What a day! Thank you so much to everyone who has logged in and played Sailing.
Over 181,179 of you have trained the skill so far, with a total of 1.06b Sailing XP gained. Over 972 Soups have been earned alone. It's been truly wonderful watching so many of you discover and explore Gielinor's ocean.... And there's more to come! We’ve also seen your feedback, heard your praise, and recognised your frustrations.
Sailing is a vast and expansive skill, with content spread across all levels. Throughout your levelling journey, you’ll unlock various upgrades along the way that help you level up even faster – whether it be a new tool or an entirely different way to train. As you progress, you’ll notice that your experience rates increase too! We highly encourage players to be diverse in the way they’re training, rather than sticking to one thing if you want to maximise your potential, since these milestone unlocks sometimes lead to significant 'breakpoints' in the XP/hr available to you. This means that even if you're running Port Tasks, unlocking a new tier of shipwreck to salvage or a new set of things to chart might lead to better experience gains.
We’ve taken time to check the data available to us and compared that to what we’d expected players to achieve during the 1-30 grind. While the top percentile of players are close to our predictions, it’s clear that most are not sharing the same experience. When combining this data alongside your feedback, we felt some changes were needed.
In this section we’d like to talk about the early grind, specifically between levels 1-30, and what we’re doing to help improve that.
- Increased the base XP from each Charting point discovered. We’ll also be retroactively granting the difference in XP gained for those who have already discovered said Charting point, which will come tomorrow via a coldfix so we have time to make sure no single point of XP is missed!
- Generic charting point XP increased from 15 XP to 35 XP.
- Spyglass charting point XP increased from 15 XP to 50 XP.
- Drink Crate charting point XP increased from 20 XP to 75 XP.
- Current Duck charting point XP increased from 30 XP to 125 XP.
- Mermaid Dive point charting XP increased from 60 XP to 175 XP.
- Weather troll point charting XP increased from 120 XP to 250 XP.
- Increased the XP gained when fully Charting a section of sea. We’ll also be retroactively granting the difference in XP gained for those who have already discovered said Charting point, which will come tomorrow via a coldfix so we have time to make sure no single point of XP is missed! Note: the interface will still show the old XP values until this coldfix is out.
- Level 5 Seas increased from 100 XP to 190 XP.
- Level 12 Seas increased from 200 XP to 270 XP.
- Level 22 Seas increased from 470 XP to 510 XP.
- Level 24 Seas increased from 570 XP to 590 XP.
- Increased the XP gained from completing Port Tasks from levels 1-30 by 20%
- It is not possible for us to retroactively grant the difference in XP that would have been gained here.
- Increased the XP gained from Shipwreck salvage from levels 1-30 by 20%
- It is not possible for us to retroactively grant the difference in XP that would have been gained here.
- Increased the time all Shipwreck salvage lasts by an additional minute.
- Note: the timer for Shipwreck salvage de-spawning starts the moment a player begins to salvage.
These changes won’t suddenly make you flash through the early levels and find yourself halfway to maxing, but we hope they help make it feel a little better than it currently does and make exploring the seas feel even more rewarding!
It's been a thrill to see everyone finally jumping on and fully experience Sailing. Today's been great and I can't wait to see the culmination of the 99 race over the coming days.
XP rates are a huge topic which we're seeing lots of discussion around. It's one of the most important parts of any skill to get right and we'll make the adjustments necessary both now and in future weeks if needed, ensuring Sailing is in the right spot for the long term.
I'd like to explain our intentions with Sailing balancing.
Sailing 1-99 by our calculations is in a good place. It fits nicely within the faster 50% of our skills. We think this is appropriate for the level of attention it requires and number of resources it will consume.
The big difference with Sailing is that we intentionally took a different approach for the early levels, especially 1-30. Most skills in the game race through these levels extremely quickly, some skipping it almost entirely via quests too. We put more weighting on this part of progression, ramping up XP gain slower than usual until the later levels. The primary reason for this was to help the learning process for captaining your boat, ensuring you felt well equipped and ready for the Barracuda trial by the time you got there.
We've been clear to ourselves before launch that we don't want to make rash calls, in knowledge that players will not be making optimal decisions, and that efficient methods will be discovered as information is shared. However, we went into the launch prepared, with the help of our Analytics team who've got reports automatically generating, providing us valuable information on the XP rates you are all getting at different level brackets. That has been immensely valuable in spotting what should be changed considering the feedback many of you have presented.
With that in mind, we're happy we have the info we need to make an appropriate buff here, with the aim of specifically improving 1-30 primarily.
Thank you again and apologies we didn't get it to where it ought to have been on launch. That said, what we promise is we will always listen to your feedback and adjust until we're happy it's right
We're halving the amount of Construction XP given from all Sailing workbenches. Unintentionally, Sailing introduced an AFK-style Construction method with XP rates that are much higher than we had intended for the effort required. There's an established Construction XP value for each plank that we tried to stay true to. However, we failed to consider just how AFK this method would be, and whether we should stray from the established XP value. We considered other options, such as increasing the animation time it takes to create items, but this would have had unintended negative effects on important Sailing items like Boat Repair Kits. Adjusting the Construction XP from Planks feels like the right way to go to resolve this issue, but we'll of course keep an eye on your feedback.
