Skills

Skills are a player's attributes that can be advanced throughout the game. Skills are trained by repetitive actions that 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 more. Some skills are "interlaced", meaning that they can be used together. For example, logs obtained from Woodcutting can be used for Firemaking, and fires from Firemaking can be used for Cooking.

There are 23 skills in RuneScape (Soon to be 24). Members have access to them all, while non-members can only raise 15 of them.

All skills start out at level 1 except for hitpoints which starts with level 10. Players can advance a skill to level 99; after that they can increase their experience up to 200 000 000 but get no more levels for doing so. A player's combat level begins at 3. The maximum combat level a player can reach is 126. See hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

A player can bring a level of a skill to 100 while wearing a Cape of Achievement of that skill, with no significant bonus; it is just for the feeling of having a skill boosted over the level 99 mark. Skills can also be temporarily boosted through special equipment, items, Prayer, or potions.

If players are in the top 1 000 000 and above level 30 in any skill they get into the hiscores.

Skill types
There are four types of skills in RuneScape: Extraction, Processing, Combat, and Independent.

Extraction skills - These skills involve obtaining resources or items from the environment.
 * Mining, Fishing, Woodcutting, Hunter, Thieving and Farming.

Processing skills: - These skills involve processing items obtained through extraction skills into finished products.
 * Magic**, Cooking, Smithing, Fletching, Firemaking, Herblore, Crafting and Runecrafting.

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

Independent skills: - These skills have no classification.
 * Magic**, Agility, and Construction.


 * Note magic appears under several categories. This is because there are several "schools" of magic skills such as combat spells (meaning it is a combat skill), enchantment spells (used to create magic items - making it a processing skill), and teleportation spells (making it an independent skill).

Experience increase
Between every skill, the amount of experience needed increases by 10% for every level. This is shown in the way that it is 83 experience between levels 1 and 2, but 91 experience between levels 2 and 3. (10% of 83 is roughly 8, therefore the next level would be 91 experience.) It is more significant in that level 50 is 101 333 experience, level 60 is 273 742 experience, and level 70 is 737 627 experience.

In addition, the experience required doubles approximately every seven levels. For example, the experience needed for level 92 in a skill is almost exactly half of that needed to reach level 99.

The below equation directly gives the number of experience per level:

$$\left \lfloor \frac {\sum_{x = 1} ^ {L - 1} \left \lfloor x + 300 \times 2 ^ \frac {x} {7} \right \rfloor} {4} \right \rfloor = experience$$

Future Skills
On 22 November 2007, Jagex announced the Summoning skill, to be released in the new year. Instead of being announced on the main page, it was the subject of a mini Development Diary (with 3 more to come in later weeks). Little information has been released on the new skill, although more is expected in the run up to new year.