What’s going on guys! My name is Theoatrix, and today I’m excited to present to you guys a Guide for anyone that’s new to Old School Runescape.
Throughout this series, I’ll go through the general mechanics and interfaces of playing the game, how combat and fighting works, as well as how to get your first 50 levels for Free to Play skills, and how to train them, as well as the Quests and Bosses available in Free to Play. Lastly, I’ll go through the member’s skills and extra things you’ll have access to as a member, which is a lot.
This article is intended for players that have never played Runescape before, and don’t know anything about the game. If you have played before, and are only just coming back, this series will give you a refresher and an update on the new things in Old School Runescape. If you are a regular player, share this article with some of your friends to give them an introduction to starting the game.
Old School Runescape is a replica of Runescape 2, back as it was in the year 2007. But, since the release of Old School in 2013, there have been so many changes, and additions to the game. The game of Runescape takes place in the land of Gielinor, a medieval world divided into different Kingdoms, cities, and races. It is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game known as an MMORPG, where you are in control of one human character that you can level and develop into a powerful account. Eventually, you will have access to high tier content like Bossing, Raids, or gaining a prestigious skill cape, or even the Max cape.
After creating an account, your journey begins on Tutorial Island.
Throughout your journey on the island, you will learn the basics of most of the Free to Play skills, how to begin training them, as well as some guidance on banking and the game interfaces. Here is a quick run through of all the important gameplay pointers that you will need to know to start playing the game.
Part 1: General Game Mechanics and Interface
To move around, you can either click or tap on your screen, or on the mini-map in the top right. Your screen should be used for when you are doing stuff in the area that you can see. But, when you would like to travel along a distance, you should always be using your mini-map.
The arrow keys are used to change the camera angle, or you can hold down the middle mouse button on your mouse, and drag around the screen.
You can type in public chat by typing anywhere. Hitting Enter will send your message to anyone that is in your area, and if you are stuck with anything, and just need to ask a question, almost always someone is going to reply to you when you ask them.
When in a chat dialogue, you can either click to select what you want to say, or you can use your keyboard. Using the numbers, you can select which option you want, or you can use the space bar to continue.
Now I’d like to quickly go over each one of the Menus, because, to play effectively, you need to fully understand the client functionalities.
Old School Runescape is available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. If you would like to download the mobile version, all you need to do is go to your specific app store and type in Old School Runescape.
The Desktop and the mobile client have a different look and layout, but they all have the same buttons and options.
Combat Stance and Options
The first icon with the two swords is your combat stance and attack options.
Here you can choose which type of attack you would like to use with your weapon, as well as choose whether you would like to fight back the monsters that attack you. That function is very important for different things in the game.
Skills
The next icon is your Stats tab, which shows all of your skills, and the levels they are at.
You can also click on the skill to see the different ways to train them. Although, this is not a guide. You shouldn’t follow this to level up, it’s only showing you what you unlock.
The prices of certain items really depends on what training method you should be using. So, once you choose a skill, your best bet is to look up a training guide on the internet. There are a lot of very useful resources out there.
As a Free to Play player, you have access to 15 skill out of the total 23 skills. With membership, you don’t only gain access to more skills, but you gain access to a lot more training methods for Free to Play skills as well. At a later stage in this article, I’ll show everything you need to know about these skills, as well as how to start off training them.
Quests
The next Tab is your Quests, Mini Quests, Minigames, and Achievement Diary. So, I’ll break that down for you.
Quests are different journeys and jobs that you can do for certain in-game characters. Currently, there are 138 Quests in Old School Runescape, with 20 being Free to Play, and 118 being Pay to Play. Quite different from other games, you should always look up a Quest Guide on the internet while you do a Quest. The Quest Log in-game doesn’t show you exactly what you need, or what you need to do, and can mislead you at times. There are a lot of videos and written guides out there. All you have to do is type the Quest name, and OSRS on Google, and it will show up.
Completing Quests gives you a range of different rewards, including experience (XP) to level up your skills, access to new areas, new weapons and armour, new training methods, and even unlocking new skills.
Some Quests will unlock Mini Quests, which can be found all the way at the bottom of the Quest list. These are shorter Quests which give sort of an extension to the reward of the Quest before.
