RSCD Community exists to keep RuneScape Classic playable. Jagex closed it permanently on 6 August 2018, after seventeen years, with five worlds still running. Nothing replaced it, because nothing else is it.
The project is open source and free. There is no membership, no subscription, nothing to buy, and no donation changes anything inside the game — donations pay the hosting bill and nothing else. Anyone may run their own server, and the client connects to any of them; no one has to ask our permission to play or to host.
RuneScape is Jagex's. The name, the world, the artwork, the design and the trademarks belong to Jagex Ltd, and this project claims none of it. We are not affiliated with Jagex, not endorsed by them, and not speaking for them anywhere on this site.
What was written here is the software: the server logic, the quests and skills and minigames, the client's scripting API, this website. That code is ours and is released under the Apache License 2.0. It descends from RSCDaemon, a community server from 2006 onward, and the attribution to its authors is recorded permanently in the project's NOTICE file, where it travels with every copy.
The game data is a different matter and we would rather say so plainly than be found out later. The world map, the item and character artwork and the sound come from the original RuneScape Classic client cache that Jagex distributed to players. They are read from it, not redrawn. Where the original game's behaviour could be recovered — from that cache, from transcripts, from what players wrote down while the servers were still up — it was recovered, and where it could not, the guesswork is labelled as guesswork rather than passed off as authentic.
We will comply. One email to macdoofer@rscd-community.org is enough — no lawyers required, no argument, no waiting out a deadline, and nobody here will be quietly mirroring anything afterwards. If it is a specific piece of material, it comes down or gets replaced. If it is the project, the project stops.
This is written down in advance, in public, because a preservation project that would have to be forced is not preserving anything — it is just holding on to it.
Because the alternative has been tried for twenty years. RuneScape Classic has survived this long on private servers, leaked builds and quiet arrangements, and the cost of that is that the work is disposable: one host disappears and everything on it goes too. Doing it in the open, with the sources published, the provenance labelled and the operators free to leave, is the only version of this that outlasts any one person — including us.
The source is on GitHub. Corrections, recovered records and bug reports are welcome on the forums.