If you’re looking into trying out Old School RuneScape’s Grid Master game mode, the list of tasks on the grid might feel a bit too overwhelming, but it’s really not that hard. I’m close to finishing mine after having started on release day, and it’s definitely not too late to start now, even as a casual player.
To help you find a bit of direction, I’ve got a few tips that might help you out. Just to clarify, this is NOT going to be an ultra-efficient guide. If you’re the type who’s trying to get it all done in a day, it’s definitely doable (I think the record at the moment is around 10 hours), but this is more for the chill players.
What I’m going to share are simple pointers to help you find a bit of early direction and leave you free to forge your own path for the rest of it, because I believe that’s part of the fun for this event.
How To Start In Grid Master
After joining a Grid Master world for the first time, you’re forced into a very brief tutorial. Read through it to get your very first free tile on the bingo board that you will be completing throughout the event.
Basically, how it works is that there’s a 7×7 grid that has a challenge in each tile. Completing a challenge will unlock a permanent buff for your account, and finishing an entire row or column will also let you claim more powerful rewards.
The Initial Tasks
Now, you start with a choice of one of three relics. It’s important to note that, unlike in the Raging Echoes league, you will eventually unlock all three of them. No choice paralysis to worry about!
Here are your choices, and a quick summary in case you didn’t get to use any in the previous league:
- Power Miner – This gets you the echo pickaxe, which will let you mine rocks several times before it depletes, among other bonus effects. All of the ore you mine is also automatically smithed and sent to your bank (you can toggle the first effect off).
- Lumberjack – This gets you the echo axe, which will let you automatically burn or fletch logs into arrow shafts. This is probably the “weakest” first choice, in my opinion.
- Animal Wrangler – This gives you the echo harpoon, which works for any fishing spot as long as you have the necessary bait, if any. Anything you fish will be sent to the bank and occasionally cooked regardless of your cooking level. It also has hunter buffs, though I didn’t pay much attention to those.
Just to make your start feel a little smoother, I recommend unlocking them in the order above. This is just cause one of the tasks in the starting column is to mine gold ore. You can get that done in Al Kharid within minutes of starting, and you’ll find a lot of uses for the smithing levels and bars early on.
Lumberjack is your next goal because the other task in this column is to chop maple logs. There aren’t any fishing tasks in the first column, so you can leave Animal Wrangler for last.
After those initial set of unlocks, you’re pretty much primed to do whatever the hell you want without worrying about any major skilling bottlenecks. Feel free to browse the other tiles while you’re at it, by the way. All the tasks and rewards are viewable in the grid whenever you want to check them out.
[UPDATE – Literally a day after writing this] Yes, you can brute force the PVM challenges if you have even just a surface level knowledge of the mechanics. If you need proof, here’s my completed board. The only “hard” part for me was the Awakened Whisperer, but that just took one (dragged out) attempt.
A Few More Starting QOLs
While you’re working on your first column, try to take on the Stronghold of Security by running over there or talking to Count Check at the Lumbridge Graveyard for a one-time teleport.
With a bit of food on hand, try to complete the whole thing to get yourself some gold and the boots at the end. Wearing the boots is another easy task that’ll get you the Fairy’s Flight reward. It’s a particularly useful teleportation tool that’ll let you teleport to any unlocked fairy ring, tool leprechaun, or spirit tree on the map.
With the Fairy mushroom, teleport to the fairy ring CKQ. This will send you to Aldarin, and if you run south to Mistrock, you can finish another task by entering the pub and drinking a Steamforge brew, which spawns on the bar and can be purchased from the NPC there. This unlocks the Banker’s Briefcase, which lets you teleport to any unlocked bank counter or chest in the game.
These two items will remove the need for any of the regular teleportation spells in the game. Seriously, you’ll be carrying one or both of these almost all the time during the event. They’re that good.
Unlimited Gold
Get yourself to 25 thieving as early as possible too. This will unlock Dodgy Deals, which makes thieving impossible to fail and quite literally an “AFK” activity. With this unlocked, work on getting 50 thieving so that you can pickpocket house keys from wealthy citizens in Civitas Illa Fortis.
With some house keys on hand, participate in the Stealing Valuables activity to unlock the Golden God reward from the grid. This will let you use High Alchemy without any runes and at any level.
The best part about Golden God is that it lets you alch a stack of noted items, and this will continue to autocast until you either run out of that item or you move it around in your inventory. It’s essentially infinite gold and an endless stream of magic EXP. You’ll never be broke with this reward unlocked.
Link Skills
There are three tiles that unlock a variation of a “linked” skills buff wherein training one of the three will grant 50% EXP to the other two. Unlocking them is fairly simple, but it’s easy to fall into a bit of choice paralysis here.
Honestly, just pick whichever skills you don’t enjoy doing alongside at least one that you do, or at least one that’s insanely quick and easy to level up with the boosted rates. I won’t outright tell you what to pick, especially since what I enjoy doing might not necessarily be yours as well, but here are a few things to consider:
- Magic and Prayer are completely free because of Golden God. In case you didn’t know, you can use gold at an altar to train prayer, and this makes it insanely easy to max out, especially with chaos altars.
- Agility and Slayer are going to be pretty slow, even with the bonus EXP rates. This is especially true for the latter if you don’t have the Slayer Master reward, which requires you to do around half of the Inferno.
- Runecraft and Herblore are probably the only ones that you should definitely consider linking to something else no matter what. You don’t even really need to train RC at all, but there are tasks to reach 1500 and 2000 total level, which these will help you achieve.
- On that note, Construction is hilariously easy to train once you have Golden God. You can get it to 99 in no time at all, and you can just kinda keep doing it to max out the other two skills linked to it.
- There are plenty of ways to train Crafting quickly, including buying and cutting gems at Aldarin or using a singing bowl at Prifddinas (you can get a ton of shards by pickpocketing elves).
- Thieving is one of the fastest/simplest 99s in this game mode once you have Dodgy Deals. Do what you will with that information.
If you ask me, there are no wrong combinations, but there are definitely a few that might slow you down if you’re trying to finish the whole grid (or most of it).
For example, my silly self linked Agility, Fishing, and Hunter cause I thought I’d be AFKing karambwans as much as I did in leagues. If I could reset my choices, I’d probably replace Hunter or Fishing with Slayer, because it’s preventing me from finishing the Araxxor tile and pretty much the entire column it’s in. I’m currently level 87 slayer but rising fast as of writing this, and it’s the last one there lol.
Closing Thoughts
Just as I usually do with my OSRS guides, I heavily encourage you to just play your way and figure out how to complete most of these tiles on your own. My tips here are mostly just aimed towards getting you past the start a little faster.
It’s a very experimental game mode that’ll only last for a month, but it’s more than enough time to get maxed out and have fun with a hilariously overpowered character. If you’re inexperienced with PVM, like I partially am, this is a great opportunity to dip your toes into content you haven’t tried yet cause you can do them with training wheels and without wasting resources in the main game.
I’m personally going to use this to practice certain things in preparation for my Colosseum and Inferno attempts in the main game, because my account is finally at a point where I can try those without breaking the bank… especially since I de-ironed a while ago.
If you’re trying to finish the grid as a casual player, consider checking out my beginner’s guide to the Corrupted Gauntlet next if you don’t know how to do it. Winning one run of it is one of the “hard” tasks in the event, and it’s probably the only thing stopping you from completing a row!