Fresh account to Blood Shards

Required for the quest chain

These cover Sins of the Father and every prerequisite quest.

Strongly recommended for the Vanstrom setup

None of these are quest requirements, but the gear in section 13 depends on them.

43 Prayer is the absolute floor for protection prayers. 50 is the real number for this route.

A note on optional quests

A handful of quests in this guide aren't required for Sins of the Father at all. I did them anyway, and they fall into two buckets:

• Early XP boosts — Monk's Friend, Waterfall Quest, Witch's House, Imp Catcher, The Ides of Milk, and so on. They skip a lot of miserable low-level training, but they're active questing time.
• Quality of life — Children of the Sun and Twilight's Promise, which together open up the Gemstone Crab as an AFK combat option.

If you value speed, the XP-boost quests are worth it. If you value AFK-friendliness above all else, skip the XP boosts entirely and grind at the crab while doing something else. Do what fits how you actually want to play.

Finish Tutorial Island (it shows up in the quest journal as Learning the Ropes) and immediately head to the Grand Exchange.

Buy:

• Axe progression through Rune
• Pickaxes through Black/Steel
• Amulet of Fury
• Amulets of Glory
• Rings of Wealth
• Berserker Ring
• House, Lumbridge, and Varrock teleport tabs
• General questing supplies / stamina potions

You can buy more teleports as you need them.

Before seriously training combat, knock these out. They skip a lot of terrible low-level combat training.

1. Witch's Houseoptional
   • Big early Hitpoints boost. Makes the following combat quests much more forgiving.
   • Walkthrough + safe spot
2. The Ides of Milkoptional
   • Short F2P quest around Lumbridge with no requirements.
   • Rewards a 1,000 XP lamp usable on any combat skill, including Prayer.
   • Unlocks Brutus, a repeatable cow boss in the Lumbridge cow field. He gives double combat XP and is fantastic early training on a fresh account.
   • Brutus drops the Mooleta, the only F2P defender. Worth a few kills to grab one.
3. Waterfall Questoptional
   • Huge Attack + Strength XP.
4. Tree Gnome Villageoptional
   • More Attack XP. Also unlocks the Spirit Tree network.
   • Walkthrough + safe spot
5. Fight Arenaoptional
   • More Attack XP, plus 2,175 Thieving XP, which covers most of the 22 Thieving requirement.
6. Vampyre Slayerrequired
   • More Attack XP. Required for Sins of the Father anyway.

General questing setup

For all the questing in this guide, run around with teleports (house / Lumbridge / Varrock tabs), an Amulet of Glory, a Ring of Wealth, stamina potions, and summer pies for the Agility boost on shortcuts.

Use combat gear similar to your Slayer setup wherever the quest allows it, and safe spot with Magic or Ranged whenever the fight lets you. Witch's House is the obvious example. A lot of early quest bosses are far easier from behind an obstacle than toe-to-toe at low combat.

Do Priest in Peril and The Restless Ghost. Both are part of the Myreque chain anyway.

Then buy Lava Dragon Bones and Burning Amulets, run bones to the Chaos Altar in the Wilderness, and train to 50 Prayer.

43 unlocks the three protection prayers and is the bare minimum. 50 is the real target because the antler guard in the Vanstrom setup requires it, and the extra Prayer makes Slayer and the quest bosses much more comfortable along the way.

Dwarf Cannon first

Do Dwarf Cannon before anything else here. No requirements, 750 Crafting XP, and it unlocks the cannon. The cannon is what makes Wilderness Slayer fast and is how we reach 60 Ranged without ever training Ranged directly. Buy the cannon from Nulodion after the quest.

Natural History Quiz

Then do the Natural History Quiz in the Varrock Museum. It's a miniquest, so it lives in the miniquest tab. Don't skip it — 1,000 Slayer XP takes a fresh account straight to 9 Slayer.

Wilderness Slayer

Goal: 9 → 50 Slayer. While doing this:

• Cannon as many good tasks as possible.
• Use Bracelets of Slaughter on good cannon tasks to stretch them for extra Ranged XP.
• Train melee during tasks to build Attack, Strength, and Defence.
• Aim for 60 Ranged from cannon XP by the time you're ready for Vanstrom.
• Push 50 Strength and 50 Defence here too. Both are needed for the Vanstrom gear.

