Progression in Old School

If you're joining us from other MMOs or RPGs, it might be a tad confusing not having an overarching level that says "this is how powerful you are", instead having 23 different Skills with their own uses, progression and identities for you to progress as you please.

	Skills These Skills (which you can check in-game using the Bar chart icon) help determine your interactions with everything else in the game, meaning levelling these is the primary way that you'll progress your character. Not only do higher Skills give you access to new resources, allow you to equip the best gear, or even grant the ability to slay special bosses for unique rewards, but they're also required for Quests (which unlock loads of content) or 'secondary' systems like Achievement Diaries and Combat Achievements.
	Setting Goals Old School RuneScape is all about setting goals and achieving them in whatever fashion best suits your playstyle. As you set these goals and start working towards them, the game unravels into an ever-expanding spiderweb of options, for example: Fairy Rings are a powerful teleportation option that require partial completion of Fairy Tale II: Cure A Queen to unlock. Fairy Tale II: Cure A Queen requires various other quests, including Lost City. Lost City requires 31 Crafting and 36 Woodcutting. A huge chunk of Crafting XP is available from early-game quests. These quests in turn have other skill requirements or item requirements. And so on, and so on... The web keeps on growing.
	Don't Panic! It might sound daunting, but once things get rolling you'll find yourself bouncing between content whenever you like, planning out your next grind while you're working on your current one, and most importantly of all: always progressing. Every log chopped, every rock mined, every swing of your sword is moving you towards some goal or another, even if you don't know what it is yet. If that all sounds like a bit much, it's worth knowing that Old School has loads of low-intensity or outright AFK methods that will still allow you to progress (although more slowly than active gameplay) towards those goals while playing other games, watching a show, doing some chores, catching up on cardio at the gym - just about anything!

Best of all, in Old School, the experience you earn, loot you secure, quests you complete are never going anywhere - they'll be with you always and remain relevant forever.

Let's start with Old School's bread and butter: how do we make numbers go up?

Levelling Your Skills

The Skills tab is one of the most important in the game, making these numbers go up is the easiest way to feel yourself progressing in real-time. Thankfully, all of the information you need to get started can be accessed from this very tab!

Clicking on any of the Skills shown will bring up a separate interface. We'll use Woodcutting, an iconic Skill, as an example. Use the tabs below to see how you can figure out everything you'd ever need to know about Woodcutting, which you can then apply to any Skill you like!

Completing Quests

Quests in Old School RuneScape are in a league of their own. Rather than being told 'kill 10 boars' (we've got the Slayer skill for that), each Quest in Old School is a narrative experience, and many of them offer powerful rewards or unlock brand new content. Quests are so impactful that some of them unlock new bosses (e.g. The Heart of Darkness), new raids (e.g. Beneath Cursed Sands), new areas like Morytania (e.g. Priest in Peril) or even entirely new continents like Varlamore, unlocked by the Children of the Sun quest - which you can complete very early into your journey!

Some quests may be as simple as bringing an NPC some items, others feature extensive dialogue and short stories to take in, puzzles to solve, and many feature challenging, unique bosses and enemies that you'll need to overcome to progress.

But how exactly do you find Quests that you're able to do, then actually get started on completing them?

We can start by clicking the  'Quest List' tab, introduced to you on Tutorial Island. From here, you can see a list of all 170+ Quests in the game. Use the tabs below to learn about finding, starting and completing quests from start to finish.