Prayer on an ironman is a bone problem. A main buys bones on the Grand Exchange. You kill every one of those dragons yourself, so the multiplier you put each bone through matters more than the XP per hour of the method. A bone buried for 72 XP is a bone you could have turned into 348 or 504.
This guide follows the OSRS Wiki's Ironman Guide for Prayer and its Pay-to-play Prayer training page, checked as of 22 October 2026. It adds where each input comes from, what each altar costs you to set up, and which unlocks matter.
The three rules of ironman Prayer
- Quest to 37 first. Nine quests give enough XP for 37 Prayer without a single bone.
- Never bury a bone you could carry. Bank them all for a multiplier, and let a bonecrusher or ash sanctifier handle the drops not worth picking up.
- Pick your altar by account type, not XP per hour. The Chaos Altar doubles your bones but is in the Wilderness. The wiki steers hardcores to the Ectofuntus; the libation bowl is the other option outside the Wilderness.
Levels 1-37: Quests
The wiki's ironman guide lists nine quests that together give enough Prayer XP for level 37. The first four alone (The Restless Ghost, Priest in Peril, Recruitment Drive and Holy Grail) take you from 1 to 30.
| Quest | Prayer XP | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| The Restless Ghost | 1,125 | None |
| Priest in Peril | 1,406 | None |
| Holy Grail | 11,000 | 20 Attack, Merlin's Crystal |
| Recruitment Drive | 1,000.5 | Druidic Ritual, Black Knights' Fortress |
| Rag and Bone Man I | 500 | None |
| Ghosts Ahoy | 2,400 | 25 Agility, 20 Cooking, Priest in Peril, The Restless Ghost |
| Making History | 1,000 | Priest in Peril, The Restless Ghost started |
| Spirits of the Elid | 8,000 | 33 Magic, 37 Ranged, 37 Mining, 37 Thieving |
| Another Slice of H.A.M. | 3,000 | 15 Attack, 25 Prayer |
Holy Grail is the big one: 11,000 XP for 20 Attack and Merlin's Crystal. Another Slice of H.A.M. needs 25 Prayer, so do it after the others. Priest in Peril also opens Morytania, which you need for the Ectofuntus.
Later quests and miniquests that reward Prayer XP, from the wiki's quest table:
| Quest | Prayer XP | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Mountain Daughter | 2,000 | 20 Agility |
| Rag and Bone Man II | 5,000 | 40 Slayer, 20 Defence |
| The Great Brain Robbery | 6,000 | 50 Prayer, 16 Crafting, 30 Construction |
| Rum Deal | 7,000 | 47 Prayer, 42 Crafting, 50 Fishing, 40 Farming, 42 Slayer |
| Swan Song | 10,000 | 100 quest points, 66 Magic, 62 Cooking, 62 Fishing, 45 Smithing, 42 Firemaking, 40 Crafting |
| His Faithful Servants (miniquest) | 20,000 | Priest in Peril; kill all six Barrows brothers and loot the chest |
| Hopespear's Will (miniquest) | 38,750 | 50 Prayer (unboostable), Desert Treasure I, Fairytale II, Land of the Goblins |
His Faithful Servants is the easy win once you are doing Barrows anyway: one full run, a 20,000 XP lamp and a crypt map that reveals the minimap in the tunnels. Leave six inventory slots free before you loot the chest, because the strange icon will not drop to the floor. The quest order slots these in where their other requirements fit.
Prayer Unlocks and Milestones
Prayer levels that matter
- 31 PrayerEdgeville Monastery: monk robes, holy symbol blessing
- 43 PrayerProtect from Melee (Magic 37, Missiles 40)
- 45 PrayerEagle Eye 44, Mystic Might 45
- 60 PrayerChivalry after Knight Waves
- 63 PrayerDeadeye 62 and Mystic Vigour 63 (Royal Titans scrolls)
- 70 PrayerPiety, superior dragon bones, dragonbone necklace
- 74 PrayerRigour (dexterous prayer scroll)
- 77 PrayerAugury (arcane prayer scroll)
- 84 PrayerZeal (Horn of Bran)
- 85 PrayerElite Desert Diary
Connect your account in the header to auto-check these requirements.
