The Blast Furnace is a minigame in which a team of players cooperates to run a furnace that smelts large numbers of ores into bars at once. The goal of the minigame is not speed per se, because the high capacity of the furnace is offset by its distance from a bank. Its main advantage is lower cost, as you need only 4 coal per runite bar instead of the usual 8. There are anvils nearby to use your smelted bars for Smithing XP, but for making money, you want to bank the bars, so the objective is to be as efficient as possible in how you travel to the furnace, use it and then return to the bank. Be sure to follow the directions here carefully, as they are the result of many hours of testing to avoid problems such as finding your inventory full of ore and not being able to put it into the furnace.
The addition of a dwarven mine cart route between the Keldagrim and the Grand Exchange has cut down on the formerly long run to the Keldagrim bank, and removed the need for energy potions. You can further increase the number of bars you make per hour by making use of beast of burden familiars, with higher level ones allowing you to make more bars on each run.
You should use the furnace on World 58, the official Blast Furnace event world. Try to help out others who are running the furnace -- too many people are "freeloaders" who load in their ore and expect others to do the work for them. So pick up a shovel or a hammer or a bucket when it is necessary and pitch in.
The September 2009 change to player-specific stores means you now have an alternative to using Ordan to unnote ores -- you can sell them to the store and buy them back again. This ends up costing slightly more than unnoting the ores, but saves a noticeable amount of time at an additional cost of only a few gold pieces per bar, so it is the method I recommend.
Bear in mind that the numbers described here are estimates, because the exact amount of time needed for each run is variable, depending on where in the cycle the furnace is when you load your ore. |
All information based on Grand Exchange price data from: May 20, 2012. Note that the three-day delay in price updates is waived for RuneScoop members. 