What a shooting star is
Every so often a star crashes somewhere in Gielinor. It becomes a rock that any player who meets the Mining requirement can mine, and it rewards stardust alongside normal Mining experience. It is not an instanced resource — everyone mining the same star wears down the same star, which is why the useful question is never just where but how much is left.
A star's location cannot be looked up in advance, so the only practical way to find one is for a player standing at it to tell everyone else — which is what a tracker is.
When and where stars land
- One lands roughly every 90 minutes on each world, give or take about 15 minutes.
- Only one star is active per world at a time. If a new one lands before the old one is finished, the old one disappears.
- A star will not land in the same place twice in a row, so the spot that just ran dry is the one place you can rule out.
- Landing sites are a fixed, known set spread across both free-to-play and members areas — including the Wilderness, which is worth checking before you travel.
This site lists 78 landing sites with travel notes, each with the fastest way to reach it.
Star sizes and the Mining level you need
A star has a size — also called its tier — from 9 down to 1. The size is both how much star is left and how high your Mining level has to be to touch it. The rule is simple: size × 10.
| Size | Mining level | Chance of landing at this size |
|---|---|---|
| T9 | 90 | 20% |
| T8 | 80 | 25% |
| T7 | 70 | 30% |
| T6 | 60 | 25% |
| T5 | 50 | — |
| T4 | 40 | — |
| T3 | 30 | — |
| T2 | 20 | — |
| T1 | 10 | — |
Stars only ever arrive at size 6 to 9. The smaller sizes are what a star becomes on the way down, so a T3 on a tracker is not a small star that landed — it is a large one that has already been mined for half an hour.
How a star is mined down
Each layer takes a fixed 7 minutes to deplete, as long as at least one player is mining it. When a layer runs out the star drops to the next size down, and everyone now below that Mining level is locked out. When the last layer goes, the star crumbles and is gone.
So a star's total remaining life is roughly its size × 7 minutes — a fresh T9 is about an hour, a T3 about twenty minutes. And because the clock only runs while somebody is mining, a star nobody has found has not decayed at all.
Stardust, experience and what it buys
Mining a star rolls for stardust regularly, at a rate that scales with your Mining level — from about 29% at level 1 to 46% at 99. Each success gives 32 Mining experience (32.8 with the full prospector kit). At 90+ Mining with a dragon pickaxe, a solid session runs to roughly 30,000 experience an hour.
The first player to mine a newly landed star earns double stardust for their next 300 — a real incentive to be the one who finds it rather than the one who reads about it. Experience is not doubled. Free-to-play players get half the Mining experience and cannot use the reward shop at all.
Stardust is spent at Dusuri's Star Shop, by the Mining Guild in Falador:
| Reward | Stardust |
|---|---|
| Star fragment | 3,000 |
| Celestial ring | 2,000 |
| Bag full of gems | 300 |
| Soft clay pack | 150 |
Finding a star
There are three ways, and most players use more than one:
- A telescopein the study of a player-owned house predicts the rough area and time of the next landing on your world. Better wood narrows the window: oak gives about 24 minutes, teak about 9, mahogany about 2. You can use someone else's house telescope too.
- The Shooting Stars grouping chat, joined from the grouping menu in game, where players share what they have found.
- A crowdsourced tracker — this site, and the Star Miners RuneLite plugin behind it. Players standing at a star report it, and everyone else sees the world, the size and the location immediately.
A telescope tells you about your world. A tracker tells you about all of them at once, which is usually the faster route to a high-tier star.
How this tracker estimates size and time left
Worth knowing, because the numbers on the live map are estimates and the honest thing is to say how they are made.
The feed reports the size a star was when a player called it, and does not revise that as the star decays. A T8 called nineteen minutes ago is realistically a T6 by now. So this site ages every sighting forward at 7 minutes per size and shows the result, rather than repeating a number that has gone stale — otherwise a decayed high tier would outrank a freshly called low one sitting next to it.
Both the size and the time left are lower bounds, not measurements. The 7-minute rule assumes somebody has been mining continuously, and a star nobody has touched has not decayed at all. The error therefore runs one way: the estimate undersells the star. For deciding whether to travel, that is the safe direction to be wrong in.
Sightings older than 10minutes are flagged as unconfirmed. The plugin re-calls a star while a player is stood at it, so a call that has gone quiet is weak evidence that nobody is there — in which case the star has not decayed and the estimate is marking it down too far. "Unconfirmed" is a more honest signal than a more confident number would be.
Sources
Game mechanics on this page are summarised from the OSRS Wiki's Shooting Stars article, which is the place to go for the full detail. Live sightings come from the Star Miners community feed. The estimates described above are this site's own.