Overview
Hello There! Thanks for giving my little guide a read. This is something i’ve been working on for a very long time. The idea was to make a “New/Returning/Veteran player’s guide” as complete and informative as possible, but also, taking into consideration the most elemental features; because a lot of things changes in our game, but some things stay the same.
INTRODUCTION
Hello There! Today i want to share with you a guide i’ve been making for the last couple months. The purpose of this guide is helping out new, returning and even veteran players navigate the user interface menu, the gameplay and graphics settings, along helping out new players configure their very own ability bars; wether they’re in F2P or Member worlds and, help them undertand some of the fundamentals behind them, all that information, who sometimes, can get a little overwhelming due the sheer amount of it.
With that being said, this guide contains a couple of “Cheatsheets” along the way, carefully designed to contain as much information and visual examples as possible in order to enrich and make each section of this guide easier to understand. Now, without further ado, let’s get right into it.
USER INTERFACE
Undoubtedly, one of the most important things of any game; regardless of its genre, is the user interface, as this is where all your controls, buttons and vital information is found. As a new RuneScape player, you’re welcomed with a rather confusing interface where Everything seems to be all over the place (as seen on the image above) without clear indication of what it does.
The majority of the time, when you arrive as a fresh player, the first hour or so is spent on “figuring out” what everything does by trial and error and, by the end of it, you end up even more confused, and with plenty of time invested.
Now, if you take a look at the First Cheatsheet below, you’ll notice there’s a lot of windows and information scattered all over the place, but don’t be afraid as i’ll guide you through them in the next couple of paragraphs.
“This is a general overview of your user interface and its many windows”.
- The main chatbox
To get things started, you’ll need to focus your attention on the “Main chatbox window”, there you’ll find all the information displayed in game; be it a Goblin examine text, your friends flexing their Chickens killcount, an in-game announcement, a rare drop, a skill level up or a message telling you about how you burnt those shrimps (again). This is where all of the wordplay comes alive, but don’t fret about receiving lots of spam because you can filter those messages by clicking on the first button of this handy header bar; for more information about these icons, refer to the mini-cheatsheet below.
“Here’s the magic behind the Chat Message filters”.
Returning to the yellow window, there you can also drag and drop your friend’s, group or clan chat windows, the cool thing about it is that you can configure it to your heart’s content and see what works best for your playstyle; wether if you want to have only your friends chat window, or you prefer to talk to your clan, the choice is yours.
- The main action bar and secondary action bars.
Moving on, we have the Green and Purple windows, where you can see your Main Action Bar (who might be minimized, so click on the top right yellow icon to maximize it) alongside your Auxiliary action bars, to not delve too much into what these action bars do, they allow you to cast your abilities, use items directly from them (if they have an associated keybind) use prayers to help you in combat and even use teleports to different locations. Sounds amazing right? That’s why it’s recommended to have them on the center of your screen and in your line of sight.
- The Inventory window.
The blue window contains your inventory, which also contains your items; such as food, potions, Weapon Switches, Logs, Raw fish and others, this window should also be within your line of sight in order to keep track of the items you’re carrying, looting or making.
- The Familiar and ability spellbooks window.
The red window is equally important as it serves as an expansion for both your inventory; if you’re using a “beast of burden” familiar, or your ability spellbooks; if you’re not using a familiar. As you make your way through the game, you’ll unlock a wide array of useful familiars (through the Summoning Skill) which can help you with your skilling (by offering invisible boosts), with combat (by offering Passive abilities and Powerful special attacks) and, some of them are sworn to carry your burdens (namely the Terrorbirds, War Tortoise, Pack Yak and Pack Mammoths, known as Beasts of Burden), the latter can help you bring extra food to your Bossing trips, or even help you stay longer at certain skilling spots, so you can stay there a bit longer without needing to visit your bank as often.
You can customize your familiar options by right clicking on the Summoning Medallion (That Blue Icon with a Wolf Head). When you’re not using a familiar, switch to the other tabs, as these will help you use abilities you couldn’t include in your main action bars. If you’re not doing any of the above, then drag and drop the Music tab here, that way you can enjoy some amazing tracks while you play.
- The Ribbon.
The small Mint Green window is your ribbon bar, here you can unlock your interface (by clicking on the little lock icon, or just by clicking the letter “L” in your keyboard, assuming you haven’t configured your keybinds yet), this will let you re-arrange the interface windows to your liking. On the cheatsheet above, you can see a standard “Bottom right corner style”, which isn’t too terrible and a good foundation to change and improve progressively throughout your playthrough.
- The Skills window, Prayers/Ancient Curses and logs.