43 is the first wall. Protect from Magic (37), Missiles (40) and Melee (43) are what most quests recommend, and Protect from Melee is what makes early Slayer and bossing workable. Eagle Eye (44) and Mystic Might (45) follow straight after.
Piety (70) needs more than Prayer. You must finish King's Ransom (45 Magic and 65 Defence, both unboostable, plus Black Knights' Fortress, Holy Grail, Murder Mystery and One Small Favour) and then the Knight Waves Training Ground: eight knights over level 100, melee only, no prayers. That also unlocks Chivalry (60 Prayer, 65 Defence). Piety itself needs 70 Prayer and 70 Defence. The wiki lists Knight Waves as a safe death for hardcore ironmen, but not for hardcore group ironmen. Piety also gates the bonecrusher, because the hard Morytania Diary asks you to pray at the Altar of Nature with Piety active.
Deadeye (62) and Mystic Vigour (63) come from untradeable scrolls dropped by the Royal Titans in the Asgarnian Ice Dungeon: the deadeye prayer scroll from Eldric the Ice King and the mystic vigour scroll from Branda the Fire Queen, each at 1/75. They permanently replace Eagle Eye and Mystic Might. For an iron who will not see Rigour or Augury for a long time, these are the realistic ranged and magic prayer upgrades.
Rigour (74) and Augury (77) both need 70 Defence and a prayer scroll from the Chambers of Xeric: dexterous for Rigour, arcane for Augury. Preserve (55) uses the torn prayer scroll from the same raid.
Rigour and Augury are raid drops for you
A main buys the scrolls. You roll them in your own Chambers of Xeric runs. The August 2026 Summer Sweep-Up cut each scroll from a weight of 20 out of 69 to 14 out of 60 on the normal-mode unique table (12 out of 56 in Challenge Mode), so the ancestral pieces became more common and the scrolls less so. The two scrolls are still 28 of the 60 weight between them, so plan your ranged and magic prayer progression around Deadeye and Mystic Vigour until they land. The drop calculator shows how dry you are.
Zeal (84) was added with the Fractured Archive on 20 October 2026. It needs 84 Prayer, 75 Attack and 75 Strength and gives +25% Attack, +28% Strength and +25% Defence, against Piety's 20%, 23% and 25%. You unlock it by taking the Horn of Bran, a tradeable Fractured Archive reward, to Camelot Castle, where a cutscene with King Arthur replaces Piety with Zeal. The raid is gated behind While Guthix Sleeps, so this is endgame.
85 is the last Prayer requirement for any Achievement Diary (the elite Desert Diary).
The Altars Compared
Every method below multiplies the XP you would get from burying. The wiki's ironman guide lists the first five as its main options.
| Method | XP per bone | Requirements | Ironman catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chaos Altar | 350% per offering, 50% chance to keep the bone: about 700% on average | Members; level 38 Wilderness | PKers, multi-combat; dangerous death |
| Libation bowl | 399-500% with blessed wine, 479-600% with blessed sunfire wine | Children of the Sun, 30 Prayer | You bless and chisel every bone; jugs of wine and sunfire splinters |
| Ectofuntus | 400% | Priest in Peril; the ectophial from Ghosts Ahoy helps | Slow: grind bones, fill slime, worship |
| Gilded altar | 250%, 300% with one incense burner lit, 350% with both | 75 Construction (boostable), 45 for the chapel | About 1.2m coins of marble and gold leaf; marrentill for the burners |
| Offering spells | 300% | A Kingdom Divided; 84 or 92 Magic | Wrath runes need 95 Runecraft |
| Sacred Bone Burner | 300% | Forthos Dungeon; raise its faith level first | Long walk; mainly for the red dragons beside it |
XP per bone at each altar
All numbers are the wiki's per-bone figures. The Chaos Altar column is the average per bone consumed.
