Skills

Skills are a player's "gifts"  that can be advanced throughout the game. Skills are trained by various 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 so on. Some skills have "synergy," 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 food, and food can be used to last longer while training Slayer.

There are currently 24 skills in RuneScape. Members have access to them all, while free-to-play can only advance in 15 of them.

All skills but Hitpoints start out at level 1. Hitpoints start out at level 10. Players can advance a skill to level 99; 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 3. The maximum combat level a member can reach is 138. Non-members can reach up to level 126. See hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

Skills can be temporarily boosted or lowered by using certain items or equipment, such as Capes of Accomplishment, beer, potions, and pies. The wild pie will boost your Slayer level, while other pies such as the Summer pie will temporarily raise your Agility level. These types of pies can be made using the Cooking skill (only some pies may raise your stats; pies such as Redberry or Meat pie only replenish your Hitpoints - technically, a stat). Refer to the Cooking skill guide for more information on pies.

If a player is in the top 2,000,000, and is of level 30 or greater, they will appear on the hiscores.

It has also been confirmed by Mod MMG that come the end of 2009 there will be a new skill introduced to RuneScape. Which skill this is, however, has not yet been announced.

Non-member skills
Free players have access to 15 skills.

Member skills
Members have access to 9 other skills:

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 Hitpoints

Resource: - These skills involve regular spawns.
 * Woodcutting, Mining, Fishing, Farming, and Hunting

Production: - These skills involve creating Resource items into other items.
 * Smithing, Cooking, Fletching, Firemaking, Crafting, Herblore, Runecrafting, and Construction.

Character Development: - These skills help with travel and making money.
 * Agility and Thieving.

* Magic could be a Production Skill because of Enchantment and Lunar Spells and a Character Development Skill because of Teleport Spells (a commonly used method of travel).

** Summoning familiars have a wide variety of abilities. Although most are designed to help with combat, several have gathering based abilities (not considered Resource because you don't take anything from the environment), others Production abilities, and others help with traveling, making them have Character Development abilities.

*** While Slayer is related to combat, it does not contribute to combat level.

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 xp to get from lv 1-2 So it would take at most 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 = 4 x d
 * where d = damage dealt to an opponent

This equation does not work for some opponents such as random events which give significantly less experience.

A fairly new feature includes using sacred clay weapons and armour which then entitles the player to gain double experience for a certain period of time. When you use the mode controlled the experience is divided by 3.

Hitpoints
To calculate the experience gain for Hitpoints, another simple equation can be used:
 * Experience earned = 1.33 x d
 * where d = damage dealt to an opponent

Skill release timeline

 * All other skills have been in game since time of release.

Skill relations are skills that help other skills so that you don't need to buy anything and can make/resource it yourself.

Non-chain skills

These skills must be done by killing monsters or getting items that cannot be taken with other skills. These are:

Prayer

Agility

Slayer

Thieving

Construction

Summoning

Hunter

Chain skills

These are skills that can be trained by using other skills and thus does not require buying the materials yourself. Some are as follows:

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Woodcutting &gt; Fletching &gt; Ranged &gt; Hitpoints

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Woodcutting &gt; Firemaking

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Attack &gt; Hitpoints

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Strength &gt; Hitpoints

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Defence &gt; Hitpoints

Mining &gt; Crafting &gt; Cooking &gt; Attack &gt; Hitpoints (with access to the Cooks' Guild)

Mining &gt; Crafting &gt; Cooking &gt; Defence &gt; Hitpoints (with access to the Cooks' Guild)

Mining &gt; Crafting &gt; Cooking &gt; Strength &gt; Hitpoints (with access to the Cooks' Guild)

Crafting &gt; Fletching &gt; Ranged &gt; Hitpoints

Runecrafting &gt; Magic &gt; Hitpoints

Fishing &gt; Cooking

Farming &gt; Herblore

Mining &gt; Smithing &gt; Woodcutting &gt; Fletching &gt; Magic