Skills

Skills are a player's abilities that may be developed throughout the game. Skills are trained by various actions which use that skill, which give experience in the skill, until enough experience is earned for the next level. Some skills 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. The higher your levels are the more of the skill you will have access to.

With the release of Dungeoneering, there are now 25 skills in Runescape. Members have access to all 25, while free-to-play can only advance in 16 of them, with less advantages.

You can also train a skill at the same time you gain money! For this, please refer to the Money-making guide, though, is your decision.

All skills but Constitution start out at level 1. Constitution starts out at level 10. 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 3, because of 10 Constitution. The maximum combat level a member can reach is 138. Non-members can reach up to level 126 because a non-member can't train the Summoning skill. See the hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

If a knowledgeable player were to start a new character, with certain assumptions for efficiency in activities like training combat and summoning with slayer, it would take approximately 3600 hours to go from all level 1 skills to all level 99 skills.

Skills can be temporarily boosted or lowered by using certain items or equipment, such as Capes of Accomplishment, beer, potions, and pies.

If a player is in the top 2,000,000 players in a skill, and is of level 30 or greater in that skill, they will appear on the hiscores.

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

Member skills
Members have access to 9 additional skills:

Skills types
There are four types of skills in RuneScape: Combat, Resource, Production, and Character Development.

Combat: - These skills involve fighting in Combat.
 * Attack, Defence, Strength, Magic*, Ranged, Summoning**, Slayer***, Prayer, and Constitution.

Resource: - These skills involve regular spawns.
 * Woodcutting, Mining, Fishing, Farming, and Hunter

Production: - These skills involve creating Resource items into other, generally more useful, items.
 * Smithing, Cooking, Fletching, Firemaking, Crafting, Herblore, Runecrafting, and Construction.

Character Development: - These skills help with travel and making money.
 * Agility and Thieving.

* Magic could be a Production Skill because of Enchantment, Superheat Item and Lunar Spells. It could also be a Character Development Skill because of Teleport Spells (a commonly used method of travel) and Alchemy Spells.

** Summoning familiars have a wide variety of abilities. Although most are designed to help with combat, several have gathering based abilities (not considered Resource because you don't take anything from the environment), others Production abilities, and others help with traveling, making them have Character Development abilities.

*** While Slayer is related to combat, it does not contribute to combat level.

**** Dungeoneering is the new skill that uses all of the skill types above.

Levels
The equation below calculates exactly the minimum experience needed for a given level:


 * Experience Required $$ = floor \left[ \frac {\displaystyle\sum_{n = 1} ^ {L - 1} floor \left( n + 300 \times 2 ^ {n/7} \right) } {4} \right] $$, where L = skill level

The above equation can be approximated with minimal rounding error as:


 * Approximate Experience Required $$ = \sum_{n = 1} ^ {L - 1} \left( \frac {n} {4} + 75 \times 2 ^ {n/7} \right) $$, where L = skill level

This approximation can then be used to find the maximum additional experience required to level up:


 * Additional Experience Required to Level Up $$ = \frac {L} {4} + 75 \times 2 ^ {L/7} $$, where L = current level

Example
You want to find the experience that it would take to level up from 28 Strength to 29 Strength:


 * Additional Experience Required to Level Up $$ = \frac { \left( 28 \right) } {4} + 75 \times 2 ^ { \left( 28 \right) /7} = 7 + 75 \times 2 ^ {4} = 7 + 75 \times 16 = 1207 $$

It takes 83 experience points to get from level 1 to 2 in any skill. Thus, it would take a maximum of 1207 experience points to get from level 28 to level 29.

Combat skills
To calculate the experience gain for combat skills, a simple equation can be used:
 * Experience earned = 4 x d ÷10
 * where d = damage dealt to an opponent

Using sacred clay weapons and armour enables the player to gain double experience for a certain period of time.

When you use controlled mode the experience gained is divided between all three of Attack, Defence and Strength.

Constitution
To calculate the experience gain for Constitution, another simple equation can be used


 * Experience earned = 4/3 x d ÷ 10 = 1.33 x d ÷ 10
 * where d = damage dealt to an opponent

Experience Boosters:

For certain skills, you can use Stealing Creation equipment to double your xp gained.

These skills are:


 * Smithing/Construction - Sacred Clay Hammer
 * Crafting - Sacred Clay Needle
 * Melee/constitution - Sacred Clay Melee Armour
 * Magic/constitution* - Sacred Clay Mage Armour
 * Range/constitution - Sacred Clay Range Armour
 * Woodcutting - Sacred Clay Hatchet
 * Fletching - Sacred Clay Knife
 * Hunting** - Sacred Clay Butterfly Net
 * Mining - Sacred Clay Pickaxe
 * Fishing - Sacred Clay Harpoon

* The Magic boost only works with combat-related spells.

** The Hunting boost works with implings and butterflies.

only *** The Combat boost works while using armour not related to the specific combat type. (ex. using Melee Sacred Clay Legs will give an experience boost to range while the player is ranging.)

For certain skills, you can use the Penance horn from Barbarian Assault to double your xp gained.

These skills are:


 * Firemaking with logs
 * Mining ores
 * Completing agility courses (not including Werewolf Skullball or the Agility Pyramid)

Stat Wipe
Back in RuneScape Classic, people caught botting would be stat-wiped, meaning all their skills would be taken back to 1, including Hitpoints. When RS2 came out, Jagex banned (most) of these accounts. As of February 2010, these accounts are extremely rare. Few rumours go around that there are only 5 to 10 of these accounts left.