> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.manugames.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Gathering Update That Made Nothing Faster - URL: https://blog.manugames.com/osrs-gathering-efficiencies-september-2026-daeyalt-compost/ - Published: 2026-09-29T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-29T13:59:59.000Z - Description: OSRS shipped another Gathering Efficiencies batch on September 23, and almost nothing in it makes gathering faster. That is the interesting part. - Author: Seth Tideward - Tags: The Deep Dive ## The Deep Dive Jagex shipped another round of what it calls Gathering Efficiencies into Old School RuneScape on September 23\. The batch is short enough to read in one breath, so here it is. The Celestial Ring and Celestial Signet now apply their Mining enhancer to Daeyalt Shards, giving a 1 in 10 chance at double shards on a successful Mining action. Converting shards can hand you noted Daeyalt Essence, with a toggle from Noranna Tytanin deciding whether it arrives noted in your inventory or goes straight to the bank. Ultimate Ironmen always receive it in the inventory and choose only noted or unnoted. Poison Dynamite takes one Nightshade instead of three. Deadfall and Pitfall traps can be built from logs sitting in your Log Basket, with inventory logs spent first. Farming patches on the official client, mobile included, now carry a letter for their compost state, C for compost, U for Ultracompost, S for Supercompost, E for nothing, in a colour you pick in Settings under Activities. And you can light a fire at the Nex bank. That is the batch. Read it again and notice what is not in it. ### Nothing in it makes gathering faster One item touches a rate, and only sideways: a 1 in 10 chance at double Daeyalt Shards is more resource per action, not more actions per hour. Everything else deletes bookkeeping. The Log Basket change is the clearest case. Running Hunter rumours with Deadfall and Pitfall traps meant pulling logs out of the basket before every set. The traps are not faster now. What changed is that you can stock up at a bank once and stop thinking about logs, which in Jagex's own framing means you are no longer racing tree respawns in the middle of doing something else. Poison Dynamite dropping from three Nightshade to one is the same move in different clothes. Nightshade supply was the thing that ended the activity and sent you off to a different one. Cutting the input by two thirds does not make dynamite stronger. It makes the session survive longer without a detour. The compost overlay replaces an Inspect click, and a line of chat box to read, on every patch of every run. A farm run is a lot of patches, and people run them several times a day for years. Farming did not get faster. A recurring act of remembering got deleted. Here is the claim I will defend: in a gathering skill, what drives people off is almost never the duration. It is the number of times the duration gets interrupted. Four hours of Woodcutting is fine. Four hours of Woodcutting that drags you back to the screen for eight seconds every ninety is a different activity, and it is the one people quietly stop doing. Somebody will call this trivial, tinkering at the edges while the real content happens elsewhere. I think that has it backwards. Changes like these move a method between situations. A skiller with a desk job can run something that wants a glance every ninety seconds. They cannot run something that wants a bank trip. Take out the bank trip and the method goes from weekend-only to any Tuesday. That is a content unlock filed under convenience. The line that matters here, and it is an easy one to cross, is that none of this removes a decision. Choosing which patch gets Ultracompost is a decision. Remembering which patch you already composted is bookkeeping. The overlay deletes the second and leaves the first, and by deleting the second it makes the first easier to see. Games that get this wrong do the reverse: they automate the choice and hand you the ledger. ### The compost overlay was a plugin first, and Jagex said so Sitting inside the compost section is a sentence I would put on a wall. Jagex notes that RuneLite plugins already did this, and that players on other clients have now been "brought up to speed." That is not a small thing to write in your own patch notes, and it is not defensive. The third-party client has been this genre's design lab for over a decade. The plugin ecosystem runs the experiments, adoption sorts the winners from the noise, and the base client absorbs whatever survived. A plugin that a large share of the playerbase installs has stopped being an enhancement. It is a missing feature with a volunteer maintainer. The unhealthy version of that relationship is a studio reading a dominant mod as a threat to be designed around. The healthy version is what shipped here: take the idea, build it properly for everyone including mobile, keep the colour picker, and say where it came from. The same posture shows in the Daeyalt change. The April proposal had the Celestial Signet granting an extra shard. What shipped covers the Celestial Ring too, so players who have not upgraded get it as well, and it reuses the double-chance behaviour those items already have everywhere else instead of a bespoke effect invented for one ore. That is a designer picking consistency over the version that read better in a blog post. ### Five months, and Jagex said why The batch was polled in April. It shipped on September 23, and the notes say outright that it ran late because this year's Summer Sweep-Up took priority, and that the rest of it, stackable net traps among them, is still waiting for room in the weekly schedule. I find the admission more interesting than the patch. Quality-of-life work always loses the scheduling fight, because nothing breaks when you skip it. Nobody files a bug that reads "I had to click Inspect twenty times." There is no crash report, no broken economy, no angry thread with a reproduction case. The work gets done only if somebody gives it a name, puts it to a vote, and keeps a public list that makes its absence visible. Naming the batch is most of the reason it exists. ### What I am taking from it I build an idle RPG called Tideward, so I have a stake in this and you should weigh what I say accordingly. What I took out of the September 23 notes was an audit I had not been running. XP per hour is easy to measure, so everybody measures it. The harder number is how many times an hour a game pulls a player back to the screen for something that is not a decision. That second number decides whether a piece of content gets played at a desk on a Tuesday or saved for a weekend that never arrives. Jagex spent a poll, five months and a scheduling fight on that number, and shipped a batch whose headline item is one fewer Nightshade. I think they spent it correctly. If you are running rumours this week, fill the Log Basket before you leave the bank. That is the whole patch, and it is a good one. [The September 23 changelog](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Update:Further%5FGathering%5FEfficiencies?ref=blog.manugames.com) | [Jagex on the April poll and the delay](https://steamcommunity.com/games/1343370/announcements/detail/1842846814455270?ref=blog.manugames.com) | [Summer Sweep-Up, the final batch](https://steamcommunity.com/games/1343370/announcements/detail/1844115010488611?ref=blog.manugames.com) P.S. Tideward is up for pre-order on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Free to download, one $9.99 unlock. It launches February 11, 2027, and you can [pre-order it now](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tideward/id6765781814?ref=blog.manugames.com). --- *The Assembly Line is a free twice-weekly newsletter on factory builders and idle games. Read on the web at* [*blog.manugames.com*](https://blog.manugames.com/)*. Brought to you by Manu Games, makers of Tideward, a premium idle RPG for iPhone, iPad & Mac.*