One excellent material item in Old School Runescape is crystals. In this guide, I’ll break down a few ways you can collect them as effectively as possible.

What Are Crystal Shards?

Crystal Shards are helpful material found in the Elven city, Prifddinas. They can upgrade potions, charge magical items, and enhance Crystal Keys, unlock Elven Crystal Chests.

Method #1. Pickpocketing 

The first method for getting crystal shards is through Thieving. While in Prifddinas, pickpocket the various Elves around you without getting caught.

To do this task, you’ll need to make sure your Thieving Level is at 85 or higher, preferably at 99. You’ll also want to have completed the Hard Diaries equipped with a Thieving Cape and Dodgy Necklace. You’ll also want to have the Rouge’s Gear on, which ensures you’ll get twice as many shards per pickpocket.

While 85 is the minimum, because Elves are so keen, pickpocketing has a very high fail rate without maxing out your Thieving and using many of the items mentioned. Still, because you can still get caught potentially quite often while doing this, it is risky.

That said, if you can get away with this, you can manage to pull in between 26 and 28 shards per hour. Not only that, but you also have the chance of getting an Enhanced Crystal Teleport Seed. This seed can be fused with 100 crystal shards at a singing bowl, making an Eternal Crystal Teleport. While it is pretty expensive to make, you can sell it for a pretty good profit.

Method #2. Agility Course

Next up is completing the Prifddinas Agility Course. To do this, you’ll have to be in Prifddinas and have a Level 75 in Agility before starting. This is a much less intensive method of collecting shards as you’ll just be doing the course over and over. You can make between 10 to 15 Crystal Shards per hour doing this method.

In addition to getting crystals, because this is an agility course, you can also gather up a few levels in Agility, making this useful on both ends.

Method #3. Zalcano

The third method of farming shards is by facing off against Zalcano. Ideally done with a team, while facing off against him, spend a good portion of your time mining the walls. You’ll want to do this during any intermission or pause in his attacks or movements.

If you’re working with a team, if you get MVP, you can earn a considerable amount of loot and GP from this as well. As far as shards are concerned, you can get upwards of between 25 and 30 shards per hour as well as up to 1 million GP or more per hour.

Method #4. Trahaern Mine

Fourthly, by mining through the Trahaern Mine, you can pull between 5 and 10 crystal shards per hour. in addition, you also have a 1/127 chance of finding a crystal shard when opening up any rock you come across.

While you don’t have to be at any particular level when mining, the higher you are, the more you’ll get. Going in at 60 Mining or higher, you can bump your numbers up to 6-10 shards an hour. If you’re at 99 Mining, you could potentially get it up to 15 shards an hour.

Method #5. Woodcutting

Lastly, in the Prifddinas forests, you can use woodcutting to pull in crystal shards. Each chopped log gives you a 1/80 chance of finding a crystal shard. Woodcutting doesn’t have a base requirement, but ideally, you’ll want to be in the 60s or higher.

While all the trees have relative drop rates, I suggest chopping down Teak Trees. Not only will you get more crystal shards overall (roughly a maximum of 11 shards per hour), but you’ll also greatly improve your Woodcutting XP through Teak Trees.

Conclusion 

There are many ways to reliably farm out crystals in OSRS, and while all of them will require a bit of work on your end, they are all fairly simple. Consider the Agility Course or the Woodcutting method if you don’t know where to start. They won’t result in bigger hauls, but they also come with the lowest barrier to entry.

If you’re confident in your setup, consider jumping into the mines with Zalcano or testing out your pickpocketing abilities.