The orange window contains your skills levels, prayers/ancient curses (useful when you’re in combat) and your Drop log/RuneMetrics stats, which helps you keep track of your items or damage/XP. During minigames or Treasure trails compass clues, the interface also goes here, so it helps you out by keeping track of those interfaces in a comfortable spot.
- The Equipment window.
The light blue window contains your equipment, here you can see a mini-you version of your character alongside the items you have equipped.
- The Minimap.
Finally, the golden window on the upper right corner displays the minimap, here you can see where you stand in a current area, also, it helps you change skyboxes, filters, open the world hop interface (if you want to switch to a more active/quiet world) and Teleport to the various Lodestones you have unlocked. Once again, make sure you right click every single icon here, you’ll find plenty of useful and cool options to try out.
- The Developer Console.
Now, leaving all these interface windows to the side there’s a useful tool known as the “Developer console”, which can be accessed by pressing the Keys [Alt] + [¬] (the key on the left of the number 1 key and below the ESC key) or the keys [Option] + [< >] if you’re using a MAC.
The purpose of the developer console is to display some performance information of your game, like the amount of FPS you’re getting, how much memory the game is consuming, how much of the Game Disk Cache has been downloaded; and if the game’s still downloading the cache files, and finally, it shows your ping. All available commands will be shown in the next table:
If you type the command a second time, the information window will be hidden and, in order to close the developer console, just click the same combination of keys used previously.
LAYOUT WINDOWS
All of those windows shown on the bottom half of the Cheatsheet above, represent a different interface that will appear in the game at some point; like your bank interface, dialogue windows, xp counters, achievements, level up progress icons, loot interface, and many more. The arrangement showcased in the cheatsheet is just an example aimed to make each of these windows easier to find.
You can resize some of these windows and re-locate them to an specific spot that suits your playstyle. Once you are done make sure to click [SAVE AND EXIT] and then on the [SAVE LAYOUT] option select the Custom interface of your choosing; called [MY CUSTOM 1/2/3/ETC], this way you can have multiple layouts for different activities.
In order to access the layout windows editor, you just need to click the ESC key and click on the [EDIT LAYOUT MODE] option, from there, click the [ADVANCED OPTIONS] button, and check the various windows you want to display, overall it’s just a matter of resizing and rearranging them to your heart’s content.
GRAPHICS SETTINGS (Part 1)
You may have seen a couple of amazing screenshots on the subreddit or the Steam community page, yes, those screenshots that are “wallpaper worthy” and take your breath away, In order to make your PC run in such a beautiful fashion, you will need to understand what each setting does and how it impacts the game performance; because as you’d might expect, higher graphics can take a heavy toll on your PC and, in some old laptops, they can even match your frying pan’s temperature (ideal for some shrimp cooking).
By default, and once you run the game for the first time, it will run an “Auto Setup” to determine which option works best for your PC, however, you may still want to customize a couple of settings here and there, as some of these options may only provide minimal improvements at the expense of a smoother performance. On the following Cheatsheet, i’ll explain all of these options in detail alongside some visual examples.
The Current available screen resolutions are: [950 x 540], [1920 x 1080] and [2560 x 1440], the [Fullscreen mode] will use the entire area of the screen and, [Windowed] mode will let you resize the game window to your liking.
“Here’s where you can configure your graphics to look as good as they can, or optimize the performance of your PC by lowering them”.
One of the most impactful settings on the game is the [DRAW DISTANCE]; which can be helpful on some Bossing arenas (like Solak, Nex: Angel of Death, Raids, Araxxor, Elite Dungeons and The Wilderness; to see potential attackers on the horizon), paired with a camera set on [FREEDOM – CLASSIC] mode, will let you see your target’s a lot more clearly. Overall, i’d recommend something like Medium or High depending on your PC specs. But, If you have a bottlenecked PC or laptop, choose the lower setting.
Vsync or Vertical Synchronization, will help you prevent screen tearing in your game by matching the frame rate of the game and your monitor refresh rate, for this feature keep in mind the following: if you set your game at 120 FPS but only have a 60 Hz monitor, you won’t be able to see any extra FPS, but, if you were to play on a 144Hz monitor, you will be able to see those 120 FPS.
[Here a couple of quick videos about this topic]:
On the other hand, [Anti aliasing quality], will help you produce a smoother image quality, for the most part, this feature won’t be really noticeable unless you zoom your camera very close, and give how impactful this setting is, it’s adviced to turn it off if you’re having performance issues.
The [Antialiasing mode] included in the game are the high performance option [FXAA] which is slightly less taxing than the [MSAA] option; which consumes a bit more of resources, and the combination of [FXAA+MSAA] which makes certain objects in the game blurry.
