Wishing well fruit

Wishing well fruit was removed after an update. The contents of this page no longer exist in RuneScape, and this article is kept for historical purposes.

Wishing well fruit
Release	20 May 2013 (Update)
Removal	8 April 2019 (Update)
Members	Yes
Quest item	No
Properties
Tradeable	No
Bankable	No
Stacks in bank	No
Equipable	No
Stackable	No
Disassembly	No
Destroy	Grow another wishing well bush to get another fruit.
Values
Value	1 coin
Alchemy	Not alchemisable
On death	Always lost
Weight	2.267 kg
Examine
A large fruit bursting with ripe goodies.
Advanced data
Item ID	28311
Links	MRID • recipe
FAQ • doc

Item JSON: {"edible":"no","id":"28311","stackable":"no","removal_date":"8 April 2019","death":"never","name":"Wishing well fruit","bankable":"no","gemw":false,"equipable":"no","members":"yes","disassembly":"no","release_update_post":"Harvest Heaven: High-Level Farming","release_date":"20 May 2013","lendable":"no","destroy":"Grow another wishing well bush to get another fruit.","stacksinbank":"no","removal_update_post":"Miniquest List!","highalch":false,"weight":2.267,"lowalch":false,"tradeable":"no","examine":"A large fruit bursting with ripe goodies.","noteable":"no"}

The wishing well fruit was produced after depositing a certain amount of coins to a wishing well bush plant when it was fully grown. Opening it would yield items that could surpass the value of the amount of coins deposited, although there was a chance that they wouldn't. On 8 April 2019 the fruit was made unobtainable, and all existing fruit were refunded.

In order to open the fruit, 9 free inventory spaces were needed. The fruit could not be banked. After opening the fruit, the player would receive the message "You open the fruit and receive bounteous goods." When opening a wishing well fruit, you also had a chance of receiving a Crystal triskelion fragment. When you did, the chat box read: "In addition, you receive a part of a crystal key." Estimation based on a data sample of 503 harvests has shown this chance to be around 0.6%.

On average, harvesting wishing well bushes resulted in a loss. See the value analysis section for details.

Issues and removal

Initial issues

The value of the reward generated by the fruit was calculated out of the amount paid to harvest the fruit (which scaled to total level of the harvester, with the reward scaling between 25% and 300% of the calculated price). The quantity of the awarded items was based on the Grand Exchange value of the item. This led to an unsustainable negative feedback loop on the price for several of the possible rewards. The primary victim of this were seeds, as the other items had enough other uses that wishing well fruit alone were not enough to damage the price.

From release, this began happening to the other Harvest Heaven seeds that the well gave - barberry seed, prickly pear seed, fly trap seed, and sunchoke seed were possible rewards. Due to the low usage of these seeds, wishing well fruit gave too many of them, causing the price of them to drop. As wishing well fruit quantities were awarded based on GE value, wells gave more of the seeds, which made the price drop even more, and so on. The seeds rapidly crashed from their introductory prices to 1 coin each, so wishing wells regularly awarded hundreds of thousands of them.

To combat this, shortly after release the value of the awarded seeds were reduced to 1. On 27 April 2015 the quantities of the seeds awarded were capped at 100 per fruit.

Later issues

This issue happened once again later, this time to calquat tree seeds. The seeds began declining in earnest in mid-2016 and eventually reached below 10 coins each in February 2019. These seeds were not recognised as a problem as early as previous seeds, meaning that the value of the seed was left as-is, allowing players to sell the seed to general stores for 104 coins each - an easy massive profit when hundreds of thousands of seeds could be obtained from the fruit for under a million coins.

The response to this was to disable the ability to open wishing well fruit on 7 March 2019.

Removal

Wishing well seeds, bushes, and fruit were removed from the game on 8 April 2019.

“	Due to the way in which the mechanics of the Wishing Well worked, it rapidly devalued the materials in which it was producing which had a negative feedback loop on the price of the items. The more items you got from the fruit, the cheaper they become which meant that you would get more of them. This was unsustainable and caused economy issues like being able to sell items from the fruit for more than the value assigned from the fruit. The market was flooded with those items and it caused a lot of critical design and balancing issues. Removing the Wishing Well seeds, which only held a value of 1gp, and the crop itself was the best solution to this - we may revisit mechanics like this in the future but that isn't a promise.	”
— 8 April 2019 patch notes

Upon login following the update:

• Existing wishing well seeds were replaced with 1 coin each (the GE value at the time).
• Existing bushes were removed from patches and 220 Farming experience awarded. The login message stated incorrectly that 2,200 experience would be awarded, and referenced incorrect patch locations.
• Existing fruit were fully refunded the amount paid for them.

As of the removal, most of the affected seeds had barely recovered to 7-10 coins each despite the earlier countermeasures.

Historical value

Calculator

template = Template:Wishing well bush calc
form = ppf
result = ppr
param = 1|Total Level|0|int|35-2736

Wishing well fruit calculator
Calculator failed to load.
Result
Cost: 0 coins. Reward: 0 coins.

Analysis

A fully grown wishing well bush

The total value of the items received from opening a wishing well fruit is based on the amount of coins paid to harvest the fruit. The value is expressed as a percentage of this input, where a percentage of 100% implies breaking even. The Jagex wiki lists that the value returned will be random between 25% and 300%. The remainder of this section is based on the data of 503 wishing well bush harvests, and does not take into account the cost of obtaining the seeds.

The return percentage is one of 7 possible percentages, albeit with a minor variation of up to ±2000 coins. These percentages, and the probability with which they are received, can be found in the following table:

25%	55%	80%	100%	110%	140%	300%
3.38%	16.3%	21.67%	32.01%	15.31%	7.36%	3.98%

This data allows us to calculate the expected return percentage on average over time, which is 98.23%.
On average, harvesting wishing well bushes will result in a loss.

Former drops

Concept art of the wishing well fruit

Bottom rewards

Cowhide

Soft clay

Maple logs

Feather

Big bones

Flax

Fire rune

Air rune

Water rune

Earth rune

Pure essence

Uncut sapphire

Uncut emerald

Coal

Iron ore

Mithril ore

Raw salmon

Raw lobster

Supercompost

Medium rewards

Gold ore

Steel bar

Mithril bar

Adamant bar

Nature rune

Law rune

Death rune

Blood rune

Uncut ruby

Uncut diamond

Rune arrow

Runite bolts

Raw swordfish

Raw monkfish

Raw shark

Molten glass

Water talisman

Maple seed

Water orb

Wine of Zamorak

Oak plank

Teak plank

Yew logs

Magic logs

Sunchoke seed

Barberry seed

Prickly pear seed

Fly trap seed

High rewards

Dwarf weed seed

Lantadyme seed

Yew seed

Magic seed

Papaya tree seed

Palm tree seed

Calquat tree seed

Wishing well bush seed

Runite ore

Rune bar

Uncut dragonstone

Dragon bones

Update history

The update history project is a work-in-progress – not all updates to this topic may be covered below. See here for how to help out!

• patch 27 April 2015 (Update):
  • Wishing well fruits have been rebalanced to prevent players from receiving excessive amounts of low-priced seeds.

• update 20 May 2013 (Update):
  • Added to game.