Death fees in Old School RuneScape are not always avoidable, but implementing the following methods will allow you to minimize your death fees. These methods will help you lower how much you pay in reclaim fees when you die in non-PvP scenarios.
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What are death fees?
In Old School RuneScape you’ll come across three types of death fees on top of some other mechanics, like items breaking on death which are also meant to to be GP sinks.
The death fees you can pay are gravestone fee, death’s office fee, and retrieval service fees. While the gravestone and death’s office fee are dynamically calculated based on the items you wear, most of the retrieval services fees are fixed, based on the content rather than the gear. However, there are some tips and tricks that also apply for those cases.
You can find a full list of the item retrieval services and their respective fees here, but to summarize, here are the three types of death fees and how much you can end up paying.
Understanding deaths mechanics
Understanding death mechanics is crucial to be able to avoid death fees.
Types of Deaths
Mainly there are three types of deaths you can experience in OSRS and what you keep depends on the type of death you experience.
Safe deaths
Safe deaths happen in some minigames, like Pest Control, and you get to keep everything upon dying.
PvM deaths
PvM deaths happen everywhere when you get killed by monsters. Depending on where you are, some of your items will go to the gravestone. If you are in a safe zone (outside the Wilderness), everything besides your three most expensive items will go to the gravestone or a retrieval service. If you have the protect item prayer on, you’ll keep an extra one.
If you die inside the Wilderness, you’ll keep the 3+1 items and only some items will be transferred to the gravestone.
PvP death
If you die a PvP death, you’ll only keep the 3+1 and there are only small exceptions that you’ll keep under level 20. Otherwise, you lose everything else. Being skulled or in a High Risk world will prevent you from keeping any items at all.
Gravestone
You’ll only get a gravestone and be able to avoid its fees in just the PvM deaths scenarios, whenever there’s no retrieval service available.
Gravestone instead of Death’s office
Death fees are calculated differently if you claim your items from the gravestone or from the Death’s office, so you should more often than not use the Gravestone instead of the Death’s office.
Gravestone fee
| Item value | Gravestone Fee |
| below 100k GP | no fee |
| 100k-1M GP | 1k GP |
| 1M-10M | 10k GP |
| above 10M | 100k |
The total combined fees are capped at 500k, so if you collect your items from the gravestone, you will end up paying up to 500k per death.
Death’s office fee
If your gravestone expires (after 15 minutes of logged in time) or if you ask death to bring your items there now, then you’ll pay 5 percent of the items’ value for any item that’s worth more than 100k GP. That makes some deaths really really costly, and it can even make players quit after paying several million or tens of millions to reclaim their gear (been there, done that, hopefully never again).
Strategy
The strategy here is quite simple: always go to the gravestone and only choose the death’s office when you died wearing low cost items (for example, when killing Vet’ion).
Collecting from grave tips
- Use the bond pouch to enter your Bank pin before you’re in combat
- Right click collect to instantly collect
- bring some food just in case
- remember protective items such as face mask or elemental shield depending on context
- last but not least, use the settings to auto-equip the items
Use Untradeable items to lower the cost
Certain ornated untradeable items are kept on death and that can drastically reduce the death fee since you’ll have less items to retrieve from the grave. You can upgrade your items to their untradeable form by using specific ornament kits on them. Use this ornament kit guide to get the most out of making your items untradeable and not having to pay a death fee for them.
Be Prepped for Death: Deposit in the Death Coffers
While accidental deaths do happen, being prepared for when you die can really make a difference in your life! Ask Seneca! Back to Old School RuneScape, as philosophical as that sounds, it’s actually a very practical advice, at least for OSRS. Before you engage in dangerous activities, or go learn a new boss who might kill you pay a visit to death’s office and sacrifice some items there. This is because scarifying the items will give you 105% of their value. On top of this, you can legally trick the system and sacrifice items that have a high listing price on the GE, but which actually don’t sell.
You can put any item in the death’s coffer as long as it costs at least 10k GP. The dwarven stout (keg) or Asgardian ale (keg) are great examples of this, however, the list of items that fit in this category is endless!
Ultimate method to completely avoid death fees
This one is under-rated and might sound easier said than done, but don’t die! Learn to always grab that one click emergency teleport (like the royal seed pod) and whenever you’re in danger of dying, use it. Don’t overextend fights and take your time learning the mechanics of each boss on learning gear. Some deaths are really unavoidable, but many are very very easy to avoid!
If avoiding death is too much, you might also want to learn how to suicide in OSRS! It’s just as useful!
