What is 3-ticking in OSRS?

3-ticking refers to a plethora of skilling methods involving tick manipulation through the OSRS engine, in which player invokes the tick system(every 0.6 seconds in real time is a tick in game, in which an action is set to be complete) to perform actions in an optimized way to maximize their XP gains or gain another advantage (such as no prayer points being drained, another common tick manipulation)

Even though Jagex has stated that tick manipulation is a ‘’glitch’’, they consider it fair to use due to an extra effort involved by the players.

Which skills are useful to learn tick manipulation for?

The most common skills which utilize tick manipulation are:

Fishing (via Barbarian Fishing)
Hunter (via Chinchompas)
Mining (via Sandstone)

Other commonly applied tick manipulations to skilling that are technically not 3 tick, yet still extremely useful

2 tick Woodcutting (via Teak logs)
2 tick Cooking (karambwans)

How do I 3-tick in OSRS?

You will need a swamp tar, a low level herb (guam leaf or harralander) and a pestle and mortar. Herb sack is useful but not required.

Barbarian fishing and fly fishing are both a 5-tick action, meaning that every five ticks your character will attempt to catch a fish if you have the rod in the water already. However, at the same time, every time you throw the rod in the water, same exact attempt to catch a fish will register in the game. With this information in mind, and the required items in your inventory, you can start fishing, followed by using swamp tar on a clean herb, and then throwing the rod in the water again, which in total is a 3 tick action, thus increasing your XP/HR by up to 40%.

Below is a table of Barbarian fishing XP per hour when using tick manipulation and when not.