Skills

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A player gaining a Level in a Skill.

The current skills screen.

The old skills screen, prior to 15 January 2008

The old skills screen, prior to 5 November 2007.

The old skills screen, prior to 31 May 2006

A player using the Fishing skill to catch some fish.

Skills are a player's attributes that can be advanced 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 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 gain 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 hiscores 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 level 30 or above in any skill they will appear on the hiscores.

[edit] Non-member skills

Free players have access to 15 skills.

	Attack	Allows players to hit less 0's and deal more damage. For example if a player was to fight another player with high Defence level, then the player might not just hit 0. A higher attack level also allows you to wield better weapons. (For example, rune weapons at level 40 and corrupt dragon weapons at 60.
	Strength	Allows players to deal more melee damage and equip certain weapons. It also gives access to several agility shortcuts.
	Defence	Allows players to wear stronger armour and decrease chance of being hit (a common misconception is that high defence reduces damage dealt).
	Ranged	Allows players to fight with missiles and projectiles from a distance. It, in conjunction with Strength, also gives access to various agility shortcuts.
	Prayer	Allows players to pray for assistance, such as combat ability boosts.
	Magic	Allows players to cast spells and teleportation. Reduces chance for mage attacks to hit you.
	Runecrafting	Allows players to make runes for magic.
	Hitpoints	Allows players to sustain more damage.
	Crafting	Allows players to create items, from pottery to ranged armour.
	Mining	Allows players to obtain ores and gems from rocks.
	Smithing	Allows players to smelt ores into bars and smith bars into armour and weapons.
	Fishing	Allows players to catch fish.
	Cooking	Allows players to cook food. The food can then be consumed to heal a players' hitpoints, and some foods have special effects (for example, various members-only pies).
	Firemaking	Allows players to light fires on logs, lanterns, etc.
	Woodcutting	Allows players to cut down trees to obtain logs and to make canoes.

[edit] Member skills

Members have access to 9 other skills:

	Agility	Allows players to use shortcuts and increases the rate at which energy recharges.
	Herblore	Allows players to clean grimy herbs and to make potions which can be used to boost/restore stats.
	Thieving	Allows players to steal from market stalls and chests and to pickpocket non-player characters.
	Fletching	Allows players to create projectiles (arrows, bolts) and bows which can be used for Ranged.
	Slayer	Allows players to kill certain monsters that can't normally be defeated.
	Farming	Allows players to grow plants (fruits, vegetables, herbs, trees, etc.).
	Construction	Allows players to build a house and its contents.
	Hunter	Allows players to track, net, deadfall, snare, and trap animals.
	Summoning	Allows players to summon familiars and pets to enhance gameplay in both combat and non-combat skills

[edit] 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 Hunting

Production: - These skills involve creating Resource items into other 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 and Lunar Spells and a Character Development Skill because of Teleport Spells(Way of Travel).

** 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.

[edit] Experience

Main article: Experience

[edit] Levels

The equation below calculates exactly the minimum experience needed for a given level:

Experience Required

, where L = skill level

The above equation can be approximated with minimal rounding error as:

Approximate Experience Required

, 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

, where L = current level

[edit] 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

It takes 83 xp to get from lv 1-2 So it would take at most 1207 experience points to get from level 28 to level 29.

[edit] 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

This equation does not work for some opponents such as random events which give significantly less experience.

A fairly new feature includes using sacred clay weapons and armour which then entitles the player to gain double experience for a certain period of time.

[edit] 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

[edit] Skill release timeline

Skill	Release date	Notes
Summoning	15 January, 2008	Originally envisioned to be an extension to the Magic skill.
Hunter	21 November, 2006
Construction	31 May, 2006	Reintroduction of the never introduced Carpentry skill.
Farming	11 July, 2005
Slayer	26 January, 2005
Runecrafting	29 March, 2004	Released alongside RuneScape 2, after the members only Beta of RuneScape 2.
Agility	12 December, 2002
Thieving	30 April, 2002
Fletching	25 March, 2002
Herblore	21 February, 2002	Was named Herblaw in RuneScape Classic.
Fishing	11 June, 2001
Prayer	24 May, 2001	Known as Necromancy at time of release.
Crafting	8 May, 2001	Known as Tailoring at time of release.
Magic		This original skill was initially divided into good magics and evil magics.