| Bone | Bury | Gilded (2 burners) | Ectofuntus | Libation (blessed wine) | Libation (sunfire wine) | Chaos Altar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Big bones | 15 | 52.5 | 60 | 60 | 72 | 105 |
| Babydragon bones | 30 | 105 | 120 | 120 | 144 | 210 |
| Wyrm bones | 50 | 175 | 200 | 210 | 252 | 350 |
| Dragon bones | 72 | 252 | 288 | 290 | 348 | 504 |
| Wyvern bones | 72 | 252 | 288 | 290 | 348 | 504 |
| Drake bones | 80 | 280 | 320 | 335 | 402 | 560 |
| Lava dragon bones | 85 | 297.5 | 340 | 340 | 408 | 595 |
| Frost dragon bones | 100 | 350 | 400 | 420 | 504 | 700 |
| Hydra bones | 110 | 385 | 440 | 465 | 558 | 770 |
| Dagannoth bones | 125 | 437.5 | 500 | 500 | 600 | 875 |
| Superior dragon bones | 150 | 525 | 600 | 605 | 726 | 1,050 |
Read the table as a ranking. For any bone, the Chaos Altar is roughly double the gilded altar, the libation bowl with sunfire wine beats both the Ectofuntus and the gilded altar, and plain blessed wine is about level with the Ectofuntus. Superior dragon bones need 70 Prayer (unboostable) to use at all. Lava dragon bones give 340 XP when buried on Lava Dragon Isle, which is also in the Wilderness.
Chaos Altar (Wilderness)
The Chaos Temple in level 38 Wilderness, west of the Lava Maze, holds a Chaos Altar that gives 3.5x XP per offering, the same as a gilded altar with both burners. Every offering also has a 50% chance not to consume the bone, and that can trigger on the same bone again, which is why the average works out to 7x burying XP. The altar also recharges your Prayer, so you can keep Protect from Magic up.
Getting there: a burning amulet to the Lava Maze entrance (no requirements, but often camped), Cemetery Teleport on the Arceuus spellbook (71 Magic) and run north, Ghorrock Teleport (96 Magic, Ancient Magicks) and run south, or an Ancient Obelisk in your house with the hard Wilderness Diary.
The two ways to run it:
- Suicide runs. Bring one inventory of unnoted bones, offer them, then lower your Hitpoints and die to the wine of Zamorak on the table or to the Chaos Fanatic to the north. Self-damage items such as a locator orb, dwarven rock cake or enchanted symbol speed this up. The wiki estimates up to about 2,000 bones offered per hour, roughly 500,000 XP per hour with dragon bones.
- Noted bones. The Elder Chaos druid outside the south wall unnotes any bones for 50 coins each. This is faster (up to about 860,000 XP per hour with dragon bones) but you carry the whole stack into a PK hotspot.
Hardcore ironmen: this is a dangerous death
The wiki marks Chaos Altar training as a dangerous activity: hardcore ironmen lose their status on death, and unprotected items are lost to the player who kills you. The temple is a multi-combat area that the wiki says is frequently targeted by player killers. The wiki's ironman guide recommends that hardcores use the Ectofuntus instead. The libation bowl is the other option outside the Wilderness. See the HCIM guide.
Libation bowl (Ralos' Rise, Varlamore)
The libation bowl is in the northern building of the Teomat, with the exposed altar at the summit of Ralos' Rise just to the south. It needs Children of the Sun and 30 Prayer, and the wiki's gilded altar page names it as the ironman alternative to the Chaos Altar. The process:
- Have Virilis at the bottom of the altar unnote your bones for 10 coins each.
- Bless them at the exposed altar, then break them down with a chisel into blessed bone shards. Dragon and wyvern bones give 58 shards each, superior dragon bones 121, dagannoth bones 100, hydra bones 93. Sun-kissed bones (45 shards) skip the blessing step.
- Bless jugs of wine at the same altar. For 20% more XP, first use two sunfire splinters on each jug of wine (with a pestle and mortar in your inventory) to make jugs of sunfire wine, then bless those.
- Fill the bowl and sacrifice. Each shard gives 5 XP with blessed wine or 6 with blessed sunfire wine. One jug covers 400 shards, each sacrifice uses up to 100 shards and drains 2 Prayer points, and the Shrine of Ralos in the southern building recharges you.
Blessed wine cannot be banked, so only bless as many jugs as you have shards for.
Libation bowl trip (wiki inventory)
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FillPlus a stack of sunfire splinters. The wiki's setup: make sunfire wine on the run from the quetzal to the exposed altar, bless it, sacrifice, recharge Prayer at the Shrine of Ralos, then teleport out to bank.
