General Method Description

Flesh crawlers are one of the best herb droppers in the game, but go beyond that. They also drop fire runes by the boatload, along with body, nature and dust runes (which are handy combinations of earth and air runes). They even drop good quantities of noted iron ore!

Because of how good their drops are, flesh crawlers sometimes get rather crowded. However, if you don't fight during the busiest times (weekend days especially) you can usually find a world with only a couple of other players. These other folks can even be a boon to those who are fighting flesh crawlers to make money -- they frequently leave valuable drops on the ground. It is very common to see body and dust rune piles lying all over the place, for example. And while it is true that each of these drops is not valuable by itself, they add up quickly, especially if you are keeping both your drops and those of others. I have sometimes even seen people leaving noted iron ore on the ground -- I have no idea why anyone would do that!

With monsters that drop a large number of herbs, there are trade-offs between keeping all the herbs or leaving the lower-valued ones so you can try to get more of the ones that cost more. There is also a trade-off between using a beast of burden to get more herbs per trip, or summoning a macaw for its herb enhancing benefit, because the macaw increases the percentage of good herbs (ranarr and above) by a hefty 40%. The key factors that determine the best approach are the number of herbs you get per hour from the monster, the distance to the bank (and thus how much time you waste per hour banking if you take more trips) and the value of non-herb drops.

Flesh crawlers drop a good number of herbs for higher level players -- not as much as chaos druids, for example, but enough that if you kept them all you'd be banking frequently. And these monsters are not particularly close to a bank -- you have to run a fair distance from Edgeville, go down a level and run through a maze. Based on my tests, I have determined that at low and mid levels you should keep all herbs, using a macaw at mid levels (you can't at low levels). At high and very high levels you should use a macaw and keep only guams plus herbs harralander and up; this preserves most of the drop value while cutting bank runs down. Once you get to level 96 Summoning, I recommend my macaw / pack yak combo. In this technique you bring with both pouches, use a macaw until your inventory is full (to get its better herb drops) and then switch to a pack yak.