I’ve always been a huge fan of having a home in a game. Ever since I was playing as free-to-play I knew when I got membership, I'd want to put some effort into getting a house in Old School RuneScape (OSRS).

While there is still so much, I lack knowledge about them. They do appear to offer some massive benefits. From being able to store things like outfits to teleportation all around the map. It’s also just cool to have a house in a game.

What you can do with a house is rather dependent on your construction skills. The higher the skill the better furniture you can craft, the more rooms you can have, and you unlock much better rooms as well.

The issue is construction can be quite a pricy skill to level up. I so far have very little in this game and not the over 20 million or so needed to get the skill high enough it seems many people claim it takes to level up.

I still however wanted to get the process going. Along with leveling up my construction skills. I found a quest in an area where I was grinding a bunch in that required construction level 10. It also grants some construction and other skill experience. The issue is I lacked any at all.

A part of me somewhat wished I had saved one of my lamps to use for experience. I ended up putting the two I had into runecrafting. The other part of me started to wonder if there was some other quest that lacked having higher than level 1 for construction and it turns out there is.

Quest: Dad’s Home

Oddly enough it seems I could almost finish off two goals at once. While this quest does not give me exactly the level 10 in construction I need to start Tower Of Life. It did get me to level eight. Even better it gave me a house as well.

While getting a plot with two sections of a house in it is not that pricy. It turns out there would be some other financial gains from running Dad’s Home quest than saving 1k gold on. There would even be some information parted on me as the player as well for running this quest.

I ended up running out to Varrock and meeting the starting quest NPC named Marlo. He has an issue. Rather, the father has an issue. A bunch of his furniture has degraded over time and even broken.

Even more interestingly there was a context clue for something much bigger given as well when I first talked with Marlo. He started when he was at the Varrock branch of Mahogany Homes. Which I'll be investigating a little more later.

I also lucked out and there ended up being a saw that was on the floor when I walked in to meet Marlo. I did have to go to the bank to get the other tool needed for construction a hammer out of my bank. I’ve somehow gathered about eight hammers for no good reason until now.

I ended up going over to his father’s house Old Man Yarlo. I was somewhat shocked I needed to replace so many things. I thought maybe I'd just be fixing a table and a bed or something. Instead, it was stools, tables, chairs, carpet, and a bed.

Before even getting to work on repairing anything I got a little intro to homes and construction. It felt like quite a rare moment as most times this game gives very little to go on. I would even be given a book once I finished the quest, giving me some further details.

To fix most of these things I needed nails and boards. For something a bit more complex like the bed, I'd need a bolt of cloth as well. Other than the nails the boards on the market alone were 300 gold each and the cloth was almost 1k.

Thankfully there was a much cheaper way to get these items. I just needed some logs which I was able to loot on the way to the Lumber Yard that was not that far away from my location.

You can pay Lumber Yard 100 gold per log. Since I had the quest going I got a couple of logs milled for free. I also bought the cloth I needed for about half the going rate at the auction house. Along with nails for half the going rate as well

Naturally, it is tempting to want to load up on supplies and bring them back to the auction house. The biggest issue is inventory space. I can only carry so much and if I was going to be doing this, I'd want the supplies for my construction leveling needs and building.

I then filled up my inventory and went back to the house where I was making repairs. I got a little bit of experience every time I finished a job.

I also ended up running out of nails and had to go back to get more. It turns out you can get a failed attempt per nail and when you fail, they end up being bent. With how low my skill is I had a good six nails all bent in a row at one point.

Once I was done fixing up the place I went back for my reward. I now had level 8 construction, a book on construction, and a box of supplies. I waited till I got to my house to open the box of supplies.

The gold I had spent on the quest was more than returned in supplies in the box I got as a reward. The planks, nails, and cloth I ended up getting would not last long before I used them.

My House

Now that I had the Dad’s Home quests finished one of the rewards, I got was also unlocking the ability to have a house. So, I went down to Rimmington to see what I ended up getting.

Starting it’s not much. The first thing I ended up building was a chair so I could work on leveling up my construction skills further. Anything that is a transparent color of white is a location where I could build something and the kind of object I can build at that location.

