
Herb              Buy Δ      Sell-L Δ      Sell-H  │  Prof-L │  Prof-H │  GP/hr-L │  GP/hr-H  1h Vol
───────────────────────────────────────────────────├─────────┤─────────├──────────┤──────────────────
Kwuarm          2,051 ↓6      2,245 ↑45     2,200? │   138.3 │    93.3 │    1.68M │    1.13M  21,885
Cadantine       2,139 ↓1      2,319         2,320  │   122.3 │   123.3 │    1.49M │    1.50M  12,207
Toadflax        2,013         2,185 ↓14     2,200  │   117.3 │   131.3 │    1.43M │    1.60M  21,958
Torstol         3,100         3,247 ↑12     3,247  │    71.3 │    71.3 │     866k │     866k  10,457
Avantoe         1,441 ↓25     1,544         1,554  │    61.3 │    70.3 │     745k │     854k   8,138
Guam*             196           249           249  │    37.3 │    37.3 │     453k │     453k   4,534
Irit            1,376 ↓14     1,414         1,480  │    -1.7 │    63.3 │     -21k │     769k  11,892
Ranarr$         5,554         5,785 ↓1      5,800  │   104.3 │   118.3 │    1.27M │    1.44M  23,764
Marrentill        145           219           225  │    58.3 │    64.3 │     708k │     781k   1,438!
Huasca*$        5,761         5,825         5,863  │   -63.7 │   -26.7 │    -774k │    -324k   1,578!
───────────────────────────────────────────────────└─────────┘─────────└──────────┘──────────────────
Best: Kwuarm  ·  Low 1.68M/hr  ·  24.92M capital/hr  ·  6.74% ROI
* price older than 10m
? sell-high print is below sell-low, so Prof-H is unreliable
$ needs more than your capital
! under 2,000 clean trades in the last hour, so ranked last and never picked as best

Marrentill is the shape of thing this is for. On paper it is the sixth best herb on screen and better than Guam; in practice 1,438 clean trades an hour is not a market you can dump 12,000 herbs into, so it sits at the bottom with everything else too thin to sell rather than tempting you from mid-table.

Running it

Python 3.8 or newer. No dependencies, no install, nothing to build.

python3 herb-money.py

With no arguments it asks for your levels, focus and capital, each with a default you can accept by pressing enter. Everything can be passed instead:

python3 herb-money.py --username "your name" --focus 75 --capital 50m

Option	What it does
--username	Looks your Herblore and Magic up on the OSRS hiscores
--mode	Which hiscore board that name is on: main, ironman, hardcore, ultimate
--herblore, --magic	Set levels directly. Overrides the lookup, so you can ask what a level you have not reached yet would look like
--focus	Percent of tick-perfect you actually sustain. Every rate is scaled to it
--capital	GP you can tie up, as 50m, 1.5b, 300k or 50000000. Herbs needing more are dimmed
--sort	profit (default) or roi, which ranks by return on capital instead
--no-swing	Skips the per-herb history requests and drops the 1h Sw column
--contact	Your contact for the API's User-Agent. See below

Only skills come from the hiscores. Jagex publishes no API for a player's coins, so --capital is always a number you supply.

Reading it

-L and -H are the two sell prices. Low is what you get dumping into an instant sell; High is what you get waiting for a buyer. Ranking is on Low, because that is the number you can count on. The buy side is always the patient price, since instant-buying grimy herbs is a loss on most of them and is deliberately not modelled.

Column	Meaning
Buy Δ, Sell-L Δ	Price, and how far it moved against the last 5m average. Colour says whether that movement helps you, so a rising buy price is red and a rising sell price is green
Prof-L, Prof-H	Profit per herb after tax and runes, dumping or waiting
GP/hr-L, GP/hr-H	The same, per hour of cleaning
Cap/hr	GP tied up to sustain an hour of it
ROI%	Profit per gp invested. Ranks very differently from raw profit
1h Sw	How far the buy price moved over the last hour, coloured against your own margin. Red means the swing is wider than the margin, so the margin is noise
Age	How stale the price is
1h Vol	Clean-side trades in the last hour. That is the side you have to offload. Under 2,000 earns a !, which sinks the herb to the bottom of the table and takes it out of the running for best

Prof-L and GP/hr-L are boxed off with a rule. They are the two figures the decision rests on — what you make per herb and what that comes to per hour, both at the price you can count on — and on a row where nearly every number is green, an outline picks them out where another bright cell could not.

Dimmed rows are out of reach, either above your Herblore level or over your capital.

The table reflows to the terminal as you resize it, dropping the least important columns as it narrows, down to a 26-column floor. Prices keep their deltas at every width. Resizing redraws immediately and costs no requests; it does not wait for the next minute's prices.

How profit is worked out

profit per herb = sell - GE tax - buy - nature runes

Tax is 2% of the sale, rounded down, exempt below 50gp and capped at 5M. Runes are two natures per cast across 27 herbs, priced live; the four earth runes are assumed free from a staff. Throughput comes from 10 ticks per inventory, so 600 casts and 16,200 herbs an hour at tick-perfect, which nothing sustains for a full hour — expect 67-80% of it, or set --focus to your own figure and have every number scaled for you.

If you run this

The wiki asks that requests carry a descriptive User-Agent it can contact. By default this identifies the project rather than any person, so a clone never reports your traffic under someone else's name. Add your own:

export HERB_MONEY_CONTACT="@you on Discord"

Each endpoint is cached to its real update rate rather than refetched every poll, which is the main thing keeping this polite. --no-swing drops the per-herb history requests if you want a smaller footprint still.

License

MIT. Prices come from the RuneScape Wiki at runtime and are not redistributed here; their content is under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.