Sounds like a quest doesn’t it? Unfortunately its not. (We’re due for another good Herblore quest aren’t we?)

Anyways, In herbal Remedies Jagex changed a few things about the herblore skill. Firstly we have changes to the unfinished potions and secondly changes to identifying herbs.

Unfinished Potions

Unfinished potions are now titled, you know how you used to add a ranarr to a vial of water and it would just say ‘unfinished potion’? Well now all Unfinished potions are titled by the type of herb they have in them. That title is followed by (unf) which stands for ‘Unfinished’. An unfinished Ranarr potion would be called a ‘Ranarr potion(unf)’ an unfinished Merrentil potion would be a ‘Merrentil potion(unf)’ and so on. This is pretty useful since before you had to examine a potion to find out what type of herb was in it.

All of your previously unfinished potions are now appropriately titled to match the type of herb which you had put in them.

Identifying herbs

The next part of this update was about how people identify herbs. As you know, before you didn’t know which herb was which until you identified it. Jagex didn’t think this was good so instead of just getting rid of it they changed it. Now instead of ‘Identifying’ your herbs you must ‘clean’ them before you can use them to make a potion. Unclean herbs are called ‘grimy’ and clean herbs are called ‘clean’. (What else would you call a clean herb?)

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Darn Jagex, why’d they have to get rid of Identifying? I was counting on that extra experience to make my level.” Fear not! Jagex has taken this into consideration and, not wanting to aggravate anyone, they have made cleaning herbs give you the same experience as identifying them used to give, thus you haven’t lost any experience.

Oh, also when you grow herbs with the Farming skill you grow ‘grimy’ herbs instead of ‘clean’ herbs, so you also get extra experience from that.

“So why exactly did they change the Identifying-Cleaning process?”

It was part of an anti-scam. Jagex changed this process to make it so that everyone knew what herb they had, or were buying. As you probably know, alot of people were using the fact that all unidentified herbs looked the same to scam people. They could easily tell people that the herb they were buying was a ranarr, though it may really be a Guam or some other cheap herb. (Don’t try this scam, with this new change its nearly impossible for it to work and besides, there’s no fun in scamming and you can get in big trouble.)

All in all this is a pretty helpful update to herbalists, knowing which potion is which and what herb is what at first glance can save time. Hopefully with the herbs being pre-identified this will help stop alot of scams like Jagex intended it to.