Old School RuneScape Skills Explained

Old School RuneScape is set in a medieval fantasy world. A player's character can do many things, including fighting monsters, gathering resources to make items and food, crafting skills to make armor and weapons from raw materials or other players' items for profit, mixing ingredients together with your skill levels to create potions that give temporary boosts like increased strength or agility. 

Today, we're going to focus on the various OSRS skills available to players today and how they can help you earn more OSRS GP.

Skills are a player's attributes that can be advanced at some point in the game. Skills come from doing tasks and completing missions until you earn enough experience for your level to go up, such as cooking food or chopping down trees. Some abilities let players cook and use magic with other functions coming together nicely like fire making being able to do both - make fires and cook food.

Everything You Need To Know About OSRS Skills

There are 23 different skills in Old School RuneScape. All capabilities start out at level 1 except for Hitpoints, which start off at level 10. Players can enhance an ability to stage 99 and then expand their skill up to 200 million but get no additional experience if they do so.

Free-to-play skills

There are 15 free-to-play skills:

Attack - Wielding stronger melee weapons and hitting monsters more accurately in Melee.
Strength - Dealing more melee damage and equipping certain weapons.
Defence - Wearing stronger armour and decreasing chance of being hit.
Ranged - Equipping stronger ranged weapons and armour. It also increases ranged accuracy.
Prayer - Activating temporary aids to assist in combat.
Magic - Casting various combat and utility spells.
Runecraft - Creating runes used for casting Magic.
Hitpoints - Amount of damage you can withstand.
Crafting - Creating items such as jewelry, pottery, and ranged armour.
Mining   - Obtaining ores and minerals from rocks.
Smithing - Smelting ores into bars and forging bars into armour and weapons.
Fishing - Catching fish.
Cooking - Making and cooking food.
Firemaking - Lighting fires.
Woodcutting - Chopping down trees.

Members-only skills

There are 8 members-only skills:

Agility - Traversing shortcuts and increases the rate at which energy recharges.
Herblore - Cleaning and using herbs to create potions.
Thieving - Stealing from market stalls and chests and pickpocketing non-player characters.
Fletching - Creating ranged weapons and ammunition.
Slayer - Killing certain monsters that can't normally be defeated.
Farming - Planting and harvesting crops.
Construction - Building a player-owned house.
Hunter - Capturing wild animals and creatures.

The amount of experience needed for every level-up increases exponentially, growing larger by 10% for every seven levels. This is shown in the way that it takes 83 exp to reach level 2 and 91 exp to reach 3 -- an exponential growth rate with a doubling time horizon of 7 levels (83/7 = 12). The required experience grows much more quickly than this at higher levels; which is clearly seen when comparing Level 1's 8000 EXP requirement vs. Level 16's 60250 EXP requirement.