News

Now that you’ve unwrapped the Winter Summit, it’s time for you to vote on what you’ve seen!

If you’re reading this, it means you just finished watching the Winter Summit – or, you missed it and you’re here to catch up.

For those of you who tuned in, thanks for watching! We hope you’re as excited as we are about all the cool content coming next year. If you were one of the naughty little elves who missed the live show, you can check out the VOD on Twitch or on YouTube (link coming soon).

As a refresher, we’ve put together this handy summary of everything we talked about on stream – but there’s also a load of other stuff (like the Wilderness Boss Rework) still on the cards for the first half of 2023.

A first look at the roadmap for the first half of 2023!

You’ll also notice a handful of poll questions artfully sprinkled throughout this blog. In accordance with our swanky new poll charter, a lot of these are ‘green light’ questions which just give us permission to start working on the things we spoke about during the Summit. For example, there’s a poll live right now asking whether you’d like us to add a new skill to the game – be sure to cast your vote before it closes.

As for the questions in this blog, they’ll go live on December 20th – so get those voting fingers ready!

New Skill

Well, we have to open with the evening’s biggest mic drop moment – we’re hoping to bring a new skill to Old School RuneScape, and we want YOU to help design it!

As we mentioned above, there’s a poll live right now where you can cast your vote, and an entire blog laying out exactly how we’d like to approach the design. It features a helpful breakdown of each polling stage en route to launch and a video explainer featuring our very own Mod Ayiza to bring you up to speed.

Click the button below to go right to the blog!

Please do have a read through the blog before casting your vote, and feel free to hop on Reddit, Discord, Twitter, or the Official Forums to join the discussion. We’re beyond excited about the prospect of working with the community to design our new skill, and we want to kick off the collaborative spirit straight away!

But the excitement doesn’t end there. Next up, we’re lifting the veil on a ‘mysterious quest’ that’s recently become a whole lot less mysterious…

As the name suggests, we're picking up where Desert Treasure left off 17 years ago, to delve deeper into the enigmatic Mahjarrat and the history of a long-forgotten empire…

We've been paving the way for this Grandmaster quest for almost two years with Below Ice Mountain, Temple of the Eye, The Garden of Death, and in the not-too-distant future: Secrets of the North.

Those of you who remember Desert Treasure may recall traipsing across all of Gielinor to find four diamonds - one for each of the ancient elements: Blood, Ice, Shadow and Smoke - guarded by four fearsome foes.

So, you had four quests to pave the way, introducing four new areas to explore… you’d best be prepared to fight four ferocious new bosses if you’re to have even the faintest hope of uncovering the secrets beneath the Kharidian Desert…

For taking on The Whisperer, Duke Sucellus, Vardorvis and The Leviathan, you’ll gain access to Old School’s first-ever alternative Prayer Book: the Ruinous Powers.

Now, it’s still a bit too early to go into specifics, but we can tell you that we plan to work with the community to devise a powerful new set of Prayers. You'll have to weigh-up the familiarity of the Prayers you know and love against the thrill of tapping into forces best left forgotten…

Some of you may be familiar with Ancient Curses, which were added to RuneScape in 2009. While there are bound to be some similarities thematically, we want to make it clear that the Ruinous Powers are not Curses, and that we have no plans to add the Ancient Curses to Old School. Instead, we want to collaborate with our community to fully realise the Ruinous Powers together.

Still not satisfied? You adventuring types are insatiable. Fortunately, we've got more for you!

Not to toot our own horn, but the bosses for this quest are awesome – so we’d like to give you the opportunity to vote on whether you’d like The Whisperer, Duke Sucellus, Vardorvis and The Leviathan to be unlocked as repeatable bosses after the quest is complete. The fearsome foursome would come bundled with some exciting new uniques – to be determined at a later date, with your help - including the iconic Virtus Robes.

While it’s still early stages, and we haven’t locked down our designs, it’s worth remembering that this is a Grandmaster quest. If you’ve faced Galvek or the Fragment of Seren, you’ll know how tough they can be – and we plan to make these Ancient horrors even tougher.