Kourend Favour
There’s also your Kourend Favour Interface, which shows how much favour you have gained in each House of Great Kourend. This is one of the largest additions that didn’t exist back in 2007. The Great Kourend is renowned for its Catacombs, a huge Slayer dungeon with a lot of Slayer task monsters.
There are also a lot of Minigames around the Island, each rewarding players in unique ways.
Minigames
Minigames are repeatable games and activities that you can do to unlock certain rewards to train your levels, or even make money. The Minigame menu actually allows you to teleport to any Minigame that you have unlocked every 20 minutes. So, this is very handy.
Achievement Diaries
The Achievement Diaries are a set of Tasks that restrict you into certain regions of the game, and once you complete a set of tasks in one area, you unlock an untradeable reward that has different perks. There are 4 levels of difficulty within each region – Easy, Medium, Hard and Elite – each one getting harder and harder to complete.
Inventory
The Bag icon is your inventory, where you can store 28 items at a time.
It’s worth noting that some items are stack-able, like arrows, Magic runes, and coins. At a bank, you can also withdraw items in ‘noted’ form, so they only take up 1 inventory slot. As a Free to Play player, you can store up to 400 items in your bank, and as a member, you can store over 800 items.
Worn Equipment
The next Tab is your Worn Equipment Tab. This shows what items you are wearing.
There are 10 different slots for you to wear an item, and one slot that doesn’t look so obvious is the icon in the bottom right, and that is your ring slot. Rings are a very important type of item in Old School Runescape, and so is each and every other one of the slots. So, your biggest priority after making some money, is to upgrade each gear slot as high as you can.
The tabs shown on the equipment tab are the equipment stats, which show your baseline Attack and Defence bonuses for the armour and gear that you are wearing.
The Grand Exchange
The money bag is a price look up to the Grand Exchange, which is the marketplace located in Varrock, where you can buy almost any tradeable item in the game. This is where pretty much all of your buying and selling should be done.
Death System
The bag with the skull is your items kept on Death. When you die, you keep 3 items on Death, and dying in the normal world, not in a PvP area, your items will stay on the ground for 1 hour. Dying multiple times will not cause your other items to de-spawn. This Death System is likely to change into Gravestone soon, where you can retrieve your items from the Gravestone by paying a small fee. But, keep an eye out on the weekly game updates to see when this is implemented, and how it works.
Prayer
The Prayer tab allows you to turn on and off Prayers that are unlocked by increasing your Prayer level.
These Prayers have a lot of different uses. Most of them are used to boost your combat abilities, but there are some like Protect item, which allows you to keep 1 extra item on Death. There are Protection Prayers, which dramatically lower the amount of damage you take, and Rapid Restore, which increases the rate at which you can restore Hitpoints. Your Prayer Points drain while using Prayers, and can be restored by Praying at an altar, or by drinking Prayer Restore potions available to members.
Spellbook
The final icon in the top row is your Magic Spellbook. In Old School Runescape, there are 4 Spellbooks available.
The standard one is the only one available to Free to Play, and the other Spellbooks are unlocked through Members Quests, and activities. Leveling your Magic will unlock more spells on each Spellbook, as well as increase your Magic accuracy and your Magic defence. So, magic is vital for all accounts. To cast a spell, you need runes, which can be bought at the Grand Exchange, at any rune shop, or you can make them through the Runecrafting skill. Monsters drop a lot of Runes as well, and the most notable use for Magic is teleporting across the map. Teleportation is vital in Runescape, and Magic unlocks teleports to almost everywhere across the map. All 4 of the Spellbooks contain teleports with different, unique uses. I’ll talk a lot more about Magic and the other combat skills in part 2 of this series.
Clan Chat
The 2 smiley faces is your Clan Chat Tab.
Here, you can join a Clan chat to chat to groups of players to go Bossing, to go Skilling, or whatever your Clan desires. You can join a Clan on the official Runescape website, or some Clans, like mine, don’t even need you to sign up for them, and you can just join and chill whenever.
Friends
The smiley is your friends list, where you can add players to chat to them.
A useful pointer is to use the tab key on your keyboard to respond to the most recent message that comes up. Runescape is a great social environment or meeting new people, and I’ve personally met so many people through the game, and I’ve had long lasting friendships with some players that I met so many years ago.
Ignore List
The sad face is your Ignore List.
