Muddy keys are used to unlock the similarly named muddy chest at the end of the lava maze in the deep Wilderness. Each time you use a key on the chest you get the following items: an uncut ruby, an anchovy pizza, a mithril bar, a mithril dagger, 2 law runes, 2 death runes, 10 chaos runes and 50 gold pieces. The keys have been in RuneScape for many years, but have languished in obscurity for most of that time. Few players ever encountered them, since they were obtained only from chaos dwarves that few people would have reason to fight. And those who did get the odd key would often not bother taking it to the chest, because the items you got from the chest weren't valuable enough to justify the time, hassle and risk associated with getting there.
Well, time has changed most of the elements of that equation. First, the quest Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf brought new chaos dwarves into the game with new, valuable drops, including the coveted dragon pickaxe as well as the hand cannon; as players fight the dwarves looking for this gear, they get lots of muddy keys and sell them, which has driven the key's price down. At the same time, the value of many of the items in the chest has gone up dramatically, making each chest now worth far more than each key. And finally, Summoning brought with it the lava titan familiar that teleports players to the entrance of the lava maze, reducing much of the hassle of getting to the chest, while Jennica's ring from Spirit of Summer offers a short-cut to leaving the Wilderness in case of emergency.
All of that said, this activity is still rather tedious, and also rather risky -- you are in the deep Wilderness so revenant attacks are likely if you do this for any length of time. Still, if you use the right technique this can be an excellent moneymaker, as long as the value of the items doesn't change too much and people keep getting and selling those keys...
The very high level version of this activity reuses a lava titan familiar for as long as it lasts, about an hour. The extremely high level version uses both lava titan and pack yak familiars to let you do more keys per hour, which yields far higher profits despite the "wasting" of so many valuable pouches.
Note that the figures here do account for a certain amount of time lost per hour dealing with revenant attacks. |
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. 