Stealing Valuables From 1000 Varlamore Houses In Old School RuneScape

Background

I want to talk about an Old School RuneScape grind that took up the latter half of my 2025. From the end of July to the beginning of December, I spent nearly all of my time in Old School RuneScape grinding thieving in Civitas illa Fortis by pickpocketing wealthy citizens and burgling homes, collectively known as the stealing valuables activity on the Old School RuneScape wiki.

My character, UIM Ashn, at the start of the grind, standing in Civitas illa Fortis.
UIM Ashn at the start of the grind, standing in Civitas illa Fortis.

2025 was a hectic year for our family: my partner and I went through an emergency medical incident with our cat on the same day I started a new job, we bought and moved into a house, got married, had to handle the passing of my partner's mother, had to handle my partner getting laid off, and I had multiple high-visibility projects that I was leading at work. And this is all in addition to the normal trials and tribulations that come with maintaining a home, maintaining a relationship, maintaining a community, and working on my other side projects. There were a lot of events going on, a lot of emotions to work through, and surprisingly little time in which to do it all.

Old School RuneScape is my comfort game of choice, and with everything that had already happened by July of this year, I was looking for some repetitive gameplay that I could use as a distraction. I have a mid-game ultimate ironman, so stealing valuables seemed like a perfect activity during this time period: looting houses had decent thieving xp rates of ~100k xp/hr, pickpocketing keys and looting houses required very few inventory slots, the activity gave me some passive gp in the background, and leveling my thieving would set me up for a future farming grind requiring me to pickpocket thousands of seeds from master farmers. Most importantly though, both the pickpocketing and burgling portions of the activity can be done in small time increments. Regardless of whether I had 5 minutes on the toilet in the morning, 45 minutes on the bus to and from work, or 4 hours vegging out on a weekend with YouTube on the second monitor, the activity fit my schedule.

Grind Summary

I started this grind on 2025-07-29 and ended it on 2025-12-02 with approximately 76 hours of playtime over 44 days in which I logged on at least once, gaining a total of 5,904,264 thieving experience from level 75 up to level 93, 8,231,135 gp (6,295,410 of that from turning in 114,462 valuables stolen from houses), broke down 363 blessed bone statuettes into 45,375 blessed bone shards which I subsequently turned into 226.9k prayer xp at the libation bowl. All of these metrics were tracked in a spreadsheet that I updated daily during the grind. A CSV export of that spreadsheet can be found here for those who are interested.

Turning in all of my valuables on the last day of the grind.

My character, UIM Ashn, at the Teomat, showing 226.9k prayer xp gained with an xp/hr of 402.7k.
Prayer gains at the Teomat.

Miscellaneous Notes

I was relatively sloppy with my gameplay, and by my vibe-based estimate I probably got kicked out of 1 in 25 houses, losing some gp and valuables. So the amount of gp and valuables one could get from this grind would be higher for another individual with perfect locked-in gameplay.

Pickpocketing wealthy citizens gives you a ton of easy clues. In fact, I think it might be the easiest way to get easy clues that I have found for an ultimate ironman. Although not the main goal of this grind, I ended up opening 122 easy caskets while pickpocketing my way up to 1000 house keys, which allowed me to complete my set of black gold trimmed wizard robes and netted me a ham joint.

My character, UIM Ashn, in my player owned house with a stack of 100 easy caskets.
A stack of 100 easy caskets from some point in the grind.

The House Thieving Varlamore plugin is a must-have for this activity. The plugin will give you notifications when wealthy citizens can be pickpocketed without failing, when a home owner is almost home, when a new bonus chest appears, and will show you an arrow where the next house to burgle is. With this plugin on, it is actually pretty easy to AFK this activity, making it prime second-monitor content.

I got Rocky at 83 thieving! Rocky is my first pet, and I was super pumped to get him so early! On the day that I got the pet, I was actually talking to a player with 99 thieving who was over 2,500 keys into a grind to get the pet. So better luck next time, dude. I hope you have gotten your own Rocky since we talked.

RuneLite automatic screenshot captured from when I obtained Rocky showing me in a house within Civitas illa Fortis.

Conclusions

Okay so how did the grind go? Really well, actually! Originally this grind (and this blog post) was going to be called "75 to 99 Thieving in Old School RuneScape by Stealing Valuables" because I thought I would just grind from my level at the start of this grind, 75 thieving, straight to 99 thieving. However, partway through this grind I realized I was actually getting a little bit bored, so I ended up changing my end goal from "get 99 thieving" to "burgle 1000 houses".

I did in fact complete that goal of burgling those 1000 houses, and as a result my character is pretty stacked in thieving levels. Although thieving is no longer my highest skill at the time I am writing this blog post, thieving is by far my highest non-combat skill and probably will be for a while. This was a great way to train on an ultimate ironman, a great way to get in some afk training in during a hectic year, and is a grind that I am quite satisfied with.