Players on this list cannot send you a message, and you can’t see anything they say. This is useful for spammers, or scamming players.
Logout/ World Hop
The door is where you can log out of Runescape.
If you go inactive in game for 5 minutes, your account will automatically log out. If, for some reason, you remain in combat, you’ll log out after 20 minutes of inactivity. So, always make sure you use the logout button when you’re leaving the game.
There’s also the World switcher, which is useful for certain methods, and for finding empty worlds for Bosses and Skilling activity.
Settings Tab
The next tab is your Setting Tabs, and there are a few very important toggles you need to know about.
First is your Graphics settings. On Desktop, you can change from Fixed mode to Stretched mode, which makes Runescape look a lot smoother on a bigger display.
There are the Sound settings, where the first is Music, the second is your personal Character’s sounds, and the third option is your surround sounds.
Next is your Chat. In this setting menu, I would really recommend having Split Chat on, so you can easily see your private messages.
Also, now there is a profanity filter available. By default it’s on. But, you can turn it off if you would like to see blocked words show up when other players type them.
The red joystick has some important game options that you can customize to your needs.
Emotes
The next tab is your Emotes, which include a set of emotes for all players, and some emotes which are unlocked through playing the game.
Skill capes and achievement emotes are your way of showing your dedication to getting a skill to level 99, which is the highest tier of emotes you can unlock. I’ll be talking more about skill capes and high achievements in the 4th part of this series.
Music
The final Menu item is your music player.
You unlock songs by entering different areas in the game. After finding every single song, you’re rewarded with a music cape.
World Map
Your World Map is your best friend as a starting player.
If you tap or click on the map icon, it opens up an interface showing where you are. You can search for locations by name, or even by type. Using the side panel, you can find what store you need, or find exactly where a location is really easily. When you are just starting off, you should always be using this when you are trying to find your way somewhere, especially if you are doing a Quest, or looking for some sort of monster.
Run Energy
Your run energy is shown in both your settings and as an orb next to your Mini Map. Running exactly doubles your movement speed, and it runs out slower if you have a higher Agility level. Resting isn’t an option like in Runescape 3.
For now, that’s all of the basic game mechanics, and the starting pointers you will need to get started.
Let’s move on to Section 2, where I’ll show you how combat and fighting works.
Part 2: Fighting and your Combat Level
Attacking Monsters and players is a huge part of Runescape. Fighting gives XP in your combat skill, and leveling up your combat skills will increase your combat level. This is the visible level to other players when they right click your character.
There are 7 different skills that will contribute to your combat level.
Attack
The first is Attack, which allows you to wear better weapons, and attack more accurately with swords in close range combat.
Strength
Then there is Strength, which goes hand in hand with Attack, and allows you to deal more Melee damage per hit. You also unlock a lot of new weapons with Strength, and you should try to level up your Attack and Strength at a similar rate.
Defence
Your Defence allows you to wear better armour, and better armour and a higher Defence level will decrease the chance of being hit. Defence will not reduce the amount of damage you take, which is a very common misconception in Old School Runescape. It will only reduce the chance of being hit.
Range
Ranged is arguably one of the most powerful combat styles in Old School Runescape. Increasing your Range level increases your Ranged accuracy, and your Ranged max hit. You unlock better bows, better crossbows, and a lot of extra thrown weapons that you can use to attack monsters or players from a long distance.
Magic
The next one is Magic, and I spoke a bit about this before. Leveling your Magic not only gives you access to more spells and teleports, it also lets you wear certain armour. In case you missed it in the first section, having a higher Magic level will increase the accuracy of your Magic spell, and increases you defence to Magic.
Hitpoints
Your Hitpoints level is the amount of Health your character has at full capacity. Hitpoints is trained by dealing damage to any monster in the game. Leveling up Hitpoints will allow you to sustain a lot more damage from bosses and monsters, and has a pretty big part of increasing your combat level.
Prayer
The last skill that contributes to your combat level is Prayer. It allows you to unlock more Prayer abilities, which are very useful for different things.
