Skills



Skills are a player's abilities that may be developed throughout the game. Skills are trained by various actions which use that skill, which 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. Professional Java programmers have estimated that Jagex utilized nearly 250 pages of straight-up coding using loops to achieve a single skill. 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 levels are 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 some skills can result with a profit in coins, such as selling the fish you gain when training the Fishing skill, or selling the drop(s) from a Slayer assignment. Please refer to the Money-making guide for details of this although how you train your skills is your decision to make.

All skills but Constitution start out at level 1. Constitution starts out at level 10. 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 3, because of 10 Constitution. The maximum combat level a member can reach is 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 levelled up. This jingle changes with each skill to be slightly more complex, whenever the skill reaches 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 9 additional skills, including the 16 free-to-play skills.

Skills types
There are five types of skills in RuneScape: Combat, Resource, Production, Character Development, and "All".

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

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.

Strategy: - These use all of these skill types.
 * Dungeoneering.

* 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. It is also able to be classified as a resource skill because of telekinetic grab.

** 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.

There is also a secondary way of separating skills, relating to how to train the skill. One is Resources-Based, the other is Physical-Based. Resources-Based skills are skills that can be trained by buying the resource needed to raise the skill of another player of the Grand Exchange. Physical-Based skills are skills that requires a form of action to train. An example of Resources-Based is Firemaking, as the logs can be purchased off the Grand Exchange (along with the tinderbox), and simply burnt. Woodcutting is a Physical-Based skill; no one can buy the tree (it is essentially free), earning experience requires the player to click on the trees to earn experience. Some argue that Resources-Based also require clicks, however, players can obtain or purchase the materials. Rich players are known to have high Resources-Based skill levels, and have quite low physical-based skills. Dungeoneering does not count as either, as it requires both Resources-Based and Physical-Based skills. '''Note that some skills such as Ranged and Magic require a lot of clicking to train. However, arrows and runes can both be purchased, and so are Resources-Based. Also note that Attack, Strength and Defence strongly includes armour and weapons, which must be purchased, however these three skills can be trained without the use of weapons and armour, and are so Physical-Based.'''

Resources-Based Skills

Construction (although some materials used cannot be bought), Cooking, Crafting, Firemaking, Fletching, Farming and Herblore (both have some materials that cannot be bought), Magic, Prayer, Runecrafting, Smithing and Summoning.

Physical-Based Skills

Agility, Attack, Constitution, Defence, Fishing, Hunter, Mining, Slayer, Strength and Woodcutting.

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 ÷10
 * 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 = 4/3 x d ÷ 10 = 1.33 x d ÷ 10
 * 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.)

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 and therefore characters who had not trained Constitution in RuneScape Classic did not have enough xp for level 10.