---
title: 'I Farmed Gold in RuneScape for 10 Months – Here''s What Happened'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=vhhfxmh1RrQ'
video_id: 'vhhfxmh1RrQ'
date: 2026-07-12
duration_sec: 1105
---

# I Farmed Gold in RuneScape for 10 Months – Here's What Happened

> Source: [I Farmed Gold in RuneScape for 10 Months – Here's What Happened](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vhhfxmh1RrQ)

## Summary

The speaker recounts his experience farming gold in Old School RuneScape to earn real money during Venezuela's economic crisis. Despite months of grinding and eventual success, he concludes that the time investment, mental toll, and instability make it not worth it.

### Key Points

- **Starting Point** [00:45] — In 2019 Venezuela, with a salary under $20/month, the speaker was drawn to RuneScape after hearing it could earn $3/hour.
- **Initial Grind** [02:35] — First day: 4 hours of killing cows. The addictive progression (1 damage to 4 damage) kept him going.
- **Complex Requirements** [03:33] — Good farming methods require high skill levels (e.g., 99 Agility takes 200+ hours) and multiple prerequisite quests.
- **Months Without Earning** [05:22] — Played for months without earning a penny, captivated by leveling addiction and hope.
- **First Real Method** [06:04] — Found a method promising 150k coins/hour but only achieved it partially due to insufficient levels.
- **Toxic Community** [07:10] — RuneScape has a toxic community, including racist insults against Venezuelans and player killers who ruin others' gameplay.
- **Efficient Farming** [10:05] — After 10 months, found a method killing dragons that could be done without looking at the screen, earning 900k gold/hour.
- **Burnout and Sale** [11:04] — After months of farming, suffered headaches and stress. Sold 200 million gold for only $80 due to inflation.
- **Return During Pandemic** [12:44] — In 2020, with a low-paying call center job and quarantine, returned to RuneScape to help family financially.
- **Advanced Bossing** [13:49] — Learned Zulrah boss fight, earning 2 million gold/hour after a week of practice. Contributed money to household.
- **Ban** [15:39] — After 1.5 years and 2500 hours, account was permanently banned for selling gold. Lost all progress.
- **Final Verdict** [17:17] — Earning money in video games is unstable and not worth the time. He never reached $3/hour; at most $1/hour.

### Conclusion

The speaker warns that gold farming in MMOs is unstable, mentally draining, and rarely yields the promised income. He advises investing time in better pursuits.