Think you’ve got what it takes? Well, here are the requirements, just to make sure:

• Quest Requirements:
  • Desert Treasure I
  • Secrets of the North
  • Enakhra's Lament
  • Temple of the Eye
  • The Garden of Death
  • Below Ice Mountain

• Skill Requirements:
  • Unconfirmed, but you can expect requirements in multiple skills, one of them being Prayer.
  • While not a hard requirement, we'd recommend a Combat Level of 100.

• Rewards:
  • 5 Quest Points.
  • A lamp, offering 100,000 Prayer XP.
  • The Ruinous Powers.
  • The ability to repeat the four bosses encountered during the quest for unique rewards.

Now it’s your turn! We’ve got not one, not two, but three questions about Desert Treasure II – The Fallen Empire for you to cast your votes on. Take a look, and think very carefully before you go poking your nose into Ancient empires’ business…

If you're looking for more Desert Treasure II content or to learn about its precursor (Secrets of the North), cast your eyes over this handy video before reading further!

If you caught the Winter Summit (or even just the video above), you'll have seen that the 'Mysterious Quest' we've talked so much about has been given a name: Secrets of the North.

You’ll have to tick this one off the Quest list before being able to take on Desert Treasure II, so you best keep reading!

While we don’t have anything more to poll for Secrets of the North, we can share a few tidbits of information.

For starters, you can start uncovering the titular secrets for yourself on January 11th, 2023.

In the meantime, you might want to make sure you meet all of the requirements listed below!

• Quest Requirements
  • Making Friends With My Arm
  • The General's Shadow
  • Devious Minds
  • Hazeel Cult

• Skill Requirements
  • 69 Agility
  • 64 Thieving
  • 56 Hunter
  • We'd recommend a Combat Level of 85

And here are the rewards you can expect for your troubles:

• Rewards
  • 2 Quest Points
  • 60,000 Agility XP
  • 50,000 Thieving XP
  • 40,000 Hunter XP
  • Access to a repeatable, solo-only boss

Speaking of rewards, we have a confession to make. Amidst all the mystery, we may have been a little sneaky when we polled some of them – after all, we couldn’t let you know how Ancient this quest was going to be!

So here’s the list of rewards you voted for in November, alongside their actual in-game names. You’ll notice that the Saturated Heart is absent, and that’s because its name is unchanged.

As a reminder, these rewards are all dropped by the repeatable, solo-only Phantom boss that you'll unlock after completing the quest.

• Phantom Essence → Ancient Essence
• Bloodletter Shards & Bow → Venator Shards & Bow
• Soulblight Icon & Sceptre → Ancient Icon & Sceptre
• Magister's Brew → Forgotten Brew

Now, let's do away with secrets but keep ourselves very much in the north...

We’re bringing back Bounty Hunter. What more is there to say?

Okay, just joking – there’s obviously quite a lot to say. We feel it’s high time we made good on our promise to revive this fast-paced PvP minigame, which has existed in one form or another throughout Old School’s 10-year lifespan.

You’ll notice that we’re not seeking a greenlight for Bounty Hunter itself, since we've already promised to bring it back. However, we plan to involve the community in several rounds of polling to get the final content just right. We want to work with all of you to build something that disincentivises shady behaviour while rewarding players who engage with the content in good faith, in the hopes of returning this much maligned minigame to its former glory.

For those not in the know, Bounty Hunter pits players who fancy a spot of PvP action against others of similar combat levels, with similar amounts of wealth at stake. You step into an area, get assigned your bounty, and hunt them down!

Killing your bounty acts like any other PvP kill – you get whatever items they weren’t protecting, plus an extra reward for dispatching your target.

Bounty Hunter occupies a special place for those of you who feel like traditional, ‘Edge-style’ PvP has been displaced by No-Honour and Outlast PvP interactions. For Bounty Hunter, we want to put the fast-paced, reset-heavy style you know and love at the forefront, so that people taking their first tentative steps towards brutally murdering their fellow players aren’t starting out at the deep end.