Rates. With shards already in hand, the wiki estimates about 1,050,000 XP per hour with blessed wine and 1,124,000 with sunfire wine at 62-86 Prayer. If you are breaking down your own dragon bones, the wiki says the all-in rate is about half that. Either way it is the best XP per bone you can get outside the Wilderness.
Supplies an ironman has to make:
- Jugs of wine. Make them with grapes and a jug of water at 35 Cooking (they stop failing at 68, and each gives 200 Cooking XP). The Culinaromancer's Chest sells both jugs and grapes and has a sink nearby. Or buy them: Sunlight's Sanctum in Aldarin sells jugs of wine in unlimited stock, and the Deepfin Inn does too at 67 Sailing.
- Sunfire splinters come from the Fortis Colosseum, hunting sunlight antelope, the Hueycoatl and the moon key chest. Each splinter is worth an extra 200 Prayer XP, so every splinter you do not spend on Dizana's quiver or sunfire runes belongs here.
- Shards without bones. Calcified rocks in the Cam Torum mine (41 Mining, Perilous Moons started) bank about 11,000 to 13,200 Prayer XP per hour as shards while you train Mining. Hunters' Rumours, the Colossal Wyrm Agility Course, the Lunar Chest and blessed bone statuettes from stealing valuables all add more.
Ectofuntus (Port Phasmatys)
The Ectofuntus gives 4x XP per bone. Grind each bone into bonemeal at the bone grinder upstairs, fill buckets of slime in the basement, then worship with one bonemeal and one bucket of slime per offering. Talk to a ghost disciple with a ghostspeak amulet or Morytania legs 2 or better to collect 5 ecto-tokens per worship, which you will want later for the bonecrusher. The wiki estimates around 180 worships per hour.
It is slow but cheap and outside the Wilderness, and the wiki's ironman guide recommends it to hardcores over the Chaos Altar. Ways to speed it up:
- The ectophial from Ghosts Ahoy teleports you back to the fountain.
- 58 Agility opens the weathered wall shortcut to the pool of slime.
- Trader Crewmembers on the Port Phasmatys dock sell buckets of slime for 2 coins each, so you can skip the basement.
- Robin in the Port Phasmatys pub converts 13, 26 or 39 bones a day into bonemeal and slime after the medium, hard or elite Morytania Diary. With dragon bones that is 4,000, 8,000 or 12,000 free XP a day and 65 to 195 ecto-tokens for the bonecrusher.
Gilded altar (POH)
The gilded altar gives 250% with no incense burners lit, 300% with one and 350% with both. Building it needs 75 Construction (boostable; the wiki notes 69 plus a crystal saw and a cup of tea works), a chapel (45 Construction), 2 marble blocks, 2 bolts of cloth and 4 gold leaf. Lighting the burners needs 30 Firemaking and a marrentill each.
For an ironman the materials are the wall. Marble blocks (325,000 coins) and gold leaf (130,000 coins) come from the Keldagrim Stonemason or Stonecutter Supplies at the Stonecutter Outpost, and both shops raise the price as you buy. The wiki's gilded altar page is blunt: because of the high cost, high Construction requirement and little benefit over more accessible methods, it advises ironmen to use the Chaos Altar or the libation bowl instead. Ironmen also cannot use anyone else's house altar.
Group ironmen: share one altar
The one exception: ironmen can visit the house of a player in their own Group Ironman group. One groupmate with 75 Construction can host a gilded altar for everyone. More in the GIM guide and the Construction guide.
Offering spells and the Sacred Bone Burner
After A Kingdom Divided, the Arceuus spellbook has two spells that offer remains straight from your inventory for 3x XP, with no banking. Sinister Offering (92 Magic, a blood rune and a wrath rune) offers three bones per cast. Demonic Offering (84 Magic, a soul rune and a wrath rune) does the same for demonic ashes. The wiki notes wrath runes need 95 Runecraft, so this is not an early method.
The Sacred Bone Burner in the Forthos Dungeon also gives 300% for bones or demonic ashes, but only once its faith level is high enough. You reach the crypt with a temple coin (from the Shaeded Beast, or five dragonstones given to Olbertus). The first 100 dragon bones give no XP unless you placated Olbertus with the dragonstones. Its only real use is burning the bones from the red dragons next to it.
