The biggest Quality-of-Life upgrade that crafting provides is the ability to create Item Bags. These bags allow you to hold multiple of an unstackable item in a single slot in your inventory. They are however a huge drain on Cloth, so always consider the cost of building a bag.
| PICTURE | ITEM NAME | LEVELS REQUIRED | MATERIALS |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
Item bag | 1 Crafting |
3 Blue Cloth, 3 Thread, 1 Drawstring |
When first created the Item Bag only has one slot and one charge. This is improved by adding more cloth to increase the size, and to repair it - adding more charges to it.
| Cloth Tier | Max Size | Charges added
(Repair) |
LVL Req. | EXP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue | 10 | 10 | 1 | |
| Green | 25 | 25 | 10 | |
| Purple | 50 | 50 | 20 | |
| Burgundy | 100 | 100 | 30 | |
| Red | 200 | 200 | 40 |
As you can see - Bags get more expensive the bigger they get. Therefore it is worth considering whether a smaller bag (or two!) with more charges is more beneficial than a single larger bag. For example, it takes a total of 12 Blue Cloth and 15 Green Cloth to make a single 25 slot bag, for a total cost of 495 charges worth of cloth. A 50 slot bag requires an additional 1250 charges worth of Purple Cloth, and to get to 100 slots you are spending an additional 5000 charges worth of Burgundy Cloth!
It is not recommended to use red cloth to repair or increase a bag, as it is currently very hard to obtain.
Bag Recommendations
Smithing
Smithing sees the greatest improvement with the introduction of bags. A clever selection of bags will greatly increase your smithing rates by decreasing the number of trips to a bag. It is however quite a cloth heavy skill to optimise so consider the size of your bags, and whether or not it is worth it for lower level ores. Coal bags are probably the single greatest investment you can make as it is used all the way from level 20 smithing on. Other ores are more debatable, but as you can afford them they are well worth it.
Iron Ore: 25 Slots is fine, meaning you can smith a full inventory of bars each trip.
Coal: A total of 185 Slots seems to be the perfect amount for late game smithing, however you could start with a 50 slot bag, and build up from there as you move through the tiers of bar.
Nelenite: A 25 slot bag, along with a 50 slot coal bag will allow you to smith 25 bars per trip.
Gothite: This is the first time you could consider making a bar bag. With a 25 slot bar bag, a 76 slot Gothite ore bag and a 100 slot coal bag, you could make 50 bars per trip. Otherwise stop at 25 slots , as per Nelenite.
Osmium: This will be your best source of smithing experience, therefore it is well worth building a bar bag. A good setup is a 50 slot bar bag, a 100 slot ore bag, and a total of 185 slots in coal mean you can make around 62 bars per trip.
Crafting
Clay bags are extremely useful for training crafting. Consider making multiple 100 slot bags as not only is crafting a useful skill to train, but the pots are used to train magic and alchemy.
Having a small Flax bag can be useful to make drawstrings, however as your crafting level increases, your need for flax decreases, so 50 slots is plenty.
Cloth Bags are a great quality of life for both thieving, melee combat and crafting, as it not only speeds up your building and repairing of bags, but it allows you to spend longer thieving or killing monsters before having to bank your cloth. Blue Cloth bags in combination with pickpocketting men can provide a huge source of Blue Cloth for cheap bag repairs.
Cooking
Cooking is similar to smithing, where it is a great quality of life upgrade, but you should definitely consider how long each bag will be useful, starting with only 25 slot bags for Herring, Mullet, and Boxfish, before making bigger bags for Rockfish and Starslugs. It is also not recommended to build bags for cooked fish until Rockfish, as lower tier food is not often very useful, therefore it is more economical to let the fish drop to the ground. However, Starslug bags are extremely useful, not only to recover the cooked fish for banking, but as a container of food for high level content such as bossing or the obelisk.
Firemaking
Also similar to cooking. Lower level bags provide a moderate quality of life boost to training, but even less so as firemaking is usually trained right next to a banker! I would still recommend making a moderately sized king maple log bag, and a 100 slot Magic log bag, as these can also be used for other skills.
Gathering Skills:
It can be worth building bags for tools if the resource nodes you are camping are far away from a bank. For example, Gothite, Osmium, King Maple and Magic Lumber is all found on the island - therefore having a 10 or 25 slot tool bag to help with building camps can greatly extend your trips. Copper Pickaxe bags are also useful as the camps last for such a short time that having the picks in bags mean you can build more camps at once.