Skills

Skills are a player's attributes that can be advanced throughout the game. Skills are trained by 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 more. Some skills are "interlaced", 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.

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

All skills start out at level 1 except for hitpoints which starts with level 10. Players can advance a skill to level 99; after that they can increase their experience up to 200,000,000 but get no more levels for doing so. A player's combat level begins at 3. The maximum combat level a player can reach is 138. Non-members can reach level 126. See highscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

Skills can be temporarily boosted or lowered 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 (NOTE: Only some pies may raise your stats, pies such as Redberry or Meat pie will do nothing but replenish your Hitpoints). Refer to the Cooking skill guide for more information on pies.

If players are in the top 2,000,000 and above level 30 in any skill they get into the hiscores.

Skill types
There are four types of skills in RuneScape: Extraction, Processing, Combat, and Independent.

Extraction skills - These skills involve obtaining resources or items from the environment.
 * Mining, Fishing, Woodcutting, Hunter, Thieving, Farming, and Summoning***.

Processing skills: - These skills involve processing items obtained through extraction skills into finished products.
 * Magic**, Cooking, Smithing, Fletching, Firemaking, Herblore, Crafting, Runecrafting, Construction, and Summoning***.

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

Independent skills: - These skills have no classification.
 * Magic**, Agility, and Summoning***.

** Note that Magic appears under several categories. This is because there are several "schools" of magic skills such as combat spells (meaning it is a combat skill), enchantment spells (used to create magic items - making it a processing skill), and teleportation spells (making it an independent skill).

*** Summoning familiars have a wide variety of abilities. Although most are designed to help with combat, several have extraction based abilities, others processing abilities, and several do not fall into any pre-established category.

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

Next level
The equation below gives the experience needed for the next level:


 * $$Experience = \sum_{n = 1} ^ {k - 1} \left \lfloor \frac {n} {4} + 75 \times 2 ^ \frac {n} {7} \right \rfloor $$


 * where k = current level

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

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

Trivia
After the release of RuneScape HD, many users saw the "Sailing" skill appear on the highscores for a few minutes. This was swiftly removed. There have also been claims that this happened before the release of Summoning and Hunter when servers were updated. Although this skill has not been announced or confirmed by Jagex, it could have been an accidental leaked image from Jagex.