Getting Started

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The Getting Started guide is intended to help both new and returning players.

This guide aims to assist the player from the early-game to the beginning of mid-game, covering a wide range of topics including skilling, money-making, and the meta in Idlescape. Mid-game can loosely be described as the point where the player has:

• A set of runite armor
• Skill levels roughly averaging 50‒60

Things to Consider

This section will cover subjects including the player's account and official rules.

Game Rules

All players must follow the rules of the game. Certain things are not allowed, and can result in your account being muted, suspended, or permanently banned from play:

• Any form of automation or botting is NOT allowed. This applies to the use, creation, or distribution of both bots and automation devices. Discussions about botting is also not permitted.
• Scripts for quality of life improvements may be allowed, but for safety check with Boohi through in-game chat or Discord for a timely response and approval.
• Alt-trading, specifically having multiple accounts that trade between each other is NOT allowed. Players are only allowed to own a single account!
• Trading any items from outside of Idlescape for items inside Idlescape is against the rules and will result in a trade ban for both players.
• Follow the chat rules!

Staff & Moderators

Tasks of people within a role are not set in stone, but in general developers create the game system and code, and moderators keep chat in normal and help players out with small problems. Community contributors help develop and test new parts of the game on a voluntary basis. Artists create the artwork for the game.

To open a ticket for assistance, you can do so in game from the "Send Feedback" feature in game, or via the Discord channel #create-ticket.

Ironman Mode

Note: The information on this page is based on non-ironman gameplay. While still very useful to start off, some advice may not apply!

Released on 11 December 2020 v0.8.

Ironman mode accounts have unique restrictions and special capabilities:

• Trading: cannot trade with other players.
• Ironman-only Chat: all ironmen have their own chat channel that cannot be accessed by regular players, but can still chat in the general channel.
• Chat Total Level: total levels displayed in chat for ironmen is greyed out to differentiate them from regular players.
• Multi-logging: players can use both their regular account and ironman account at the same time in different browser tabs.
• Server-wide Broadcasts: the first time an ironman reaches a special achievement, (e.g. first to level 50 farming) a server-wide message is sent to congratulate them in both general and the ironman chat channels.
• Ironman-only Hiscores: a special hiscores page where the highest level ironmen are ranked.

This mode is not recommended for new players to the game.

With the release of Ironman mode came several Alternate Playstyles, all based around the mode.

Gameplay

This section covers mechanics and other information relating to the game itself.

Action Queue

In Idlescape, players can only perform one action at a time; for example, mining and foraging simultaneously is not possible.

The exceptions are: farming, enchanting, augmenting, and crafting. These can be done at the same time while training other skills.

Offline Progression

Offline progression continues for up to 12 hours.

Skills

Players have access to 13 skills, split up into four categories: combat, gathering, production, and magic. For more information on each skill, see their respective articles.

Combat skills
	Attack	Determines how accurate the player is.
	Strength	Determines a player's maximum hit, calculated alongside their strength bonuses.
	Defense	Decreases the chance of being hit.
	Constitution	Increases Health/HP.
Gathering Skills
	Mining	Used to gather ores and other materials from different locations.
	Fishing	Allows players to catch fish.
	Foraging	Allows players to gather logs, seeds, and cooking ingredients.
Production Skills
	Smithing	Allows players to smelt ores into bars.
	Farming	Used to plant and harvest seeds.
	Cooking	Allows players to turn their ingredients into meals with different effects and/or for healing during combat.
	Crafting	Allows players to create items & equipment.
Magic Skills
	Runecrafting	Allows players to make runes using rune essence.
	Enchanting	The enchanting skill is divided into the following: Scrollcrafting allows players to create enchantment scrolls. Enchanting allows players to apply enchantment scrolls. Augmenting allows players to improve equipment stats.

Combat

Combat Experience

Players gain combat skill experience when dealing damage; 2 experience in the selected combat skill and 1 experience in Constitution per damage dealt. When fighting in a balanced stance, each skill gains 2/3 of an experience per point of damage.

Stance Example

Combat Stance

Players have 4 different settings to gain combat experience, either by selecting a single skill or by gaining equal amount of experience in all three at the same time, players can choose this in the combat interface by clicking on the crossed sword tab on the left side of the screen, the player needs to be in combat for this to be shown.

Equipment Stats

Equipped gear has bonuses that impact combat; the higher the level, the better the bonus.

