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 currently 24 skills in RuneScape. Members have access to them all, while non-members can only advance in 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 138. See hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

Skills can be temporarily boosted or lowered using certain items or equipment, such as Capes of Accomplishment, beer, and prayer 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, Hitpoints and Summoning.

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:

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