## Transcript

MMO games, short for massively multiplayer online games, where thousands of people connect to play simultaneously on the same map. Clearly, the possibilities in a game like this are practically endless, especially toxic things
like going with seven teammates to attack a single player, or more disturbing things like ridiculous bars, such as doing questionable acts with Chang's cat, which isn't exactly what it seems. Pretty bizarre stuff, but what about something
more serious, like earning real money playing these games? That's what we're going to talk about today. And no, this isn't some [ __ ] how-to guide. On the because I did it. And I'll tell you why it's something I wouldn't wish on my worst
enemy. What's up, guys? This is Frames speaking. And this is my experience farming real money in a video game. Let's go back to 2019 in my homeland, Venezuela. Just saying this will make more than one of you imagine where this is going:
more than one of you imagine where this is going: have no money. One fateful day, a friend of mine—you know, that typical shark-minded friend who wakes you up at 3 a.m.  At 11:00 a.m., someone told me a new idea to make
money, saying, "Hey, look, haven't you heard of Run Sky? That game with all those little trees where you earn money?" "Yeah, yeah, lots of money, lots of money!" At first, I was a little skeptical and didn't pay much attention. I thought, "It has to be a
lie." However, I started looking for information about the game, Roomscape, a better non-linear RPG where you write your own story towards misfortune. Its graphics, I think, were the
archaic. However, on news sites, I read that it was supposedly possible to easily earn the gold equivalent of $3 an hour. It might seem like little, but then the frames calculator came out,
and I concluded that if I worked eight hours, five days a week, that would be more than $500 a month. And considering that Venezuela at that time had a salary of less than $20 a month, well, of course, it seems
outrageous to me. Even if it were a quarter of that, it would still be a lot of money. How naive I was! I kept investigating, and something that surprised me was the size of its community, with a large number of
the game made it easy to find very complete guides on how to start. What I didn't know was the dark side of such a large community, but we'll talk about that later. In the end, I joined and did what everyone does when they
rocks, kill cows, cut sticks, mine rocks, farm, farm, farm. On my first day, I spent four continuous hours doing this.
cows for four hours. Well, not so much for me, and this is where it all began. I realized that farming was somewhat enjoyable because you start the game
doing one damage. But as you level up, look at the damage, crazy! You improve your weapon and look at four damage, brutal, bro! Now I do quadruple damage, which before sounds ridiculous, but that feeling of progression, however small, is what
makes RPGs so addictive. You feel more and more powerful, but wait, we're getting distracted from our objective. That rich conversation... Well, I started researching the best farming methods and I saw
that the thing  It wasn't that simple, firstly because there are hundreds and 90% of them are complete garbage, and secondly because of the requirements for the ones that are actually good. For example, to fight this son of a [ __ ], you need
of a [ __ ], you need Perfect, but to unlock those quests, you have to have done these beforehand, and before those, you also have to do these. And another tiny detail: each quest usually has
each quest usually has level requirements like these. And that's the thing. This game has tons of greens. You want to climb this hill? You want to kill this gray voice, Leo? You just want to enter this damn
city? Greens? For literally everything in this game, you have to level up. To make myself clearer, in a room escape room, there are a total of 20-something different skills, very different from each other, that you have to level up. For example, to
cut sticks, you need Wood Cutting; to fish, you need Fishing. And the quests require you to farm several different skills. Do you understand? All this translates into hours and hours and hours of farming just one skill. To give you
an idea, leveling up the Agility skin to level 99 with the fastest method takes more than 200 hours, time during which, of course, you're not earning money, but rather... Supposedly you're preparing to do it, and don't even get me started on the time you
spend looking for guides, which is much more than you think. This is where you start to see that making money is kind of tricky, not like those amazing news sites that said, "You start playing and in no time you're already
making three dollars an hour." The thing is, I didn't realize that until I was quite far into the game. It completely captivated me, caught between the hope of finding a good farming method that would give me good money and the addiction
to leveling up more and more and becoming more powerful. I ended up playing for months without earning a penny, months in which I learned more and more about the game—interesting things, funny things, and things that were interesting before. For
example, the fact that the game's story and lore aren't bad at all; it's actually composed of different eras, wars between gods, and ancient creatures. It's really interesting, and the humor in some quests... well,
I remember there's an agreement where they even call you mentally deficient, or the typical alcoholic beverage from each city in the game. I don't even want to mention what happens to our character in the end. But anyway, after...  After a while,
