For whatever reason I've been itching to just play something quite old. Back in the day I never played Old School RuneScape (OSRS) and only a couple of years ago I tried it for the first time. Since then, it’s been sitting in the back of my mind as something I'd like to play further.

Since recently returning I've noticed the OSRS client itself has received a bit of an overhaul from the last time I played. While that is cool and all. I'm not going to use the one developed by the developers.

I'm getting a bit more serious about the game, I found out there are other clients and yes mods you can run while playing this game. The biggest and most used client is called RuneLite. It’s so popular among the community, that even the official OSRS Jagex Launcher has an option so you can go out to the RuneLite website to download it. You then can still log in using the official launcher for the game using RuneLite.

As far as mods I'll be using. I don’t know enough about them yet to say much. I am at the very least going to be getting things like Quest Helper, some graphic upgrades, and other information tools such as seeing how much experience I'm getting amount other things per hour.

Since I'm a rather inexperienced player of OSRS these mods are just going to help make my time playing the game far more enjoyable. On top of the quality-of-life mods, I'll be finding along the way. These things are also just going to cut down on how long it takes me to do certain things as well to a certain degree.

One thing that kept me from jumping into this game sooner was trying to work out some things. Should I pick up where I left off? Should I play Old School RuneScape or RuneScape 3? There were somewhat big decisions.

I ended up spending a while looking into the two different branches of the game. In the end, it was how RuneScape 3 is with the in-game cash shop that made me not want to have anything to do with that game. It also seems most of the active player base remains in OSRS. I can’t blame you as I for one hate lots of microtransactions as well.

I decided since I've written a little bit in the past about running some quests I'd just pick up where I left off on that character. While I have many of the quests you can do for free to play finished off. There are lots of things to still do. Not to mention questing for experience and rewards is nice to have not all there is.

With all of that said. OSRS is quite a slow grind of a game. As of right now, I have no idea how often I'll even be posting about it let alone playing it. I do, however, want to avoid one of the biggest issues people who try to go too hard early on in this game get and that is burnout.

Also at least for now, I'm remaining free to play. In similar situations in the past, I might have considered making it a goal to work up to earning bonds which give you membership for 14 days. However, they sell for around 9-10 million gold these days. With my current skills and game knowledge, it would take longer to grind for that than the time I'd get out of having one. I’m not even at 1 million gold yet.

Being free to play can be quite limiting. That struck me even trying to get on a server or as the game calls them worlds. On the server list, all servers with gold stars are members only. While there looks like there are many options for free to play it’s not that simple.

Some of the worlds have a skill level minimum. Once I get enough to get into those servers it will at least be great to be on a server with a lot fewer people on them.

Other servers are PvP even outside of the wilderness as far as I can tell. That last part as far as I can tell is also the issue. Trying to find out what different kinds of servers even mean is a bit of a challenge. While there is a lot of information out about this game the exact explanation of different servers can be a bit lacking.

For instance, there are both fresh start servers and some kind of league servers. When trying to work out what that means, just assuming things is a bit information-limiting. As information about league servers just refers to older league servers that refers to even older league servers and so forth.

There are even Ironman only servers. While it was somewhat tempting to want to try something that hardcore. With my lack of experience, I decided it was best not to. I've also noticed where you see things on screen and where they are cannot always be the same thing. There is even a mod for dealing with that kind of issue.

Then there is wanting to get on a server in my region. For free-to-play that is quite limiting. Some parts of the world have lots of servers for free to play. It seems for the Americas there are lots of member servers. This explains why there are so many people on server 301 for free to play which tends to be where I'm waiting to get on every time I log in.

Perhaps as I learn more about the different kinds of servers. I’ll end up having a couple to choose from while I am free to play. At the very least you are not limited to the one you pick. Many even tend to world-hop and switch servers if the area they want to do something in is quite busy among many other reasons for doing so.

Once I got back into the game itself. There was some time needed just relearning the basics again. Which was one reason I was considering just starting over fresh. I’m however glad I did not. Getting used to this game again did not take that long.

I spent some time farming cows for their hide. While I don’t have that great of gear it was quite a safe activity to be doing while working out and relearning things. It leads me to go on quite a little adventure after picking up a clue school which I'll be going into more depth in my next post.

A big thing to work out is just how to get around this game's map again. As a free-to-play I know my options are quite a lot more limited. An early goal I had was just to try and find where the Grand Exchange was again and get there.

As expected, that just required a bit of walking around to get there. It even went a bit quicker when I remembered I could toggle on run which gets drained as you use it. There are lots of other ways to get around the game than that. It will take me some time to discover which options are available for free to play. Such as who to talk to about using boats to get around at the ports.

Grand Exchange and the area around it are quite important for selling and buying things. So that ended up being quite a top priority to getting to it. I don’t have much to sell currently. I also don’t recall how far along progression-wise my gear is. The stats you can see on items are quite limited. Perhaps there is a mod that helps you be more informed on that part. That is, however, something to worry about for another day.

Final Thoughts

I am quite thrilled to return to this game again. I am going to be taking things slowly at least for now. I’m also going to be setting quite a few different goals for myself. Many of those goals will be small for the short term as I learn more about this game and progress further along in it. While there are quite a few large goals I have in mind I'm going to do my best to not even think about those for now as I would not be shocked if they would take hundreds of hours on a member account to accomplish. For now, I'm going to just keep things simple.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape.