About the Community

Jagex closed RuneScape Classic permanently in August 2018. This project exists to keep it playable, and that is three jobs, not one.

The first is restoration. Where the real game's behaviour can be recovered — from the genuine client cache, from recovered transcripts, from what players wrote down while the servers were still up — that is what gets built, and where it cannot, the guesswork is written down and labelled rather than passed off as authentic. Nothing here is a re-imagining of vanilla RuneScape Classic.

The second is making it easier to actually play: an open-source server, a downloadable client with real scripting instead of a fight against it, and a community worlds list so no single server controls who gets to play.

The third is improving on the original and adding to it, openly, outside the restoration work and never confused with it. The dragon medium helmet shipped in 2002 with its own sprite but no animation to go with it — wearing one just replayed the plain medium helmet's frames, on Jagex's servers and on every private server since. It has its own animation here. Kite shields never had one at all, only ever borrowed the square shield's wholesale; they animate as their own item now too.

A great deal is still missing on all three fronts, and a fair amount of what is here is wrong in ways nobody has noticed yet. That is the part the community is genuinely needed for. If you played Classic and something reads wrong — a price, a drop, a line of dialogue, an NPC standing where no NPC stood — say so. If you kept screenshots, logs, guides or transcripts from the original game, those are the most valuable thing anyone can hand over: almost every correction made so far came from a record somebody happened to save. And if you have ideas for what belongs in the third category — improvements or additions that respect the game instead of reinventing it — those are just as welcome.

Bug reports and corrections belong on the forums. To ask about becoming a contributor, or to send supporting material for something that needs fixing, email macdoofer@rscd-community.org.

Features

Everything below is built and playable today.

The game

• All 18 skills, with authentic level curves and experience rates.
• 50 original quests — 17 free and 33 members' — with quest points, requirements and rewards, all rebuilt from recovered transcripts, and every one of them played through start to finish before this page claimed it.
• Combat to Classic's own formulas: prayers, every spell including the god spells, poison, dragonfire, retreating, and the rare drop table.
• Free-for-all Wilderness player-killing with skulling, and item-staking duels anywhere outside it.
• Minigames and activities: the Mage Arena, Gnome Ball, the Fishing Trawler, the Crystal Chest, the Alfred Grimhand bar crawl, the Gnome Restaurant and Gnome Bar, the dwarf multicannon, and Tutorial Island.
• All four agility courses, thieving from every stall, chest and pocket, banking, certificate traders, and 86 shops with Jagex's own prices and restock rates.
• Desert heat south of Shantay Pass — waterskins, desert clothing and cactus water, with the Shantay Pass disclaimer word for word from 2003.
• Pet kittens that grow into cats, need feeding, and run away if neglected — and Ardougne civilians who will trade a grown cat for death runes.
• The full transport network: every charter ship, the Entrana ferry, and the gnome glider routes.

The world

• The map rebuilt tile-for-tile from a genuine RuneScape Classic client cache, free and members' land alike.
• 3,578 NPC spawns, 27,822 placed objects and the original ground items, at the coordinates Jagex used.
• Item, NPC and object definitions verified against that same cache rather than copied from a later private server.
• The Black Hole, Thordur and the Disk of Returning — real early-2002 side content that was pulled from Jagex's own servers and rebuilt here for the first time since, with the original disk-trap exploit closed at the root.
• Dye mixing and cape dyeing, all six dyes on all seven capes.

Beyond vanilla

Built on top of the restoration, kept clearly apart from it — see above.

• Runecrafting, a 19th skill Classic never had: the Rune Mysteries quest opens a rune essence mine of its own — a crystal spire, mine-cart railways and a floating portal, all built new for this world — and every rune has its talisman and its altar. Runes you could only ever buy or loot can now be made.
• The dragon medium helmet and kite shield both animate as their own item now, instead of replaying another item's frames.
• Built-in autocast for ranged and magic: pick a spell, click a target, and it keeps firing on its own, timed against the server's real cooldown.
• The Seers' Village Party Hall is open for business: book a party with the guards for 50,000gp and it goes on the schedule with world-wide announcements — the free Magical Party Schedule book shows everyone what is coming. The Party Cannons on both floors take whatever you load into them and fire it out over the hall, one item at a time, onto the dance floor. Booking buys the announcement, not the hall: the cannons work for free, any time. And telekinetic grab does not work inside, so a drop party actually reaches the people standing in it.

The client

• Play instantly in your browser, nothing to install — or download the desktop client for scripting support.
• A community world list: one client, many independently run servers, each of which you choose to connect to.
• Scripting is a supported feature, not something fought. Three tiers are built in: full Java scripts, simple labelled text scripts, and an APOS-compatible layer that runs scripts written for the original bot.
• Scripts run unattended: the client remembers your setup answers, and after a disconnect or a server restart it logs back in and the script carries straight on. Nothing stops a running script except you, or the script finishing.
• rscd:// join links — a Play button on any community website opens your installed client straight into that world, no server details to copy by hand.
• An in-client world map.

This site

• Account manager — password reset, email changes, and a look at your own character, bank and inventory.
• Forums and hiscores, sharing one login with the game.
• A Beastiary generated from the game's own data, with sprites drawn straight out of the cache — so it cannot disagree with what you actually fight.
• The original 2003 manual: 84 of Jagex's own pages, recovered from web archives, plus a quest section generated from the server's own quest definitions.

A Brief History

RuneScape was written by Andrew and Paul Gower and released as a beta on 4 January 2001; Jagex was formed later that year. RuneScape 2 succeeded it in 2004, and what it left behind became RuneScape Classic — kept alive for a shrinking set of grandfathered accounts, reopened to members now and then, and finally closed for good on 6 August 2018, with five worlds still running.

RSCDaemon, the server this one descends from, was begun in 2006–2007 by eXemplar, SeanWT, Philodespotos and Mediator, and was continued by Reines, who brought it to the stable release the community actually ran. It was worked on in the open and shared as a community project throughout, and its source went fully public after the project ended — most later RuneScape Classic servers start from that code, and so does this one. No licence was ever attached to it; the attribution above is recorded permanently in the project's NOTICE file and travels with every copy.

What came from upstream is the engine skeleton: the packet loop, the tile and pathing model, the persistence layer. What a player touches — the quests, the skills, the minigames, the combat and drop tables, the world data — was written here.

The client's scripting owes the same debt. SBoT (2005) came first, and SkullTorchaScriptable, written by Reines in 2005–2006, refined its API into the one this client still follows. The API here is a reimplementation of that documented contract, not a copy of anyone's code.

None of the recovery work above happened in isolation. The RuneScape Classic Wiki, written and maintained by players since the game's own lifetime, was the primary source for quest walkthroughs and mechanics the archived server code never had on its own. Tip.It's RuneScape Classic bestiary settled drop tables no other source had recorded. OpenRSC, an independent RuneScape Classic recreation of its own, was a constant reference for comparison and bug fixes throughout. And the 2003scape project's own recovered spawn data and reference server filled in NPC, object and item placements this codebase never had. This project owes all four a real debt.

RSCD is released under the Apache License 2.0. The source is on GitHub. What this project claims, what it does not, and what happens if Jagex ever asks are set out in full on the About page.