Port Tasks will be the first thing that you're likely to do when training Sailing after completing the Pandemonium quest. Deliver cargo from A to B, easy peasy. And, what's even better, is that from Level 7 you can grab yourself two at once! Use this to grab multiple tasks towards the same destination, or stop off at a mid-point and grab an extra task on your way to keep that XP steadily increasing.
While this is a good method, exploring the seas will give you major benefits to your Sailing endeavours alongside experience. Not only do you get a nice chunk of bonus XP from fully charting an area, but you'll also unlock rapids within that area to make you faster. With over 50 Charting points for you to find in the early game areas, or locations to view at Level 1, there's plenty of options for you to explore! Make sure to upgrade your ship where you can so that you can make use of these rapids and maximise your speed at sea - we'd recommend upgrading to an Iron Helm to make use of the rapids that you unlock, and upgrading your sails & hull as you progress to keep your ship speed increasing!
It's a good thing to keep in mind that whenever you're travelling the sea, whether it be finding salvage, or just charting, it's wise to have a port task (or two) active so you always have some Sailing experience you can cash in while working towards more unlocks.
Keep an eye out for chance encounters too! Saving a castaway, catching a gust of wind allowing you to trim your sails multiple times, the ocean man who takes you by the hand and leads you to the land, and many more! They give you either XP or loot for each time you complete them!
You can also gain extra Charting Tools from some early quests including Crowbars from 'Prying Times' at Level 15, and the Current Duck from 'Current Affairs' at Level 22, which will give you more options for charting on top of the Sailing XP that they award on completion.
Finally, it's always worth moving to newly unlocked Notice Boards when you unlock their associated docks, as these will give you higher level tasks that grant more Sailing experience. Remember that you can just teleport there and recover your boat (assuming you've got nothing in your Cargo Hold that you're not willing to lose), or you could sail there yourself and tick off some extra charting tasks along the way!
Ultimately this is just a rough example of how you can tackle the seas, as the beauty of Sailing, much like Old School, is that you can choose how you play! We hope that you continue to play in a way that you enjoy the most!
Sailing is one of our biggest updates ever, and although we’ve done our utmost to make sure all issues have been fixed for launch during Alpha and Beta testing, there may be bugs or unexpected issues that occur.
To get issues fixed effectively, we’ll triage them based mainly on player impact, ensuring that the most ‘game-breaking’ ones are dealt with first where possible. We’ll keep this news post updated with the most important bugs that we’re aware of, and the Game Status page will also be updated for anything that might impact downtime. For more minor bugs or issues, we’ll use a space within the OSRS Discord and keep it updated as regularly as possible.
Some bugs will be fixed straight away, and others may require a reboot to fix. We’ll assess this based on our triage process, where the most player-impacting and game-impacting ones are fixed as quickly as possible.
If you’ve encountered a bug or issue, please consider using in-game bug report button to make us aware of it - we'd really appreciate it!
You may also want to consider reporting them to us via Discord in the ‘Sailing’ channel. This is because Discord’s functionality includes the ability for users to upload images or files, which can be useful to us when we identify bugs or issues. Please note, tagging individual staff members outside of the Community Management team is not required and may disrupt their work.
Finally, we often check our owned and community-ran social media platforms, including X, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook - feel free to post there and we'll do our best to update you where we can.
Check back here for known issues.
Crashes
- 10:15 UTC - If you are experiencing client crashes using Runelite, try disabling the 'GPU' plugin or '117HD' plugin whilst the developers work on a fix.
Boats getting stuck
We'll do our best to address any mapping issues that arise from bug reports in this update. In the short-term, here's how you can escape if you get stuck on your boat:
- If you are at the Dock, right-click the Gangplank to leave, and then relog.
- If you are out at sea, right-click the Tiller and click 'Escape', and then relog. This will cause you to lose any Cargo in your hold but will reset the ship.
- If you are at the Dock and unable to click the Dock to leave or the Tiller to 'Escape', then relog.
Other
- 09:15 UTC - Some of the new music tracks are described as unlocking "on various islands out a sea".
- 10:30 UTC - Similarly to above, if you're seeing boats as invisible, please disable the 'Legacy GPU' plug-in or '117HD' plugin whilst the developers work on a fix.
Check back here for fixed issues.
- 08:37 UTC - We've fixed an issue where the HiScores 'Hall of Fame' were not up to date.
- 13:20 UTC - Daddy's Special Water's special water was more generous than intended, and will now give an appropriate level of XP.
- 17:45 UTC - We balanced sea creatures based on player damage, but the Dwarven Multi-cannon wasn’t included in those calculations. As a temporary measure, it has been disabled when fighting sea creatures. We’ll review its intended role and make further updates in the coming days.
- 21:40 UTC - Sea Charting drinks can teleport your boat, which unintentionally wipes your Cargo Hold. We've made a fix to prevent this from happening and we can confirm that items will be restored to those that lost them as a result of this. We'll have more information to share on this tomorrow.
You can also discuss this update on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.
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