I thought I might as well build some further rooms to my house. Since my skill is quite low in construction, I thought I'd build a dining room and a kitchen. They both cost 5k gold each just to place them. I then needed to build in them which I took as an opportunity to level up the construction skill further.

This ended up requiring all the supplies and then some that I got for free. Since those items are “noted” I can’t use them. I went back to Rimmington and found an NPC named Phials that for 5 gold per note would unnoted them turning them into the item I needed.

This was the cheapest way to go about it unless I wanted to run for a bit to the next town to access my bank and un-note them that way. At the higher levels, I can hire a servant who will do that for me. That, however, will cost me a lot more than just 5 gold per item.

After some further building, I was now at level 10 construction. This was exactly what I needed to go out and do another quest. While other quests require or even reward construction experience. I would not be doing any others for a while since most of them required a lot higher skills than I currently have.

Quest: Tower Of Life

Sometimes quests can get rather annoying with how many inventory slots they end up taking up. Even more so when they start giving you clothing that they require you to wear while inside working on the construction of a tower.

The first part of Tower of Life just had me running around talking to a bunch of workers who were not working. They would each give me a different item like boots or a hat. I did not know at the time they were gearing me out to be their construction worker. At least I did not need to bring my supplies in for this job.

Once I had everything to be considered acceptable to enter a work site, I thought I might as well check out what they were working on. It also turns out there were a bunch of creates I'd need to keep coming back to and searching for things like values, piles, and balls.

Every time I had enough to work on something I would find myself in yet another mini game. For some of them, I understood right away what was required to finish the mini game. Other times I had no idea what I was doing and once I managed to fall forward to the end of the mini-game I was involved with I was glad to see it over.

This is one of those quests that seem to drag on for quite some time. At least everything I was doing remained within the tower. I’d just run down to the base of the tower and collect more supplies. Then running up to the next floor I was to work on and repeat.

After quite a few repairs it turns out these people were building something quite strange. They took me to the top once everything was finished and a creature spawned in a cage. It attempted to break out and everyone but me ran.

They just thought I'd solo fight the thing and kill it for them. Thankfully there was another way to go. I just needed to answer a bunch of questions to convince it to believe in either magic or logic.

I then got to go down into the basement of the tower where you can summon things to fight. While I was not expecting to unlock a strange area such as this. I was more than happy with the 1k in construction experience and some quest points as well.

Mahogany Homes

It turns out there is another way to grind out construction by not working on your own house spamming and removing the same item repeatedly. That Mahogany Homes thing that one NPC said he was a part of during the Dad’s Home quest turns out to be more than I was expecting.

In many of the major towns like Falador and Varrock, there are representatives from Mahogany Homes you can talk with. They offer you a contract to build and repair items in homes.

You then get to select the difficulty of the repair based on skill. What you can’t pick is where the contract is. So, while I could have gotten a contract for Falador. I ended up having to go all the way over to East Ardougne for my first contract.

These repairs you are doing for other people also require you to bring your supplies such as planks, cloth, nails, and so forth. So, you still need to invest a lot in supplies.

It seems you then get the normal amount of experience as you would for the item you worked on. In this case, I finished a bed and hit level 16 construction. I also had quite a few other items to repair like a clock, drawers, and some chairs as well.

Once I was done with the job, I then got bonus construction experience. On top of that, I earned 2 points to spend in the Mahogany Homes shop. If I get something like 350 points, I can buy a plank sack that holds 28 planks. Which would considerably increase the number of planks I could carry at once.

It seems this way of leveling up construction is quite the slower but more economical way of doing things. There is also some gear I can get with points out of the shop as well that gives me a small increase per piece worn of construction experience.

I’m not sure if it’s worth grinding it out for the carpenter's set or any of the other items. I would also need to work on having much better methods of transpiration between the different cities you can spend to repair items to make this even worth considering.

Final Thoughts

For the time being, I don’t see myself investing heavily in trying to level up my construction skills to have a better house. It was, however, something early on I wanted to investigate, and at some point, I'll be putting some effort into leveling up the construction skill. For now, I'm far too broke in the game and there are so many other things I'd have a better chance at taking on.

Other Content

• Old School RuneScape | A Cat And The Pyramid

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape