While you're out and about practising your non-combat skills or wandering around your house, keep an eye out for ‘strange rocks’. These will usually appear in your inventory and will be of interest to the archaeologists at Varrock Museum.

As you deliver each strange rock to the museum, your discovery will start to take shape; you’ll have the opportunity to gain a little more Kudos from your peers; and you’ll also get some extra knowledge in Agility, Construction, Cooking, Crafting, Farming, Firemaking, Fishing, Fletching, Herblore, Hunter, Mining, Runecrafting, Smithing, Thieving or Woodcutting (depending upon which skill you were training when you discovered the strange rock).

The museum archaeologists encourage you to train each of the skills listed above, as only then will you be able to find every piece of...whatever it is you’re finding. Indeed, it may well be a good time to train a wide variety of skills, so as to gather resources in preparation for future skill training or the upcoming Bonus XP Weekend (starting Friday 12th March).

You can also learn something of Dahmaroc, a Second Age mage who was cursed in a battle over the limited supply of runes in those dark times. With diligent study, this could lead to another reward, this one of more solid and permanent construction...

If, for any reason, you'd prefer NOT to receive these strange rocks while training, you can talk to the archaeologists to toggle their appearance off (or back on) after taking them your first strange rock.

Mod Maz
RuneScape Content Developer
Queen of the Squirrels

Summary:

In other news...

The members' skill-total world requirement has been increased from 1000+ to 1500+. The free players' skill-total world requirement remains at 1000+.

TzTok-Jad now has a second animation played on him when he's being healed. This will be shown at the same time as his usual animations, so won’t interfere with the fight.

When infusing granite lobster pouches (level 74 Summoning), you can now use any size of granite, not just 500g blocks. Equally, when infusing praying mantis pouches (level 75 Summoning), you can now use any colour of ‘flower’ (whether grown from mithril seeds or bought), not just red flowers.

When buying poison chalices from Stankers at the Coal Trucks, or climbing boots from Tenzig[sic] in Burthorpe, you’ll now see a shop interface instead of having to click through chat.

We've added five microtutorials to the advisor system for Agility, Hunter, Slayer and Thieving, and more information has been added about a number of members' items and locations.

RuneScape's minigames have been renamed to 'Activities' and all references to 'minigames' have changed in accordance (predominantly on the Knowledge Base, but also a few in-game references). Some of this content has been reclassified as Distractions & Diversions, skill-based tasks or areas (on the KB); the content itself has not changed.

Strykewyrm and other Slayer changes:

• You can purchase the ability to be assigned ice strykewyrms from Slayer masters (using Slayer points after completing Smoking Kills).
• You need to be wearing a TzHaar fire cape to cause 2x damage to ice strykewyrms with fire spells (without it, fire spells inflict 1.5x damage).
• The TzHaar fire cape adds +40 damage (see other news about changes to the Hitpoints skill) to all attack types when worn to fight ice strykewyrms.
• Ice strykewyrms may cause you extra damage if you're not wearing a TzHaar fire cape.
• Strykewyrms should no longer lose focus on the player they were attacking.
• You can now block a 5th task if you have more than 250 Quest Points.
• You can purchase the ability to be assigned aquanites by Kuradal.
• You can now purchase the ability to deal killing blows faster to those Slayer creatures that require them.
• The crystal chime now has an auto chime feature, which should help when fighting warped terrorbirds and warped tortoises.