In the Summit, we also proposed bringing back Bounty Hunter Craters. These first appeared in RuneScape in 2007, bundled with the removal of Wilderness PvP – fortunately for PKers, we’re not planning to block PvP everywhere else this time, and the addition of craters will not massively change the overworld map of the Wilderness.

While they won’t look the same, or be in the same location as previous craters, they’ll functionally be the same thing. The key takeaway is that we’re separating combat brackets into zones players must choose to enter. This makes Bounty Hunter as opt-in as opt-in gets, which frees us up to get experimental with the content in ways we haven’t in the past.

While any and all rewards will be determined by community consultation and various rounds of polling, we want to reward would-be Bounty Hunters (or pesky Rogues) with rewards in-line with the Ancient Warrior equipment you know from Last Man Standing, Deadman Mode, or the 2008 release of PvP Worlds in RuneScape.

We want the rewards system to feel worthwhile for actively engaged PKers without incentivising gold farmers to ruin everyone else’s fun. In doing so, we might just open up account builds that haven’t been seen since the earliest days of Old School RuneScape – could this be the glorious return of 20 Defence accounts?

Emblems and killstreaks are also key elements, allowing players to opt-in to extra risk and challenge themselves to rack up rewards before cashing out. We’re looking forward to exploring exactly how this system will work in the coming weeks.

The long and the short of it is, this update will bring back the same Bounty Hunter you know and love… but better.

After all the bloodshed detailed above, we feel like it's time for a change of pace. Perhaps something that encourages working with other players instead of hunting them down for bounties?

Introducing Forestry, a Woodcutting expansion that will see you interacting with Gielinor’s flora and fauna in ways you’ve never seen before!

Forestry aims to make Woodcutting a more social experience by removing resource competition, introducing new events, and expanding the skill’s economic offerings. Best of all, every one of these features can be found out in the wild, on every part of the map – where there are trees, there’s Forestry!

To get started, you’ll pick up a Forestry Kit from none other than the Freaky Forester himself. Then, while cutting trees, you’ll have the chance to encounter a Forestry event: chasing away poachers, culling the pheasant population, rehoming bees, or even giving a friendly tree ent a stylish haircut.

You may also encounter the forest’s more mysterious inhabitants, who may just be inclined to hand over special rewards for helping them maintain their home.

Rewards and XP from Forestry will scale with Woodcutting levels, so that players can play together at any level without missing out. We’ll also adjust tree de-spawning so that grouping up is no longer punished, and perhaps even give bonuses when more people are cutting the same tree.

Rewards include Leaves, a new resource that you’ll collect alongside Logs and use to build special Forester’s campfires or brew fancy artisanal teas packed with healthy nutrients – and buffs!

What about those 'economic offerings' we mentioned? We'd like to introduce a new Forestry currency that can be used (along with Logs of all tiers) to purchase unique rewards and components for your Forestry Kit.

If you’re already well-stocked, you’ll be able to sell these components to other players – and if you’re especially good at other production or gathering skills, you can make them for yourself and sell them on for profit.

Obviously we want to work with the community to refine the more unique rewards, but we have a handful of ideas to start with – including an equippable log basket, two-handed axes, a bee box for your Player Owned House, and perhaps even a way to obtain the Lumberjack Outfit without hanging around a stinking swamp for hours on end.

If you'd like to hear more, check out this handy segment from the Summit!

We’re excited about all the possibilities Forestry: Way of the Forester could bring to the game, and we hope you are too! We’ll have more details to share in the coming year, but for now, we need to ask you green-thumbed gamers to give us the green light:

Still in the mood for some skilling? Or perhaps you'd actually like to cut back on your XP gains? Either way, you’re gonna love this next bit…

NOTE: We have made a number of changes since this blog originally went live. Please see the "An Update on Official Account Builds" blog before casting your vote!

Since the earliest days of Old School RuneScape, there have been players who go against the grain, eschewing petty trifles like ‘gear’ and ‘killing things more good’ in favour of building 10HP accounts, never moving past 1 Defence, and taking on all manner of other exciting challenges.

In late 2014, we officially supported an alternative playstyle for the first time with the introduction of Ironman mode. Now, eight years later, we want to give players even more power to customise their experience and play Old School their way.

We’d like to add official support for alternative playstyles. Whether you’re a relative newbie who just loves skilling, or a dedicated 1 Defence pure who’s gone almost a decade without gaining XP, you’ll soon be able to opt-in to our Official Account Builds System and show the world what you’re made of!

Players of all game modes will be allowed to add restrictions.

Initially we want to restrict Combat skills and support Level 3 pures and 1 Defence pures – although the system could be expanded to include further rulesets (807s? 807s? Anyone?) in future. You’ll still be able to customise your account in all kinds of wacky ways with a range of combat-based options to choose from.

Here’s what the interface for setting up your build could look like! (WIP - 10HP Pure is no longer an available option)

Restricted accounts will work just like unrestricted accounts, with one crucial difference: they cannot make gains in content they’re restricted from. This applies backwards, too – you can’t opt-in to the system if you’ve already gained XP beyond the restrictions you’ve chosen.

For example, if your account still has only non-combat skills, you’ll still be able to choose the Skiller Pure restriction. Now no matter what hijinks you get up to, you’ll be unable to receive XP in any of the Combat skills. Yes, this means what you think it does – a skilling pure could avoid claiming the Prayer XP reward from Priest in Peril and gain access to Morytania at level 3.

If you realise that the restricted life is not for you, you can always opt-out – although you’ll regain all the XP you avoided as soon as you do, so be careful! Because we’re tracking the XP you would have gained regardless of whether you take it or not, we’re also able to spot the purists among you who’ve never broken their restrictions regardless of how tempting a swamp full of ghouls looks from over the fence.

By adding support for official account builds, we hope to remove access limitations and allow players to show off their commitment with new chat icons, outfits, and HiScores. We’ve seen what official support can do for niche playstyles in the past, and we’re excited to help a new crop of communities flourish under the Old School banner.

Tech Update

Outside of in-game content, we spoke about a raft of updates relating to Jagex Accounts and improved security, alongside server and gameplay stability improvements. We’re not going to get into that in this blog, but you can learn more about them in this clip from the Summit:

If you'd like to learn more about the Mobile TLI Rework mentioned in the video above, you can read all about it in this dedicated blog!

And with that, we’ve fully unwrapped the 2022 Winter Summit! As you can tell we’re extremely excited for the first half of 2023 – including a bunch of stuff we haven’t mentioned, like the Wilderness Boss Rework!

If you tuned in to the livestream, we'd love it if you could take the time to fill out this survey and let us know how we could improve it for our next one, scheduled for Summer 2023!

But it’s not time to go into hibernation just yet – now that you’ve read the blog, we need you to get your skates on and head to the polls on December 20th, when you’ll get to cast your vote on everything you’ve just read about. Remember to vote in the current poll too, to have your say on a new skill!

In the meantime, we hope to see you excitedly chattering about everything we’ve showed off on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and the Official Forums. See you there, and have a wonderful holiday season!

Mods Arcane, Archie, Argo, Ash, Ayiza, Boko, Bruno, Chilly, Crystal, Curse, Daizong, Dylan, Ed, Elena, Errol, Fed, Gecko, Gizmo, Goblin, Grub, Halo, Hend, Hornet, Husky, Jalo, Keyser, Kieren, Kirby, Kurotou, Lenny, Light, Mack, Markos, Maylea, Meat, Moogle, Morty, Nin, Nylu, Other, Redfield, Regent, Roq, Ry, Sarnie, Shroom, Sigma, Skylark, Soffan, Sova, Squid, Starry, Stevew, Surma, Tide, Titus, Torrance, Tyran, Veda, Vegard, West & Wolfy

The Old School Team.