Experience

Experience, commonly abbreviated as XP or EXP, 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. The minimum XP needed to max all skills is 338,895,206 (430,133,942 with 120 Dungeoneering) (299,793,508 xp for pure F2P).



Gaining experience
Experience in a skill is obtained by performing a task related to that skill. Experience can also be gained by completing a daily challenge, completing a quest, or by playing a minigame or miniquest.

For skills where failure is a possibility, experience is usually only granted on completion of a successful action. For example, if a player cooks a lobster, rather than burning it, they will gain a minimum of 120 Cooking experience. Experience gains can be increased in a variety of ways, including bonus experience, certain clothing, and the effect of bonfires on Cooking and Firemaking.

Players who help others using the Assist System can earn a maximum of 30,000 total experience every 24 hours, although the experience may be shared among many skills. Some skills cannot be shared through the Assist System (namely gathering and combat skills, such as Attack and Mining).

Players can continue receiving experience after level 99 in a skill, up to a maximum of 200 million experience. Once a player reaches this limit, they can continue using the skill, but receive no additional experience. The maximum total experience possible is 5 billion 200 million (5,200,000,000) when a player has 200 million experience in all 26 skills.

Until the Skills Interface update (on 12 November 2007), players with a level 99 skill could view the experience it would take them to earn level 100. However, even when "level 100" was "reached", the actual level remained at 99, and it would not show the experience required to achieve level 101.

The experience gain rates one may obtain varies very much between skills. For example, with 99 Agility it is difficult to get much over 70k Agility experience per hour without brawling gloves, while making summoning pouches can give over 800k Summoning experience per hour.

Setting targets


It is possible to set an individual level target for each level. You can set a level target or a target experience for each level individually. Setting two different targets for two different skills will not affect either of the levels.

Exponential growth
The total amount of experience needed for the next level increases by approximately 10.5%. As a player's level increases the growth factor rapidly approaches $$2^{1/7} \approx 1.10409,$$ which is an increase of 10.409%. A 10.409% growth factor may seem slow, but it expands rapidly to 13,034,431 experience at level 99, and to 104,273,163 at level 120.

The increasing experience needed to get from one level to another has some surprising consequences; getting from level 98 to 99 requires approximately the same experience from level 1 to level 75. Note that higher level activities award more experience than lower level ones, so going from level 98 to 99 will be much faster than going from level 1 to 75.

Total experience approximately doubles every 7 levels, triples every 11 levels, quadruples every 14 levels, and increases almost 10-fold every 23 levels. 200,000,000 experience in a skill would put the level at approximately 126.56535.

Equations
The equation below calculates exactly the minimum total experience needed for a given level, L:


 * $$ \text{xp}( L ) =  \left \lfloor \frac{1}{4}\sum_{n = 1}^{L-1} \left\lfloor n + 300 \times 2^{n/7} \right\rfloor \right\rfloor \ $$
 * Note: $$\lfloor x\rfloor$$ means the greatest integer less than or equal to $$x$$.

The above equation can be approximated to negligible error as:


 * $$ \text{xp}( L ) \approx 75 \sum_{n = 1} ^ {L - 1} 2 ^ {n/7} $$

Which is underestimates by <1% at all levels, and is easier to calculate.

This approximation suggests that the total experience between consecutive levels is:


 * $$ \text{xp}( L + 1 )-\text{xp}( L ) \approx 75 \times 2 ^ {L/7} \approx 75 \times 1.10409^L$$

After about level 40 the experience increase from one level to the next is a nearly constant 10.5% of that level's starting experience. This means that doubling your experience after reaching a given level will result in rising almost exactly seven levels (for levels between ~35 and 120). Lower levels have higher experience percentages to level up; it's about 12.5% of level 20's experience to reach level 21. Conversely, higher level ratios are asymptotic to 10.41%.

Gaining experience summary
While the main method of gaining experience is practice in the skill (including combat) substantial amounts of experience are available from other sources.

One-off

 * Quests and related one-off events award a total of XP
 * Tasks offer a total of XP and 200,000 XP for the Ardougne elite tasks alone.
 * Opening the balloon system up gives 8,000 Firemaking XP.
 * Chompy champion gives 30,000 Ranged XP.
 * Resource dungeons give 86,600 Dungeoneering XP after entering them all at least once.
 * Showing Wizard Elriss talismans or tiaras to obtain the omni-talisman gives a total of 13,605 Runecrafting experience.

Daily events

 * The Jack of Trades aura gives the player an experience reward book if they can gain experience in any 10 skills within 3 hours. It can be used every 24 hours. Upgraded versions of the Jack of Trades gives greater experience rewards when training 15 or 20 skills within 3 hours.

Distractions and Diversions

 * The maximum experience you can gain from the circus per week is 105,967 (around 17,710 Ranged, 25,006 Magic, 10,531 Agility, 2x 19,230 Firemaking and 14,260 Thieving experience).
 * From Shattered Heart up to 9,703 per non-combat skill per week for an absolute maximum of 0 XP per week, and 0 XP over the time to build a full statue.
 * From Tears of Guthix the maximum seen was about 60,000 per seven days, based on the previous highest amount seen and the capacity of the Ornate bowl.
 * From Penguin Points points x 25 x skill level per week (maximum 57,000xp for finding all penguins and using the points on level 120 dungeoneering). (You can gain more penguin points per week upon the completion of the Cold War quest, The Hunt for Red Raktuber and Some Like it Cold.)
 * From the Troll Invasion distraction and diversion.
 * Hanky Points in the Thieves' Guild gives weekly Thieving xp.
 * From Wilderness Warbands
 * From God Statues up to 5x large XP lamps worth in the Construction skill, and up to 5x medium XP lamps worth in Prayer or Slayer (Player's Choice)

