Skills



Skills are a player's trainable abilities that may be levelled throughout their game play. Any given skill can be trained by various actions that relate to the skill. Performing any of these various actions grants the player experience in that skill. Using items such as experience lamps can increase a skill by a variable amount of experience points based on the player's skill selection. Certain skills may allow players to cook, chop down trees, make fires, use magic, craft runes, and so on. Some skills complement other skills. For example, logs obtained from Woodcutting can be used for Firemaking, and fires from firemaking can be used for Cooking food. Food can then be used to replenish life points to help in Combat, which can be used to kill NPCs that drop herbs, which may then be used for Herblore. Some herblore potions may, for example, boost mining so you can mine ores to smith with, which may then be used to create nails. Nails can be used in Construction. Altars may be constructed within one's house, which can be used to further train prayer. The higher your level is in a given skill, the more resources you will unlock from that skill to enhance game play.

Achieving higher levels in skills can give players various advantages around RuneScape, such as agility shortcuts, faster cutting of wood, etc. Skills are often contrasted with money, some of which are profitable, and others which do not provide the player with any in game wealth whatsoever.

With the release of Divination, there are now 26 skills available to train in RuneScape. Members have access to all 26 skills, while free-to-play players may only access 16 of these skills, resulting in less available content for the player.

Training certain skills may be profitable, such as selling logs obtained from woodcutting, selling the fish from the fishing skill, or selling the drop(s) from a slayer assignment. Please refer to the Money-making guide for more details. Conversely, other skills may not be profitable. While some skills may be less profitable than others, the main cause of loss of profit is through a lack of the player acquiring their own materials.

When training skills, it is important for players to consider the cost of not obtaining their own materials, including opportunity costs such as obtaining gems while mining ores. The advantage to obtaining materials by oneself is that it may yield a profit since no gold was spent acquiring items. The disadvantage of acquiring your own materials is that it can be very time consuming, and when considering opportunity cost (time you could have spent earning money elsewhere), it may be counterproductive, and become more expensive. When a player buys the materials, it usually results in faster skill training.

All skills, with the exception of Constitution, start out at level 1. Constitution starts out at level 10, so the player has a fair advantage against monsters. A player has 100 life points per constitution level. Players can advance a skill to level 99 (except for Dungeoneering, which can go to level 120); after that, they can increase their experience up to 200,000,000 - but gain no more levels for doing so. A player's combat level begins at level 3. The maximum combat level a player can reach is level 138. See the hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

Every skill has a unique jingle that plays when the skill is levelled up. This jingle changes with each skill to be slightly more complex whenever the skill reaches level 50.

Skills can be temporarily boosted or lowered by using certain items or equipment, such as Capes of Accomplishment, beer, potions, certain foods, or a summoning familiar if the player is a member.

A player will appear on the hiscores if they are in the top 2,000,000 players of a skill, and are level 15 or greater in that skill.

Free to play skills
Free players have access to 16 skills.

Member skills
Members have access to all 26 skills, including the 16 free-to-play skills, and 10 additional skills, and more items that F2P can't use. For example, Dragon platelegs for defence, magic trees for woodcutting. An update has made F2P able to level these skills to level 5.

Skills types
There are four types of skills in RuneScape: Combat, Gathering, Artisan, and Support.

Combat: - These skills involve fighting in Combat. Gathering: - These skills involve gathering raw materials (resources) directly from the source.
 * Attack, Strength, Defence, Ranged, Prayer, Magic, Constitution and Summoning
 * Mining, Fishing, Woodcutting, Farming, Hunter and Divination.

Artisan: - These skills involve using resource items to create other, generally more useful items.
 * Herblore, Crafting, Fletching, Smithing, Cooking, Firemaking, Runecrafting and Construction.

Support: - These skills help the player in various different ways:
 * Agility, Thieving, Slayer and Dungeoneering.

Elite skills
Elite skills is an upcoming type of skill. It was been mentioned in the 11 June 2015 podcast.

Elite skills require two or more other core skills to be a certain level, around level 80, in order to be unlocked. Once it is unlocked, it is possible to level through them just like one would with regular skills. They are meant as end-game content and as combination skills. Elite skills are additions to the later levels of already existing skills, but will very likely be counted as a separate skill. They will count to total level and experience, and will show up in the stats interface.