The next couple of settings are [Lighting detail] and [Bloom], in the most essential sense of the word, these settings will only help you produce a more realistic image, by simulating accurate light bounces on a specific areas and objects and “Enhancing” light sources (like suns, moons, fires and lava), keep in mind tho, the latter can be pretty aggresive to the eyes, so use moderately.
[Anisotropic Filtering], what this setting does is add a little more of detail to far away objects by making them sharper the higher this filter goes, for instance, if set to [OFF], far off textures will look slightly blurry, whereas in a high setting [16x] these far off textures will look sharper and nicer. In a similar fashion to Draw distance, if the game performance starts to dwindle down, it’s recommended to set this setting to OFF.
The [Foreground FPS], will define the amount of FPS your game will output and, like mentioned in the [Vsync] setting paragraph, one must take the Monitor Hz into consideration when setting the amount of FPS desired. Similarly, the [Background FPS] should be set to a low number, because this is the amount of FPS you game will run at when you’re not actively playing the game (or in other words, when the game is running in the background).
The [Interface Scaling Setting] is mainly used for big monitors where your interface may look small, the higher this setting is at, the bigger your interface will be displayed at.
The game [Shadows] setting is pretty self explanatory, as it will display the environment shadows of a particular area. Disabling this setting will make the game look “flat” and slightly similar to the Oldschool RuneScape graphics. it is also suggested to disable this setting if you’re experiencing performance issues.
The [Shadow Quality] on the other hand, will only work if you have enabled the in game shadows and this setting will help define their “sharpness”, with [ULTRA] being the better looking one, or [LOW] which makes them slightly “blurrier”. The shadows setting can be somewhat taxing to your PC or Laptop, so disable this setting if you’re experiencing a poor performance.
Depending on your personal preference, you can either enable the game [Loading Screens] or disable them.
[Terrain Blending] is, in simple terms, a setting allows the different floor textures to “blend together” in order to make them more fluid, if this setting is turned OFF, Textures will automatically get disabled aswell.
The [Smooth Camera Fade] is only visible when certain objects get “cut” by your camera zoom; like walls, trees, rocks, buildings, etc.], the purpose of this setting is to “smoothen” the look of these cut objects, but other than that, it doesn’t really change anything important.
[Mouse over entity highlights] This setting consists of an “outline” that appears around anything “clickable” when hovering the cursor over it. Depending on the object (item/npc/players/etc.), it will appear as a different colour, e.g: for the majority of NPC’s, it will appear as a Yellow outline, for interactable objects like Fishing Spots, Trees, Archaeology Hotspots, etc, the outline colour will be Cyan, on the other hand attackable NPC’s will glow with a Red outline when clicked.
[Remove roofs] This setting will remove the roofs and first floors from the buildings in the game, you can either set it to [ALL] to remove it from all buildings, or [SELECTIVELY] to remove them only after entering the buildings.
GRAPHICS SETTINGS (Part 2)
[Water detail] In short, the [LOW] setting makes the water look like a flat surface, without reflections or depth and it gets progressively “realistic” by adding more reflectivity: [MEDIUIM] to [ULTRA], keep in mind this setting is also taxing, so adjust according to your preference.
[Ambient occlusion] simply put, this setting determines how much lighting should a space have depending on its features in order to make it more realistic. [SSAO] (Screen Space) is the least demanding, while [HBAO] (Horizon Based) has a higher performance hit. [OFF] would be the best option if you don’t mind losing this little feature in order to maximize the performance.
[Textures] this setting only has two options available, with those being [OFF] and [Compressed], disabling textures in the game will make everything look like a mesh of polygons without depth or detail, therefore, this can also greatly improve the performance of your game.
[Volumetric Light] this setting adds more realism to light emitting sources on certain skyboxes (like the suns or moons); similar to the Bloom setting, this feature depends, mostly, on personal preference and only if the brighter effects are desired.
[Game rendering Scaling] the higher this setting goes, the higher the overall image quality will look, however, this can be somewhat taxing for your computer. On the other hand, a lower setting will make the overall image quality look blurred out, but will increase the performance. Therefore, it’s recommended to leave this setting at 100% and adjust based on your performance and preference.
[Custom Cursors] to keep it simple, these custom cursors are the iconic RuneScape icons displayed when hovering your mouse over literally anything in the game, like the attack icons, the food icons, the “use item” icon, among others.
[Ground decoration], the purpose of this setting is to add more elements to certain areas of the game to make it more “rich looking”, things like Grass, Pebbles, Flowers, etc, are added to the ground.