Boosts

 * A Penance Horn from Barbarian Assault can be charged by playing and used to get double experience in either Agility, Firemaking or Mining.
 * Smelting gold bars with the goldsmithing gauntlets gives 33.7 extra Smithing experience per bar, for a total of 56.2 experience.
 * Up to 5% extra Woodcutting experience can be earned by wearing the lumberjack clothing.
 * Up to 5% extra Mining experience can be earned by wearing the golden mining suit.
 * Up to 5% extra Thieving experience can be earned by wearing the Black Ibis outfit.
 * Up to 5% extra Construction experience can be earned by wearing the constructor's outfit.
 * Up to 5% extra Fishing experience can be earned by wearing the Fishing outfit.
 * Up to 5% (or 700 experience per action) extra Runecrafting experience can be earned by wearing the master runecrafter robes.
 * Extra Firemaking experience can be earned by wearing the flame gloves and ring of fire. If you wear one of them on its own, you get 2% extra xp, but if you wear both of them together, you get 5% extra experience instead of the expected 4%.
 * Using Firelighters from clue scrolls will grant an extra 10 experience per log. They can only be used with normal logs.
 * With a Pyrelord or Forge Regent summoned, lighting logs grants 10 additional Firemaking experience. However, this bonus does not apply to bonfires.
 * Runecrafting gloves obtained from Fist of Guthix provide double experience when crafting air runes, water runes or earth runes.
 * Swordfish gloves provide 100 extra experience when fishing swordfish.
 * Shark gloves provide 100 extra experience when fishing shark.
 * Dragon slayer gloves provide 15% extra Slayer experience when killing a dragon on a Slayer task.
 * Wearing a Seer's headband 2, 3, or 4 gives 10 extra experience per log when chopping maple trees.
 * Saradomin's blessing, Guthix's gift, and Zamorak's favour provide 10% experience boosts to Farming, Herblore, and Hunter, respectively, when participating in the Herblore Habitat.
 * Urns provide bonus experience while training Cooking, Fishing, Mining, Prayer, Smithing, and Woodcutting.
 * The Harmony, Salvation, and Corruption series of Auras boost the experience a player gains in Prayer for as long as the aura is active. The percent of experience gained depends on the level of the aura.
 * The Wisdom aura boosts all experience earned by 2.5%.
 * Wielding a Dwarven Army Axe will grant a small amount of additional experience in various skills after completing Troll Warzone.
 * Cooking food on a Bonfire grants 10% additional Cooking experience, while burning logs on a Bonfire will grant additional experience based on Firemaking level and other players burning with you.

Special events

 * Bonus XP weekend was active during the following dates:
 * 12 March to 15 March 2010
 * 3 September to 6 September 2010
 * 11 March to 13 March 2011
 * 9 September to 12 September 2011
 * 16 March to 19 March 2012
 * 27 October to 29 October 2012
 * 21 February to 24 February 2014
 * 30 October to 2 November 2014
 * 20 February to 23 February 2015
 * The Hati paws, available for a limited time in the beginning of 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 gave additional combat experience to the wearer.
 * On 25 October 2011 an event was held in celebration of the release of Clusterflutter which gave players triple Slayer experience.
 * From 12 November to 14 November 2011, double Dungeoneering experience and tokens were awarded "to celebrate [the] continued success in the war against bots."
 * On 31 August 2012, 350,000 xp was given to players who had been a member all month.
 * On 30 September 2012, 700,000 xp was given to players who had been a member all month, and all the previous month. The combined award of 1.05 million XP would get a new character to around level 41 in all skills, but is not enough to go from level 98 to 99 in one skill.
 * On 15 December to 16 December 2012, double Dungeoneering experience was awarded during one of the Winter Weekends.

Trivia

 * Experience gained on member's skills while F2P is capped at 388 (Level 5).
 * If levels were capped at the point where 2,147,483,647 experience was reached in that skill, you could get up to level 150, needing ~2,034 million experience. The current maximum experience per skill (200,000,000) would allow a maximum skill level of 126.
 * Experience is capped at 200,000,000 because experience is handled with an invisible tenths place, which means the real experience would look like 200,000,000.0 and is stored as 2,000,000,000 (2 billion). Since the max a 32 Bit integer can hold is 2.14 billion, it was cleaner to round it down to 2 billion (shown as 200m after the invisible decimal place) for the cap. However if an unsigned integer were used the amount could double.
 * The equation for the maximum integer size in RuneScape is 2³¹ - 1, which equals 2,147,483,647. Because Runescape uses 32 Bit (java standard integer) integers at the moment, if RuneScape was to switch to 64 bit integers (java long) the maximum value would be 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (9.2 quintillion on the short scale, or 9.2 trillion on the long scale). However, since Jagex handles experience with invisible tenths, the total experience would actually be 922,337,203,685,477,580, having this much experience would be equivalent to a level of 351. Having every skill at level 351 would result in a combat level of 447 on free-to-play worlds, 491 on member's worlds, and a total level of 9126.
 * The total amount of experience in any given skill approximately doubles every seven levels (This doesn't remain accurate for skills below level 20, since starting with 0 experience takes a while to adjust).
 * The amount of experience between levels 98 and 99 is roughly the same as the amount between levels 1 and 75, while the experience between levels 119 and 120 is equivalent to getting levels 1 to 96.