the day finally arrived. I found a really good method and met the requirements to do it, and I thought, finally, after so long, we're going to get this conversation going. Well, no. Despite the damn guides
coins per hour, when I tried it, following everything to the letter, I only ended up with more than 150,000 coins per hour. Why? Very simple. Because I was still lacking levels. The levels I reached were the minimum to be able to
use this method, but to reach the supposed amount from the guides, I would practically have had all my combat skills at 99. At would have said, "Okay, I'm done with this crap.
I'll invest my time in something else, and that's it." But I thought, "Okay, I've been involved in this for months. If I quit now, it would have been a total waste of time. I can't just walk away now." And that's how, in a combination of perseverance
in a combination of perseverance and addiction to the game, I stayed. I kept discovering more things about the game, especially its community. Remember I told you it was quite large? Well, you know what happens when a
community is big... Ruscape.  It has what I consider one of the toxic communities in any video game, even more so than League of Legends. And that's saying something. In League of Legends, they might insult you, your family, your entire
family, but the game ends and that's it. But this game is on another level. From racist and xenophobic insults against any Venezuelan, because, for those who don't know, the illegal sale of gold affects the
game's economy, which infuriates the Americans who only play this game for fun. A curious fact for those who don't know: in Venezuela, in mid- 2019, there were nationwide blackouts that lasted about
a week. During this time, the Ruscape economy experienced a sudden spike in the prices of its items, and thanks to this, the Venezuelan blackout was a relevant news story in the English-speaking Ruscape community. Just to give you
an idea of ​​the economic impact Venezuela had on an community, we also find the Player Killers, the CAS Pekers, as their name indicates, are those who dedicate themselves to killing.  To other
players in PvP zones, up to that point everything is normal, it's perfectly valid. However, something disgusting they often do is hunt players who kind of mini-quest where you have to enter a PvP zone in the game and
dig in a specific place indicated on the map. The thing is, those who do this are usually unarmed and without any valuables, and the pekers can't think of anything more fun than going to kill
these players, even though it doesn't benefit them at all since the map is destroyed when the player dies. So why do they do it? Basically, to mess with the poor guy who's been looking for his treasure for half an hour and end up
empty-handed. Interesting fact number 2: a while ago a rumor spread that an absurd number of Venezuelan farmers had joined forces against Rain of Terror, the biggest clan of Player Killers in the game, and had managed to kill them all in an
unprecedented battle royale, causing the clan to lose billions of gold in equipment. Is this true? Hey, I have no [ __ ] idea, I think it's unlikely, but there she is.  The rumor is so widespread there's even a wiki article about it.
There's such a tryhard and competitive sector that they prevent bonus experience weekends like other MMOs offer. Because if Johnny, the number one player in total experience, is busy this weekend, he'd be at a disadvantage
able to log in. Although, these types of players literally grind for experience for about 16 hours a day. Why? I don't know. They reached level 99 in all skills a long time ago. Maybe it's
to earn the title of, I don't know, the person with the least social life in history. But anyway, getting back to my rune escape journey, I went through many, many, too many different farming methods, all of which
ended the same way: I never got the money the guides supposedly promised. After about 10 months, I finally got to these little dragons here. The great thing about them was that they could be killed efficiently,
meaning without even looking at the screen, which is actually funny that can be done that way.  From leveling up to farming gold for free, these are very popular methods, but that's where I wonder, those who play this
game solely for fun find it entertaining to do things other than actually play the game. That's why I say the community for this game is strange, but anyway, the point is that with this method I managed to get about 900,000 gold per hour without
intervals of about a minute. I farmed like this for a couple of months until I noticed something: all that time I'd spent farming was taking its toll. I had very frequent headaches, I started to feel very
stressed, I mean, after so long I was burned out on playing the game, and that's when I started doing the math. In total, I had about 200 million gold, a pretty significant amount in the game. I decided I
couldn't take it anymore and said, "Okay, I'll sell all this and I'm out of here." Of course, I had that selling gold for real money is completely prohibited in the game, and if you get caught you'll be permanently banned, but since I did n't want to play anymore anyway, I didn't care.  I
got into the black market, a somewhat shady name for what is really just a shitty little website where you contact your gold. And here's the kicker: I had researched and
price of gold relative to real money many months before, when I was just starting out. Unfortunately, that price had already devalued a lot due to the growing number of farmers in the game. That's right,
inflation came to screw me over, even outside the Venezuelan economy. Those 200 million that I calculated would be maybe $140 ended up being about $80. I fried my brain cells and retinas playing for 10