[Depth of field] this setting is often seen in photography, and what it does in RuneScape is blur far off objects in order to make them look less “Sharp” on the horizon and, provide a more pleasant effect. Keep in mind tho, this setting is only available if you have your draw distance setting on [ULTRA] or [HIGH].
[Tree canopy fade] in short, will fade out any and all Tree canopies around the character, in order to prevent the canopies from obstructing the visibility of the character.
If you’d like to learn more about these settings, check out the following RS Wiki Link.[runescape.wiki]
“All videos linked on this section belong to their respective authors, if you liked their content, consider subscribing to their channels, I do not take any credit on the content displayed and, my only goal is to provide useful information to new, returning and veteran player audiences”.
WEAPONS, ABILITIES & FUNDAMENTALS (Part 1)
Finally, now that your user interface is stablished and, you understand what each of the graphical settings does in your game, let’s move on to the Combat abilities and their fundamentals.
Keep in mind though, the ability bars shown on the cheatsheet require some levelling up and questing in order to fully unlock their potential and, as a new player, you’ll have access to their “lesser variants” but, as you level up, these lesser variants will be replaced by the actual abilities.
Anyways, i highly recommend one of your early goals in the game becomes unlocking as many combat abilities as you can by levelling up and doing your quests, as these ability bars will allow you to get into bossing later on.
There’s a couple of abilities you can unlock naturally while levelling up (as shown on the cheatsheet) and some of these are exclusive to a certain combat style and weapons (namely Two-Handed and Dual Wield Weapons), some of these abilities are unlocked by doing quests, and some of these are bought at the Grand Exchange or from other players, but some may be more expensive than others, so always do your research on the current market prices before buying or selling items, ALWAYS, DO, YOUR, RESEARCH, because some prices shown in the Grand Exchange or Trade Offer price window may not be 100% accurate, specially for new or low volume items.
“Getting to know your abilities, and your ability bars”.
You may notice these bars are “Revolution bars”, but what is Revolution Mode? Well, in the most basic sense of the word, Revo will automatically trigger your combat abilities as soon as they become available, going from left to right, and after the Global Cooldown has lapsed.
However, there’s 3 ways of using the Revolution combat mode, you can customize if you want Revo to activate your Basic, Threshold or Ultimate abilities in the combat settings menu (more on that later):
- The first one is used if you want to cast your Threshold abilities manually (making combat slightly more engaging), this means, Revolution will only activate your basic abilities (inside the yellow outline), any Threshold ability included inside this yellow outline won’t get activated as you will need to activate it yourself.
- The second one, is allowing Revolution to use Threshold and Basic Abilities, This method is preferred in order to let the game do its own thing while you just manage your HP Points, Prayer Points, Prayers or curses and manually activate your Ultimate Abilities.
- The final method is letting Revolution activate all kind of abilities automatically without any kind of manual input, however, sticking to this combat mode of Revolution can make it harder for you to progress further into “Full Manual” later on.
On that note, Revolution Mode exclusively for basics is quite good and a perfect middle ground as its learning curve should prove engaging and exciting, while also making room for improvement in the long run and transitioning into full manual.
With enough practice you’ll reach a point where you may want to actively use all your basics abilities and jump naturally into full manual or, you could keep using revolution for basics whilst you activate some of the basics and threshold abilities yourself. Invariably, it really depends on your playstyle but keep this in mind:
“There is no correct way of playing RuneScape, there’s just efficient methods, but even these keep changing and evolving over time, that’s the true beauty of the game. It’s an ever evolving game that you can play any way you want.”
On a similar topic, you have the Global Cooldown, which is divided in 3 sections (as shown in the Cheatsheet GCD Diagram), and the Ability Queueing.
With [ABILITY QUEUEING] enabled (in your Combat Settings), you can hit any Ability anywhere within the #1 and #2 Global Cooldown sectors; shown above, and it will fire once the GCD is done (you’ll know it’s done once all of your abilities “blink”).
If you were to cast your abilities once the GCD is at the beginning of Sector #3, and you had [ABILITY QUEUEING] enabled, your abilities will fire automatically without being queued.
Without [ABILITY QUEUEING], in order to fire your abilities you’ll need to cast them once the GCD timer is at the end of Sector #2 (or 2/3 of the way), as this will make your abilities fire once the GCD ends.
Dual Wield Weapons are worn with both hands, Main Hand and Off-Hand, also, all shields and defenders are always worn in the Off-Hand Slot.
- For melee the difference is quite simple:
2H swords help with AOE (Area of effect abilities) with Halberds being the absolute best 2h weapons to kill various mobs of monsters.
