RuneScape/Skills/Thieving

Thieving is a fast but not so secure way to make money. Thieving, as its name says, is about stealing from people and chests. It also involves picking the locks on doors, stealing from stalls and disarming traps placed in chests.

Three Ways to Steal
There are three forms of thieving. The most basic form, and the only one available at first, is pickpocketing. Click on an NPC (such as a common man or woman) and click "Pickpocket"; you can either be successful pickpocketing or the person who are you stealing will turn back and stun you for a few seconds. If you are successful, you will gain spare change, or at higher levels, items or runes.

The second form of thieving is stealing from market stalls. When stealing from stalls you must protect yourself from the person guarding the stall, but you will gain experience easily. There are many stalls in different places, such as seeds stalls in Draynor village and Fur stalls in Ardougne. To steal from stalls, you must reach the minimum level of 5 for the bakery stall.

The third use for thieving is in door-opening. Some doors and chests have locks that require a certain thieving level and a lockpick to do (Lockpick is for doors only), once the player has broken the lock they gain access to the loot inside, be that nature runes, cash or a quest item.

Requirement and Tactics
Food is pretty much a requirement for this skill as being stunned by an NPC (non-player-character) that you are stealing from results in a set amount of damage being inflicted on your character, though it helps if you are standing either behind them or to the side, standing in front is a bad idea and a waste of food. Likewise stealing from market stalls can sometimes result in a full blown fight with a specific NPC enemy from guards to Paladins, depending on the stall in question although these fights you run away from.

Once you've gotten into this skill however it is very easy to level up quickly without incurring any costs as many experienced thieves will steal from the cake stalls in Ardgoune before moving onto a higher leveled target. This eliminates the need to prepare food for training.