brain cells and retinas playing for 10 months at $80, man. The good thing is that back then I was still 17-year-old kid in a country in crisis; you've never had that much of your own money. Seriously, and I was able to treat myself to a few things thanks to the money. Besides that, after
watching so many damn guides in English, I greatly improved my command of the language. So let's just say it was a Neutral ending. But the thing is, it does n't end there. In fact, it's far from over. I quit the game and
months go by. But guess what? The funny year 2020 arrives. By then, I had already gotten a job in a call center. And of course, it was crap, not than try to convince someone to buy something from me,
but because the pay was a complete disaster, barely $20 a remember, in my first month they paid me about 100,000 bolivars, which
was basically like three dollars. And that's when I said, "Damn, even if it's not $500 in RuneScape, this is something." And to top it off, from my own house, to my surprise, despite having made a super obvious gold sale, I didn't get banned.
the quarantine was starting and I couldn't leave the house. Practically all the pieces came together for me to end up going back to the game. Besides, my family and I, with the crisis in Venezuela added to the pandemic, were very limited
financially. So  I felt that maybe with this, instead of indulging in stupid things, I could help out financially for the house, and that's what I did. I went back to the game. But this time I was a little more ambitious and wanted to aim for one
of the best methods. That's when I discovered that I hadn't been playing the game for real. What I had been prioritizing were easy methods, or even FK (forget-kill) methods, but Sultra was something totally different. I'm not lying when
of the hardest things I've ever had to do in any video game. You have to memorize its four different attack patterns, put on the one-shot you. You have to know when and where to stand, and
even alternate between magic and bow equipment halfway through the damn fight. It took me about a week to get my first kill. Little by little I improved and the kills became more consistent until I was
able to get 15 to 20 kills per hour. The number of kills and money that those damn things said led me to a profit of 2 million per hour, and things got to a point where my muscle memory...  It allowed me to take down the boss practically without
thinking. I could voice chat with friends, listen to music podcasts—in fact, it was just what kept me from going killing the same boss hundreds of times a day. And that's how things went. I farmed for a couple of weeks, sold the gold, and thanks to that, I contributed
money to the household. I was finally making it, but that's when greed got the better of me, and I wanted to improve my method. I tried the demonic monkeys; supposedly, I was supposed to get 70 kills per hour, but I was only getting 40. Remember this guy? In the
end, I met all his damn requirements, but it was the same: I was only getting 20 kills instead of the estimated 30. The problem with the guides for this game is that never end up reaching the profit they promise. In the end,
I decided to go back to my beloved Zulma because she was the only one who didn't disappoint me, having wasted all that time leveling up only to return to the same method as before. And curiously, that same day was when everything went
to [ __ ]. I finished my  A typical farming day, and the next day
selling gold, and sure enough, that's what I was doing. They caught me. That's it. I lost an account with a year and a half of progress, with almost all the game's features completed, a couple
of skills at level 99, and the modest sum of 5000 kilos of Sultra and about 2000 Mord kills. Not only that, but to give you an idea, the games I've played the longest have been for around 300, 400, or 500 hours. Okay, so Old School
Roomscape. The last time I checked before being banned, I had dedicated about 2500 hours to it in total. To conclude this story, Old School Roomscape was a very important game for me for a while, not
but because I had to dedicate a lot of time to it to get anything out of it. However, it's not a game I've mastered 100%. You could say I developed a kind of love-hate relationship with it. Damn, how I hated having to grind
for  Literally anything, but after doing it, I felt accomplished, like I had achieved a goal. I was stronger in the game, and there were also very tough challenges like the Voice of Surra, which, when I mastered it, made me feel quite skilled as a
player. Things like that made me have a relatively good time playing the game, and look, despite being burned out and worn down mentally and physically, I managed to and thus support my family during a difficult time. Would I recommend it to someone?
Not currently, because if there's one thing I 've learned from all this, it's that making money in a video game is very unstable. Just look at what happened with those NFT games. And besides, even if it's possible to earn money, the amount of
time you have to invest doesn't justify at all the little money you end up earning. I, for example, could never reach their promised three dollars an hour. At most, I probably got, I do n't know, a dollar an hour, and be
careful, maybe less. Believe me, it's worth investing that time in better things. And well, basically, that was my story. Want me to tell you one last interesting fact? The friend at the beginning who told me about the game didn't end up playing it.  I
was almost the one who ruined my [ __ ] life because of his recommendation, and the guy got away scot-free. ruined my [ __ ] life because of his recommendation, and the guy got away scot-free.