DW weapons help with versatility and single target combat, you can switch to a shield or defender to use your defensive abilities, but keep in mind a shield is always a better option if you’re going to switch to a shield to use the abilities Resonance or Reflect, as the defenders halve the effectivity of those abilities.
“Quick diagram about weapons area of effect damage and Bakriminel Bolts”.
WEAPONS, ABILITIES & FUNDAMENTALS (Part 2)
- For ranged, the difference lies in the type of ammunition each weapon can use:
2H Bows & Longbows use arrows and some special bows (dubbed chargebows) generate their own ammunition, so you don’t have to worry about it.
There’s also “Shieldbows“, who allow the usage of defensive abilities aswell as offensive abilities.
On the other hand, 2H Crossbows use bolts instead of arrows and this opens up a lot of cool bolts called Bakriminel bolts, which can be enchanted in order to activate some amazing and useful effects.
These bolts are what make 2H Crossbows a better pick than 2H Bows, as there’s no special arrows for these Weapons; besides the “Blackstone Arrows“, that apply a defense debuff to the target for 12 minutes or until it gets defeated.
On a similar note to DW Melee, Defenders (called reprisers for their ranged variant) help a lot with weapon switching, but also it benefits from a weapon called mechanized chinchompa, which makes each ability an AOE ability.
- For the Magic weapons:
Mage follows the same rules but the 2H weapons are called Staves, on Mage’s case, there’s no big difference on the AOE damage abilities as both 2H and DW share the same ones (with a difference in certain thresholds abilities), and both weapons use the same spellbook abilities, so it boils down to each weapon effect and if you want to use a versatile playstyle by using a Wand + defender (called rebounder in Mage’s case), or a shield. Sadly there’s no chinchompas for magic but there’s a wide array of disruptive spells than can aid you in battle.
Each set of weapons enable the usage of specific Abilities and each weapon comes with their own subset of special effects, some weapons don’t have them though.
For instance: 2H Swords are good for AOE and when facing multiple foes at once, you can benefit from the Abilities: Hurricane, Quake and Meteor Strike to deal damage around you, but if you want to maximize the amount of targets you’ll hit, you may want to use a Halberd Weapon.
If you’re interested into more in-depth information about quests, game progression, tips, tricks & guides, feel free to visit the links below, to read more about these topics:
“All videos linked on this section belong to their respective authors, if you liked their content, consider subscribing to their channels, I do not take any credit on the content displayed and, my only goal is to provide useful information to new, returning and veteran player audiences”.
GAMEPLAY SETTINGS
The Settings menu is divided into 5 different groups: [GAMEPLAY], [GRAPHICS], [CONTROLS], [AUDIO] and the [RIBBON]. On the following cheatsheets i’ll showcase each option found on the [GAMEPLAY] tab and their function. Some of them will be images (as they’re self explanatory and explain what they do) and others will be brief explanations on what each setting does, in order to make all these options easier to read and follow.
Under the [GAMEPLAY] Tab you’ll find 8 Different subgroups (7 in the NXT client and 8 on the Steam Client), in the following table i’ll explain in detail what each subgroup does:
“The various settings tabs”.
“The first part of the settings menu windows”.
“The second part of the settings menu windows”.
For more information on the topic feel free to visit the Wiki Link.[runescape.wiki]
CLOSING THOUGHTS
RuneScape is a game built around “freedom”, and all of these interfaces, ability bars and settings reflect that, while there’s no absolute best configuration, keybinds or interface, it’s always a good practice to try everything out and learn through testing, in order to find out the best results for our needs.
Whether you’re a new player strolling around the Free to Play towns, or you just bought your membership and are stretching your legs around the member’s only locations, everything you learned from this guide will help you.
One of the commonly asked questions i’ve seen posted on the subreddit and the discussion forums are: how to make as much GP/Hr? What kind of gear to buy, and in which order? What kind of bosses to fight for a given set of Levels? and, while the answers are changing constantly (as prices shift all the time and the Metagame evolves), invariably it comes to the same conclusion, which is:
- “What you can do and how consistently.“
On the following links you can find complimentary information like Gear & Bosses Progression and a plethora of useful links, tips & tricks:
However, before trying out these methods and finding out how consistently you can do them, one must start from the very basics of the game, understand how the game works and how to make it as reliable as possible whilst also looking as best as it can, and that’s the purpose of this guide, to teach you, the player, what every setting does, how does it impact your game experience and, showing you the fundamentals of the ability bars. The other half will come from your own experiences and how you expand on these foundations.
With that being said, Thank you for passing by, i wish you the best of luck and i hope you found this guide useful, see you all around and take care!