Suggested Slayer setup

Weapon: the best scimitar you can equip for your Attack level. Simple and cheap. If you're pushing past 60 Attack, consider Viggora's chainmace — charged with revenant ether it gives +50% melee accuracy and damage against any NPC in the Wilderness, roughly 60k+ XP/hr versus 40–45k at the crab.

On the d'hide: use blue, not green. The green d'hide body requires Dragon Slayer I, which we're not doing. Blue, red, and black bodies have no quest requirement — only green does.

Bracelet choice depends on the task: Slaughter to extend good cannon tasks, Expeditious to burn through bad ones, Combat bracelet otherwise.

On the ring and amulet: I used Ring of Wealth / Glory rather than Berserker Ring / Fury, because dying with expensive gear equipped means you keep fewer items and lose an extra cannon piece (~200k each). In hindsight, 250k is nothing and I should have just worn the Berserker Ring and Fury. Learn from me.

Inventory

• Dwarf cannon parts
• 600–1,500 cannonballs — you'll miss a lot at low accuracy, so tasks eat through them. Scale to your risk tolerance and how deep the task is.
• 1 Super combat potion
• 5–6 Super restores
• 1 Stamina potion
• 1 Burning amulet (optional — teleport to Chaos Temple, run north for the Wilderness Slayer Cave)
• Blighted food (Wilderness-only, so not worth protecting)
• Spare Slaughter / Expeditious bracelets to re-equip after they degrade

Why Wilderness Slayer at all

Beyond the cannon XP, Krystilia's tasks roll for Larran's keys and Trouver parchments, which are real gold on a fresh account. The Wilderness Slayer Cave is the place to be: cannons work there, drop tables are better than the surface versions, and it has a 15% higher Larran's key rate on task.

Gemstone Crab (optional, but I used it a lot)

Slayer levels far faster than Attack, Strength, and Defence, so you will almost certainly hit 50 Slayer with your melee stats lagging behind. The Gemstone Crab is the answer.

• No defence, effectively infinite hitpoints — pure uninterrupted combat XP.
• XP per hit is about 87.5% of normal, but with zero downtime and no overkill waste it usually beats regular crabs anyway.
• Genuinely AFK. I used this whenever I wanted to do something else.
• Drops uncut gems (top 16 damage dealers can mine the shell after it burrows), which feeds straight into the 56 Crafting grind.

It also gives you an out when the Wilderness is full of PKers. If Wildy Slayer isn't viable that session, go hit the crab.

Unlocking it: the only hard requirement is Children of the Sun. For the travel route, also start Twilight's Promise — partial completion unlocks the quetzal network. Then: Civitas illa Fortis Teleport → quetzal to Tal Teklan → run south-east to the crab nest. Each nest has a cave; if the crab isn't at the spawn you land on, take the cave and it drops you at the current one. Use the same cave after every burrow.

Do Monk's Friend first. 2,000 Woodcutting XP puts a fresh account at 14 Woodcutting; a tiny bit of regular-tree cutting gets you to 15.

14 → 15

Regular trees

15 → 35

Oaks

35 → 62

Teaks

For teaks: fast is 2-tick teaks in Soul Wars (this is the video that taught me the method); lazy is AFK teaks. My rough experience was around 4 hours with 2-tick vs. ~12 hours AFK, so choose based on how hard you want to sweat.

These three work well together. Agility is a ton of running and downtime between clicks, so use that time to knock out Magic and Fletching rather than training all three separately.

Agility

Rooftop courses until 52

Magic

Imp Catcher for the initial XP, then enchant bolts while running rooftops until 49

Fletching

Make darts while running rooftops until 60

Simple because the account is funded: cut gems until 56 Crafting. Dwarf Cannon's 750 XP and the crab's gem drops give you a head start. No need to overcomplicate it.

Complete Druidic Ritual, then buy supplies and make potions until 40 Herblore. That's all we need.

This grind is tiny because Fight Arena already covers a large chunk of it.

1. Fight Arena → 2,175 Thieving XP
2. Children of the Sun
3. Twilight's Promise → 3,000 Thieving XP
4. Finish the remaining XP at Baker's Stalls in East Ardougne

Fight Arena + Twilight's Promise puts you at 5,175 XP. Level 22 needs 5,624, so you only need 449 more Thieving XP. Basically a free requirement.

