Skills



Skills are a player's trainable abilities that may be levelled throughout their game play. 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 player's skill selection.

With the release of Invention, there are now 27 skills available to train in RuneScape. Members have access to all 27 skills, while free-to-play players may only access 16 of these skills, resulting in less available content for the player. However free-to-play players can train the members' skills up to level 5 to try those out.

Certain skills may allow players to cook, chop down trees, make fires, use magic, craft runes, and so on. Some skills complement other skills. For example, logs obtained from Woodcutting can be used for Firemaking, and fires from firemaking can be used for Cooking food. Food can then be used to replenish life points to help in Combat, which can be used to kill NPCs that drop herbs, which may then be used for Herblore. Some herblore potions may, for example, boost mining so you can mine ores to smith with, which may then be used to create nails. Nails can be used in Construction. Altars may be constructed within one's house with this skill which can be used to further train prayer. The higher your level is in a given skill, the more resources you will unlock from that skill to enhance game play.

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, some of which are profitable, and others which do not provide the player with any in game wealth whatsoever.

Training certain skills may be profitable, such as selling 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 not be profitable. While some skills may be less profitable than others, the main cause of loss of profit is through a lack of the player acquiring their own materials.

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. Players can advance a skill to level 99 (except for Dungeoneering and Invention, 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. The maximum combat level a player can reach is level 138. A player will appear on the hiscores if they are in the top 2,000,000 players of a skill, and are level 15 or greater in that skill.

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.

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.

Free to play skills
Free players have access t16 skills.

Member skills
Members have access to all 27 skills, including the 16 free-to-play skills, and 11 additional skills, and more items that F2P can't use. For example, Dragon platelegs for defence, magic trees for woodcutting. An 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. Players can earn expert capes of accomplishment by obtaining level 99 in all the skills of a particular type.

Combat: - These skills involve fighting in Combat.
 * Attack, Strength, Defence, Ranged, Prayer, Magic, Constitution and Summoning

Gathering: - These skills involve gathering raw materials (resources) directly from the source.
 * 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.

Elite skills
Elite skills require two or more regular skills to be at a certain level in order to unlock the ability to begin training them. They contribute to a player's total level and experience, and show up in the stats interface. Elite skills have a level range from 1 to 120. As with Dungeoneering, they need to be levelled to 99 to be able to equip the max cape, and to 120 to be able to equip the True Skill Mastery cape. They also feature a different experience to level ratio compared to regular skills. Elite skills are not intended to replace regular skills, instead existing alongside them.

The first elite skill, Invention, was released on 25 January 2016. It requires level 80 in Smithing, Crafting and Divination to train. When training Invention and all future elite skills that may be released players will only be able to gain half as much direct or bonus experience from sources such as experience lamps, stars and books, Jack of trades auras, dragonkin lamps, and Distractions and Diversions such as Tears of Guthix and Guthixian butterflies. During Bonus XP weekends elite skills' experience bonus will be 1.5x, or 2.5x, with bonus experience. Players will be unable to gain additional experience in elite skills from these sources for 6 months after they are released, compared to 3 months for regular skills.

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.

Frequency of skill milestones
These are the number of players currently listed on the hiscores as having reached these levels in the skill.

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 experience for level 10 was raised for RS2; therefore, characters who had not trained hitpoints in RuneScape Classic did not have enough experience 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 29 May 2002, 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."

- Update:Massive crackdown on cheating players.