Pickpocketing elves: money-making guide
Prifddinas elves can give you two enhanced crystal teleport seeds at once with the full Rogue set. The rare roll is more frequent than a vyre’s blood shard, but failures still interrupt the clicks and a short trip can easily finish without a seed.
Updated
Use Prifddinas for the valuable seed drop
You need 85 Thieving and Song of the Elves. Pickpocket inside Prifddinas for enhanced crystal teleport seeds and crystal shards. Lletya elves give Thieving XP but lack those drops, so they are much less useful for making money.
Travel through a Prifddinas entrance after the quest, or use a teleport crystal with a Prifddinas destination. An eternal teleport crystal is convenient if you already own one; you do not need to buy it just to try pickpocketing.
Choose an elf near a bank. Cirdan is one option; a target inside a small house is also convenient because you can close the door to limit its wandering. Position the camera so you can keep the elf and your inventory in view.
Prioritise the Rogue set and success bonuses
Wear the complete five-piece Rogue set. When an enhanced crystal teleport seed drops, that guarantees two seeds. It also doubles eligible ordinary loot, but never the XP. Obtain the set from the Rogues’ Den after reaching 50 Thieving and 50 Agility.
Complete the hard Ardougne Diary for its pickpocket success bonus outside Ardougne. You do not have to wear the cloak. Use a Thieving cape at 99 for the additional success benefit. Elves can still fail at 99 with these upgrades; this is not the no-fail knight routine.
Bring food and spare dodgy necklaces, leaving room for the loot. For fewer stuns, use Shadow Veil alongside the necklace. You need 47 Magic, A Kingdom Divided and the Arceuus spellbook; a lava staff covers the fire and earth runes, leaving cosmic runes to bring. Keep the spell active while pickpocketing.
Clicks and client settings
Make Pickpocket your normal click or tap
Set Pickpocket above Talk-to on your chosen elf. RuneLite and the official mobile app both let you make it the normal click or tap.
RuneLite · Menu Entry Swapper
This plugin is included with RuneLite. Open the plugin configuration sidebar, search for Menu Entry Swapper and turn it on.
- Open its settings. Under NPC Swaps, enable Customizable left- and shift-click.
- Hold Shift and right-click the NPC. Open Swap left-click and choose Pickpocket.
- Release Shift and try one ordinary click. It should pickpocket instead of talking or attacking. Repeat the setup when switching to a different target type if needed.
Official mobile app · Menu Entry Swapper
The mobile app has a built-in menu editor, so you can make Pickpocket the normal tap action there too.
- Long-press the NPC to open its menu, then tap the edit button at the top right.
- Open that NPC’s entries and tap the up arrow beside Pickpocket to put it first.
- Leave the editor and test a normal tap. The top entry is the tap action. Set this up on each device; your RuneLite or other-device swaps do not carry over.
If you still talk, attack or open a menu
Check the selected action with one test click. In RuneLite, make sure you edited the NPC section and Swap left-click, rather than Swap shift-click. Hiding NPC attack options in the game settings removes accidental attacks, but does not move Pickpocket above Talk-to by itself. On mobile, use the NPC’s reset control to undo a bad ordering and set it again. If the edit button is absent, check for an app update; Jagex is investigating cases where it does not appear.
Make the banking loop comfortable
- Pickpocket the elf from a stable camera position. Set Pickpocket as the normal action using the click setup above, then repeat ordinary clicks or taps.
- Keep enough health for further failures. Heal, replace broken necklaces and recast Shadow Veil as needed. Take a moment to reposition if the elf wanders out of reach.
- When the inventory fills or supplies run low, bank the ordinary loot and refill. Keep untradeable crystal shards separate from the items you intend to sell.
- Bank enhanced seeds when they arrive. Check your Rogue equipment if you only receive one, and include banking time when recording your hourly results.
Price the seeds without counting them twice
Prifddinas elves roll an enhanced crystal teleport seed at 1 in 1,024 successful pickpockets. With full Rogue equipment, one winning roll gives two seeds. At 1,024 successes you average two seeds, but still have roughly a 37% chance of seeing none. Doubling the quantity does not shorten the dry-streak odds.
Each success gives 353.3 Thieving XP. The calculator starts at 512 successes per hour, or about 181,000 XP/hr. Adjust it to match your level and equipment: around 90,000 XP across a half-hour trip is roughly 510 successes per hour. Include the time spent banking and healing.
Direct crystal-shard drops are untradeable. Enhanced crystal teleport seeds can instead be exchanged with Amrod for 150 shards each, but a seed exchanged for shards cannot also be counted as a GE sale. This calculator values selling the seeds and leaves untradeable shards out of cash income.
Uses average instant-buy prices for supplies and instant-sell prices for loot, after GE tax. Edit a price to use your own offer.
When to keep the shards instead
On an Iron, shards supply crystal equipment charges and divine potion production. Keeping or exchanging enhanced seeds can therefore be the main purpose of the trip. On a main, compare the seed’s sale value with what you would actually make from those shards after the other ingredients and processing time.
Use Other loot minus supplies in the calculator to include your ordinary drops, food, necklaces and spell costs. Leave it at zero to compare seed value alone. Elves give more frequent rare drops than vyres; compare both at today’s prices and the pace you can keep at each target.