Rocktail are fish found in the Living Rock Caverns. Rocktail require a minimum Fishing level of 90, a fishing rod and living minerals as bait to fish, and give 380 experience per catch. They require a Cooking level of 93 to cook and stop burning at level 94 only if wearing cooking gauntlets. They give 225 cooking experience per fish (228 when a dwarven army axe is wielded after some completion of some Burthorpe/Taverley tasks), which means 276k experience per hour, or, with Dwarven army axe and Decorated Cooking Urns, 370k experience per hour. Cooking one inventory of rocktail, as with any food cooked in the same way, takes about 80 seconds.
Rocktail heal 230 life points and can heal players up to 100 life points higher than their maximum life points. This makes it the 6th best single-bite food in the game (outside of Daemonheim) behind tiger sharks (250 with a life point boost) kebab (possibly 300, although this is very rare), baron shark (300), juju gumbo (320) and drinking a poison chalice (up to 490, but may damage players for up to 600). Eating raw rocktail using the bunyip's swallow Whole scroll currently does not boost life points above the maximum. The effect does not stack with thermal bath at the Spa, Saradomin brews, or tiger sharks.
The bait needed to catch rocktail is called living minerals, which can be obtained by killing and then mining (73 Mining required) living rock creatures within the Living Rock Caverns, or by buying from the Grand Exchange or other players.
It is not very hard to fish these in the Living Rock Caverns, as a bank deposit is fairly close and attacks from living rock creatures can be easily evaded. To reduce the chance of death, use worlds 84, 77 or 114 as these are the unofficial Living Rock Cavern worlds. Since 11 April2012 it is possible to get a strange rock by fishing rocktails.
A series of tests conducted with cooking gauntlets equipped yielded a burn rate of 27 rocktails out of 3969, or a 0.68%, at the minimum level required to cook them (93).
Rocktail are very similar to the real-life Angler fish as they have a bio-luminescent esca (fleshy-like stem with a bulb that emits natural light) on their heads.
Rocktails' bio-luminescence is very similar to that of Aquanites.File:Rocktailshoal.pngSize comparison between the cavefish shoal (right) and the rocktail shoal (left)
The Shoal fishing spot for rocktail are 4 times bigger than any other fishing spot, making Rocktail shoals the biggest type of fishing spot at this time.
Unlike the prices of raw/cooked sharks, the high demand of rocktails used in PVP and dangerous situations has caused the price of cooked rocktails to be generally higher than the raw version of rocktails. Therefore, players who buy their raw rocktails that wish to train cooking may make some profit by cooking them.
Rocktail, along with cavefish, are two of the few fish which provide more experience when fished than when cooked.
Rocktail were cheaper to buy than manta rays, even though the Rocktail heal more. This was because they are far easier to catch. They are also much easier to cook than manta rays.
Rocktail are also the fifth fastest fishing experience on Runescape at 45k/hr with fishing urns, behind Dungeoneering fishing method at 100k, Barbarian heavy rod fishing at 65k, Fish Flingers at 55k and Shilo fly fishing at 50k.
During Evil Bob's island random event, if you were to use a cooked Rocktail (or other cooked food) on the uncooking pot, it says, "Your Uncooking skill must be at least level (40, 50, 60, 70) before you can do that." followed by "Wait, you don't even have an Uncooking skill."
