Skills



Skills are a player's trainable abilities that may be levelled throughout gameplay. 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 players skill selection. Certain skills may allow players to cook, chop down trees, make fires, use magic, make runes, and so on. Some skills compliment other skills. 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 potions may, 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 given skill, the more resources you will unlock from that skill to enhance gameplay.

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

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

Training certain skills may be profitable, such as selling the 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 be unprofitable. While some skills may be more unprofitable than others, the main cause of loss of profit is through lack of the player acquiring their own materials.

It is important for players to consider (when training skills) the cost of not obtaining their own materials (including opportunity costs such as obtaining gems while mining ores). The advantage to obtaining your own materials is that it may yield a profit because the player did not spend any gold. 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 counter-productive, 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 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 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. A recent 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.

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.

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, 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 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.''