Skills

RSCRS

The skills tab.

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 food, chop down trees, make fires, use magic 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.

A player levels up a skill.

There are 23 skills in Old School RuneScape.

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. See Hiscores for the relative rankings of the different skills.

A player could bring a level of a skill to 100 while wearing a Cape of Accomplishment of that skill, with no great significant bonus; it is just for the feeling of having a skill boosted over the level 99 mark. Skills can also be temporarily boosted through special equipment, items, Prayer, or potions.

All players are currently displayed on the Hiscores regardless of level attained.

Skills

Free-to-play skills

	Attack	Allows players to wield stronger melee weapons and fight more accurately in Melee.
	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 (does not reduce damage dealt, as is a common misconception).
	Ranged	Allows players to fight with missiles and projectiles from a distance.
	Prayer	Allows players to pray for assistance, such as ability boosts.
	Magic	Allows players to cast spells and teleportation.
	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 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 eaten to heal players' Hitpoints.
	Firemaking	Allows players to make fires.
	Woodcutting	Allows players to cut down trees to obtain logs.

Members-only skills

	Agility	Allows players to use shortcuts and increases the rate at which energy recharges.
	Herblore	Allows players to make potions.
	Thieving	Allows players to steal from market stalls and chests and 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.
	Hunter	Allows players to hunt and catch animals through various methods.

Skill types

There are four types of skills in RuneScape: Support, Gathering, Combat, and Artisan.

Support skills - These skills have no classification.

  Agility, Thieving, and, Slayer.

Gathering skills - These skills involve obtaining resources or items from the environment..

Mining, Fishing, Woodcutting, Hunter, and Farming.

Combat skills - These skills involve fighting in Combat.

Attack, Strength, Defence, Magic, Ranged, Prayer, and Hitpoints.

Artisan skills - These skills involve processing items obtained through extraction skills into finished products.

Cooking, Smithing, Fletching, Firemaking, Herblore, Crafting, Runecrafting and Construction.

Experience increase

The amount of experience needed for every level-up increases approximately by 10% for every level. This is shown in the way that it is 83 experience between levels 1 and 2, but 91 experience between levels 2 and 3. (10% of 83 is roughly 8, therefore the next level-up would require 91 experience.) Therefore the required experience for each level-up grows exponentially; the growth of experience gaps between levels gets faster and faster at higher levels. The experience table clearly indicates this.

In addition, the experience required doubles approximately every seven levels. For example, the experience needed for level 92 in a skill is almost exactly half of that needed to reach level 99.

The below equation directly gives the number of experience per level:

$total \ experience = \left \lfloor \frac {\sum_{x = 1} ^ {L - 1} \left \lfloor x + 300 \times 2 ^ \frac {x} {7} \right \rfloor} {4} \right \rfloor$

This can be further derived into a closed-form function with a positive real variable L (standing for level), although this requires ignoring one floor function of the exact formula and thus contains an exceedingly minor error margin. The approximation rapidly approaches the original sum asymptotically. The function is as follows:

$total \ experience \approx \left \lfloor \frac{1}{8} \cdot \left( {L}^{2} - L \right) + 75 \cdot \frac{{2}^{\frac{L-1}{7}}-1} {1 - \sqrt[7]{0.5}} \right \rfloor$