Skills



Skills are a player's abilities that may be developed throughout the game. Any given skill can be trained by various actions that relate to the skill. Performing any action that requires a certain level in a given skill will give experience in the skill. Using items like experience lamps, which give various amounts of experience in a skill of your choice, can increase your experience points. 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 level is in a skill, 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 skills, while free-to-play can only access 16 skills, with less content and advantages (especially towards the higher levels).

Training certain skills can result with a profit in coins, such as selling the logs from woodcutting, 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. Certain skills, however, can cost you coins to train - If you don't want to acquire your own raw materials, some skills may cost a little (Cooking, Firemaking) to a lot of money (Herblore, Construction) to train at a regular speed.

Players should weigh-up the balance between cheap/profitable skilling against buying the raw materials needed for 'processing' skills. Players can obtain their own raw materials (logs, fish and mined ore etc), or they can buy it. On one hand, when players get their own materials, skilling costs nothing and can easily return a profit, but due to time taken acquiring the materials, it can also be an extremely slow process. On the other hand, players can buy these raw materials. This almost certainly results in making a net loss but is a faster way of improving the appropriate skill.

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 10 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 3, because of 10 Constitution. The maximum combat level a member can reach is level 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.

Every skill has a unique jingle that plays when the skill is leveled up. This jingle changes with each skill to be slightly more complex whenever the skill reaches level 50.

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 3,600 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, pies, or a summoning familiar if the player is a member.

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 all 25 skills, including the 16 free-to-play skills, and 9 additional skills, and more items that F2P can't use. (Ex. Defence: Dragon Platelegs, Woodcutting: Magic Trees)

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 gathering raw materials directly from the source.
 * Woodcutting, Mining, Fishing, Farming, and Hunter.

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

Character Development: - These skills help the player in various different ways:


 * Thieving - Looting money and other various miscellaneous - and sometimes rare - items.


 * Agility - Shortcut obstacle access all throughout the game, decreased run energy restore time, allows the use of certain weight-reducing clothing and select combat equipment.


 * Dungeoneering- Great training used in all the games skills, and access to very useful and unique items and equipment not available through any other means.

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 = 0.4 x d
 * 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 = (2 x d) / 15
 * 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.

*** 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.)

The Fishing boost only works while fishing for shark.

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
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.

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, accounts still are able to be wiped in their skills, but only for a certain skill. This skill is normally the skill that they are caught botting in. However, if botting combat, it might be possible that Jagex wipes all combat skills in that 'class' (for magic: Magic, Defence, Hitpoints, for melee: Attack, Strength, Defence, Hitpoints, etc.).