Skills

Skills are a player's abilities that may be developed 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. The higher your levels are the more armour you will have access to wear.

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

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, because of 10 Hitpoints. The maximum combat level a member can reach is 138. Non-members can reach up to level 126, this is because a Non-member can't train the Summoning Skill. See the hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

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 3600 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, 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 a new skill will be introduced to RuneScape sometime during 2010. Which skill this is, however, has not yet been announced.

"We’ll also be casting a critical eye over our existing skills, searching for holes, and filling them with new training activities and rewards. That’s before we even mention the new skill that is coming in 2010!"



Free to play skills
Free players have access to 15 skills.

Member skills
Members also 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 Hunter

Production: - These skills involve creating Resource items into other, generally more useful, 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, Superheat Item and Lunar Spells. It could also be a Character Development Skill because of Teleport Spells (a commonly used method of travel) and Alchemy Spells.

** 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 travelling, 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 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 = 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.

Hitpoints
To calculate the experience gain for Hitpoints, another simple equation can be used


 * Experience earned = 4/3 x d = 1.33 x d
 * 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/hitpoints - Sacred Clay Melee Armour
 * Magic/hitpoints* - Sacred Clay Mage Armour
 * Range/hitpoints - 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 only 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.)

New skill

 * It is definite that there is a new skill coming to RuneScape in 2010.
 * In the first question of a Q&A with Mark Gerhard in a Developer's Blog dated 6 August 2009, he confirmed that the new skill was available for all players, as since he was instated as CEO, he would give more updates to the free-version of the game, reiterating that the free-version is not a demo.



The image shows Mod MMG (Mark Gerhard, CEO) confirming that Sailing would not be a skill in the time of his career as CEO, but during a live Q&A session with Mark Gerhard (Mod MMG), he claims he was only joking, but lead belief that the new skill is less likely to be Sailing.

Quote from MMG in the live Q&A session on 6 July 2009:

Jagex has also mentioned that the skill will be open to free players as well as members. Currently, very little is known about this unreleased skill.


 * Also in the latest Q & A with Jagex a new question came out regarding the new skill of 2010:

Q) "Probably a question you saw coming - Can you shine anymore light on the new skill that's coming?"

A)Mod Mark: "Honestly, it’s not the Sailing skill. That was a crazy rumour based on a picture of a mage on a dock, who apparently is sailing a ship. He isn’t, and there is no Sailing skill. Interestingly, several of the team here at Jagex love sailing, so it did give us some cool ideas for the future. Oh, and the new skill is far better than sailing."

It is also revealed on the RuneScape official youtube channel, Mod Paul M gave a hint at the new skill. The only hint was that it started with a 'B'. However, there has also been a hint that the "B" was just a red herring.


 * Excl made the joke that the new skill will be queuing (line forming) but obviously this IS NOT the new skill as it doesn't make sense. His clues however may point to a new skill, but they may be Red Herrings set up by Jagex or Excl himself or simply part of the joke.


 * It is speculated that it could have something to do with the Assassin who returns in The Temple at Senntisten and says that he will "keep his eye on you". This would be similar to the way that summoning started. He may be your mentor. And on the forums, players have suggested an alternative melee combat style. However, there is a problem with this theory, the assassin is a members only character, but Jagex has stated that the new skill will be both Members and Free-to-play.
 * Mod Mark recently discounted the idea of adding mounts, stating that they would impossible to implement right now (perhaps due to the limitations of their RuneScript coding language).

Stat-swipery
Back in RuneScape Classic, people caught botting would be stat-swiped, meaning all their skills would be taken back to 1, including Hitpoints, making a Combat Level of 1. The only active player known to have been stat-swiped back in RuneScape Classic and is continuing to play now is Life Hated.