Elite skills will have a level range from 1 to 120, and true mastery in the skill will be an experience amount above level 120. As with Dungeoneering, they need to be levelled to 99 to be able to equip the max cape, and to 120 to be able to equip the completionist cape.

The experience difference between elite skill levels will be flatter than the exponential growth of normal skills.

Invention will be the first elite skill, being a combination between Smithing, Crafting and Divination. This would mean it would become the second skill to have a real level 120, after Dungeoneering. Potentially, more elite skills will be added after Invention.

In a forum post on 2 July, 2015 Mod Timbo posted that they have more ideas for elite skills and that there will be more elite skills, with suggestions including Necromancy (Prayer, Magic and Summoning), Archaeology (Mining, Thieving, Hunter and Construction) and Sailing (Construction, Fletching, Crafting and Agility). Mod Timbo also stated that elite skills won't replace regular skills, regular skills will not be turned into elite skills, elite skills will start at level 1, and that the other skills might be raised to 120 in the future.

Experience
Experience, commonly abbreviated as Exp or XP, is a measure of progress in a certain skill. It is generally obtained by performing tasks related to that skill. After gaining a certain amount of experience, players will advance to the next level in that skill, which can result in new abilities, items, and other achievements. You can earn XP (experience) by training skills, completing quests and participating in various Minigames or Distractions and Diversions.

Frequency of skill milestones
These are the number of players currently listed on the hiscores as having reached these levels in the skill.

Stat wipe
It is possible for accounts with less than 10 Constitution to exist. In the early days of RuneScape Classic, rule-breakers would be stat-wiped, meaning all their skills would be taken back to 1, including Hitpoints, the predecessor to Constitution. When RS2 was released, Jagex banned many of these accounts. As of today, these accounts are extremely rare.

Accounts may also have less than 10 Constitution if they were created during the period where players chose a class when the account was created. Depending on the class chosen, it was possible to have a Hitpoints level lower than 10 (while starting with other stats boosted over 1), and this would remain if they never trained their Constitution level. In this case, this is extremely rare.

Accounts may also have less than 10 Constitution if they were created during RuneScape Classic and did not level it. This is because the required experience for level 10 was raised for RS2; therefore, characters who had not trained hitpoints in RuneScape Classic did not have enough experience for level 10 Constitution.

As of today, it is still possible for stats to be reset. If a user is to commit a serious offence, then unrelated skills may be wiped in addition to the exploited skill. An example of this would be: A user is boosting (using bots) their combat level. In this case, all combat related skills (Attack, Constitution, Strength, Ranged, Magic, etc...) may be reset.

On 29 May 2002, Jagex released the following statement:

"As part of our promised commitment to stamping down and stopping cheats in RuneScape we have developed a new system to automatically detect people using macro/bot software to gain stats unfairly.

It clearly says in our rules that using software to automatically play the game for you and raise your stats for you is cheating! This will not be tolerated. It is just not fair on the players who play the game honestly and get their levels fairly.

Our new system is extremely efficient and accurate, and in the last 24 hours we have already identified nearly 2000 players who have been cheating in this way. We also believe that we will be able to identify all future offenders and will continue modifying and improving our detection software to do so. From this point on if you use a macro or use a modified version of the RuneScape client, it is almost 100% certain that you WILL be banned or erased. Since these people gained their stats/items unfairly we have unfortunately had no choice but to completely wipe the stats and inventory of the approximately 2000 people who we have caught using macro/bot software. It seems obvious that these players should not be allowed to keep what they did not gain honestly in the first place.

If you are one of the people who we stat-wiped then whining and making excuses to us won't help. Our new system is designed to have a 0% rate of false positives, and we KNOW you were cheating. The stat-wipe is irreversible, so if you want to get your stats back then the only way to do it is to start playing the game fairly, and EARN your way to greatness like everyone else has to.

Click here for a complete list of all the people who have already been stat-wiped. We expect to catch more people at it over the next few days. I hope this proves we are deadly serious about stopping this cheating in RuneScape."

- Update:Massive crackdown on cheating players.