Do Doric's Quest. 1,300 Mining XP puts a fresh account around 10 Mining.

10 → 15

Copper/tin or another low-level method

15 → 20

Iron ore

Iron requires 15 Mining, so you can't jump straight to it after Doric's. Stop at 20.

Complete Daddy's Home. That's it. It's a miniquest, so check the miniquest tab. It takes a fresh account to around 8 Construction, already past the 5 requirement.

Don't save these until the end. Use them to break up the skilling grinds whenever you reach the next requirements.

1. Vampyre Slayer
   Already done in step 2.
2. Priest in Peril and The Restless Ghost
   Already done before the Prayer grind.
3. Nature Spirit
4. In Search of the Myreque
   Once you have 25 Agility.
5. In Aid of the Myreque
   Needs 25 Crafting · 25 Agility · 15 Mining · 7 Magic
6. Darkness of Hallowvale
   Needs 40 Strength · 32 Crafting · 33 Magic · 26 Agility · 22 Thieving · 20 Mining · 5 Construction
7. A Taste of Hope
   Needs 48 Crafting · 45 Agility · 40 Attack · 40 Herblore · 38 Slayer — fight guide
8. Finish the remaining grinds
   62 Woodcutting · 60 Fletching · 56 Crafting · 52 Agility · 50 Attack · 50 Slayer · 49 Magic
9. Sins of the Father
   Start once everything above is done, then do the Vanstrom prep below before the final fight. Mechanics video

This is the one part of the route where hitting the bare quest requirements doesn't mean you're ready. Vanstrom's fight heavily rewards Magic defence, which is why the setup leans on red d'hide and mixed hide.

Stats

Gear

• Antler guard vs. red d'hide shield. The antler guard is pure offence: it boosts attack and strength across every style but takes -15 to every defence stat. If Vanstrom is hitting you too hard, swap to the red d'hide shield.
• Zombie helmet is a crush helm, which matches the Blisterwood Flail, with the best defensive bonuses of any crush helmet.
• Efaritay's aid is just an enchanted topaz ring, so buy it from the GE. +10% damage and +15% accuracy against vampyres. It's a consumable — 200 charges per ring, one per successful hit, then it shatters. Buy a handful for Vanstrom attempts and a big stack for the Vyre grind. It replaces the Berserker Ring for this fight and for Vyres.

Pre-pot sequence

At the bank, right before you go:

1. Stamina potion
2. Anglerfish
3. Divine super combat potion
4. Anglerfish
5. Prayer regeneration potion
6. Bank → withdraw the final inventory

Final inventory

• 200 darts (for the Bloodveld)
• 1 Super combat potion
• 5 Super restore potions
• 19 Marlin — 24 HP per bite, the highest single-bite heal in the game

Start the fight as soon as you leave the bank. The divine super combat is on a timer.

Prayers during the fight

Protect from Magic · Ultimate Strength · Incredible Reflexes · Rapid Heal. All four are available well under 50 Prayer.

If it's genuinely not the RNG

If you're dying the same way every attempt, that's a real problem rather than variance. Learn the mechanics and send a few more attempts before assuming you need a massive combat grind.

• If the problem is damage taken, swap the antler guard for the red d'hide shield.
• If the problem is clearly DPS, go use Slayer to push Attack/Strength higher and come back.

Once Vanstrom is dead and Sins of the Father is complete, the account has accomplished its purpose.

Head into Darkmeyer, gear for Vyrewatch Sentinels, use the nearby prayer and banking infrastructure, and begin the AFK Blood Shard grind.

Keep Efaritay's aid on for Vyres too. The accuracy and damage bonus still applies, and at AFK kill rates you'll burn through 200-charge rings quickly, so buy them in bulk.

Everything after this point is optional account improvement.

• 2-tick teaks

  step 05 · woodcutting
• Sins of the Father mechanics

  step 12 · final fight
• A Taste of Hope fight

  step 12 · quest chain
• Witch's House safe spot + walkthrough

  step 02 · early combat
• Tree Gnome Village safe spot + walkthrough

  step 02 · early combat