Skills



Skills are a player's abilities that may be developed throughout the game. Any given skill can be trained by various actions that relate to the skill. Performing any action that requires a certain level in a given skill will give experience in the skill. Using items like experience lamps, which give various amounts of experience in a skill of your choice, can increase your experience points. For example, certain skills may allow players to cook, chop down trees, make fires, use magic, make runes, and so on. Some skills support each other. For example, logs obtained from Woodcutting can be used for Firemaking, and fires from Firemaking can be used for Cooking food, and food can be used to replenish life points to help in Combat, which can be used to kill monks to get herbs which can be used for Herblore. Some herblore potion can, for example, boost mining so you can mine ores to smith with, and with that you can create nails. You can use nails with Construction. In your house you can also build an altar to help train prayer. The higher your level is in a skill, the greater pool of content from the skill you will have access to.

Having 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, skills being considered permanent and money temporary due to scams and hacking.



With the release of Dungeoneering, there are 25 skills in Runescape. Members have access to all 25 skills, while free-to-play can only access 16 skills, with less content and advantages (especially towards the higher levels).

Training certain skills can result with a profit in coins, such as selling the logs from woodcutting, 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. Certain skills, however, can cost you coins to train - If you don't want to acquire your own raw materials, some skills may cost only a little (Cooking, Firemaking) to a lot of money (Herblore, Construction) to train at a regular speed.

Players should weigh-up the balance between cheap/profitable skilling against buying the raw materials needed for 'processing' skills. Players can obtain their own raw materials (logs, fish and mined ore etc), or they can buy it. On one hand, when players get their own materials, skilling costs nothing and can easily return a profit, but due to time taken acquiring the materials, it can also be an extremely slow process. On the other hand, players can buy these raw materials. This almost certainly results in making a net loss but is a faster way of improving the appropriate skill.

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 40 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 4. The maximum combat level a player can reach is level 200. 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.

If a player is in the top 2,000,000 players in a skill, is of level 15 or greater in that skill, and is a member they will appear on the hiscores.

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

Member skills
Members have access to all 25 skills, including the 16 free-to-play skills, and 9 additional skills, and more items that F2P can't use. For example, Dragon platelegs for Defence, Magic Trees for Woodcutting.

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 and Hunter.

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.

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, doing activities such as Penguin Hide and Seek, Mage Training Arena, and other Minigames and activities. You can also gain experience by finishing random events (If you chose the Experience Lamp or Book.)

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 XP for level 10 was raised for RS2; therefore, characters who had not trained hitpoints in RuneScape Classic did not have enough XP for level 10 Constitution.

As of today, accounts still are able to be wiped in their skills, and this skill can be wiped with other unrelated skills if the offence is serious. This skill is normally the skill that they are caught botting in. However, if botting combat, it might be possible that Jagex wipes all combat skills in that 'class' (for magic: Magic, Defence, Constitution, for melee: Attack, Strength, Defence, Constitution, etc.).

On May 29th, 2001, 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.''