Every weapon in Runescape has a set attack speed, and when you are in combat with a monster or player, you will attack in every attack interval for your weapon. Eating food like fish or cakes heals your Hitpoints, but it will delay until you can start attacking again. A great place to begin training your combat levels when you start off is the cows around Lumbridge. The frogs in the Lumbridge swamp are also very good since there are a lot of different leveled frogs. As you level up your combat skills, you can attack higher level frogs. Cows drop cow hides, and they can be a decent starting money-maker.
Combat Training
Once you get into the swing of things, you can choose to go through the Stronghold of Security, where searching each of the chests on each level rewards you with a total of 10 000 coins.
The Stronghold of Security is also a great place to train your combat skills as a Free to Play player. Every level that you go down has a higher tier level of monsters, and some of them have very valuable drops that you can sell to the Grand Exchange for money.
Weaponry
There is a huge variety of weapons that you will have access to, but the highest tier of weapons isn’t so high in Free to Play. You can check the weapons available to you by clicking any of the combat skills in your skills tab.
Metals in Runescape
In Free to Play, there are 7 tiers of metal that you have access to. Bronze, Iron, Steel, Black, Mithril, Adamant and rune, with each one progressively getting stronger in both attack and defence.
Melee Weapons
For Melee combat, you should start off by getting yourself an iron scimitar from the Al Kharid Scimitar store. Scimitars give the highest damage per second out of any smithable weapon. So, as you gain a higher attack level, you should always upgrade the metal of the scimitar you are using accordingly.
At level 40 Attack, you will unlock the Rune Scimitar, which is arguably the best weapon to train your Melee as a Free to Play player. Two handed swords and the Hill Giant Club are great for dealing really high damage. But, they have a very slow Attack speed.
These weapons are a lot more useful in Player vs Player (PvP) situation, which I’ll talk about soon.
Ranged Weapons
For Range training, you can buy bows and arrows form the Range shop in Varrock, and you should always be using the best possible shortbow you can.
Longbows increase your Attack distance, but have a far slower rate of fire. So, shortbows in the long run deal a lot more damage. In Free to Play, you can use arrows up to Adamant, but for training your ranged, you should only ever buy up to Steel.
Magic Weapons
You can buy Magic Runes from the Port Sarim Magic shop, or from Aubury’s Rune Shop in Varrock.
Magic staffs give you an unlimited supply of that rune for whichever staff you are using.
Members Combat Training
As a member, you will have access to a lot more training spots as a low level player.
Your combat stats as a low level should be trained at one of the 4 types of crabs.
They have very high Hitpoints levels, which means you’ll get more XP per kill, and also they are very weak monsters, and don’t hit you very often.
The easiest crabs to get to are the Rock crabs, where you can use a Camelot teleport tablet, and run North to Rellekka to train your levels.
Members Weaponry
As a member in Runescape, you have access to hundreds of weapons. Currently, the highest tier of weapons is level 75, with notable ones being the God Swords – which are obtained from the God Wars dungeon.
You also unlock Dragon at level 60. Dragon is not smithable, so no one can make Dragon, but you can get it from monsters in the game. The Dragon Scimitar is unlocked after completing the Monkey Madness Quest, and that’s a good Quest to aim for as you are starting off as a member.
After Dragon comes the Barrows gear, unlocked at level 70, which provides some of the highest Defence bonuses in the game. Each Barrows set also has a set effect, each one being very useful in different situation.
The Wilderness
In Runescape, the entire wilderness is a PvP activated area. Whenever you are in there, you can attack and will be attacked by other players of a similar combat level. If you go deeper and deeper into the Wilderness, there is a wider spread of players that you can attack. There are also PvP worlds, where the entire Runescape world is player vs player, except for the banks. Killing other players can be an excellent source of income, or you can gain prestige in the Bounty Hunter worlds. If you would like to start player vs player, I would recommend starting off in Free to Play PvP, since it’s so much simpler compared to members. As you get more comfortable with combat, and the layout of the game, PvP can be one of the most enjoyable and entertaining aspects of the game.
A major goal for many accounts is completing the Fight Caves. Once you think you are ready, you can face 63 consecutive waves with the final being Tz-Tok JaD, a Boss capable of 1 hitting you if you are not fast enough.
Completing the Fight Caves rewards you with a fire cape, which is one of the best Melee combat capes in the game.
Once you’ve got the hang of the Fight Caves, you can attempt the Inferno, which is arguably the hardest Boss challenge in Old School Runescape.