• Accuracy bonuses increase the chance of landing a hit.
• Strength bonuses increase the max hit.
• Defense bonuses increase the chance to dodge an attack.

Death

Death occurs when a player's Hitpoints reach zero. The preceding action will be cancelled and the player returns to idling. Health slowly regenerates on its own. Dying will not result in the loss of items, experience, gold, etc.

New Character Guide

Example of suggested materials for new characters.

Following these steps will take 12 to 24 hours and leave you in a position to make millions of gold per day to fund your exploration of the game.

1. Forage in the Grasslands until you collect 30 logs.
2. Mine in the Clay Pit until level 10, then switch to mining in the City Outskirts until you collect 60 tin ore, 60 copper ore, and 6 coal.
3. Smith your tin and copper ore into bronze bars using the heat from burning the 6 coal.
4. Craft 1 bronze daggers, and as much fertilizer as possible (click the 4 above the ingredient list), and this will get you to level 2 crafting. Then craft 1 bronze pickaxe. Equip the set of daggers and the pickaxe.
5. Mine in the City Outskirts until level 20, then switch to mining in the Village.
6. AFK for several hours/overnight. Your goal here is to collect iron ore, geodes, and gems to sell on the marketplace for a total of around 2.5‒3 million gold (Marketplace is based on supply and demand, prices can fluctuate greatly).
7. Buy a Runite Pickaxe on the marketplace, which normally cost 3 million gold or less. (Marketplace is based on supply and demand, prices can fluctuate greatly), don't enchant this pick until you have augmented or bought a +5/+10. A more extensive guide on enchants are found later in this guide: Mining

Note that the runite pickaxe requires mining level 50, which you should have by the time you get the gold required, if not, mine in the Desert or the Underground until you do. Once you have your pickaxe you can always keep mining for a solid source of income.

Market prices fluctuate but iron ore, mithril ore, runite ore, and silver have been in demand and good profit for a long time.

Mining zones Village and Volcano are common places to mine for these ores.

Taking Your Next Steps

There are 2 common routes at this point; the first is to continue improving your mining skill to make more money, second is to start exploring other activities. Here are a some options to consider:

General Gear

This equipment is very useful in the long term and is well worth getting for any skill.

• Black opal necklace/ring with gathering/haste enchantments.
• Obsidian Boots with the naturalist enchantment.

Skills

Mining

Mining is essential for smithing and a good source of profit for the average player.

Items to consider:

• Runite pickaxe with the Superheat enchantment. Ideally you want to buy a highly augmented (+5 to +10) version of this pickaxe before you enchant it with superheating as those scrolls are expensive, and you might not upgrade your pick again for a long time.

Popular zones:

• Village: Drops large quantities of iron ore that is used by high level players to level up their enchanting skill via augmenting obsidian equipment.
• Volcano: Gives high experience rates as well as popular ingredients such as runite ore, mithril ore, and silver. Only one item currently doesn't have a use; stone. However even stone will sell on the market for more than the vendor/NPC value.
• Deep Pit: The last and highest level mining zone. This location has monsters you will have to fight occasionally in order to mine there, but is also the only location where you can get stygian ore. Runite equipment is recommend to fight the greater demons that you will encounter here. If you die while mining here you will go into idling and be locked out of the zone for 15 minutes.

Foraging

Foraging is essential for farming, and a good source of cooking ingredients.

Items to consider:

• Runite Hatchet with the root digging enchantment.

Popular zones:

• Fungal Grotto: Potato and mushroom spores as well as a large variety of tree seeds make this a popular location for farming experience, cooking ingredients, and money-making via selling seeds and ingredients on the market.
• The Tangle: Great source of logs and chili pepper, also the best source of crafting experience while foraging available. Branches and logs are a good source of crafting experience by crafting them into ashes. Be careful when burning them for heat as you may be better off selling them on the market and buying something else with a better heat to gold ratio.
• Misty Marsh: Slightly less logs per hour when compared to The Tangle, but a great source of pumpkin seeds.
• Haunted Woods: The second best crafting experience rates after The Tangle, but a great way to get high level seeds for farming experience.
• Living Forest: The last and highest level foraging zone. Similar to the Deep Pit for mining, this location has monsters you will have to fight often. The Spriggans that spawn here are harder to defeat than the greater demons from the Deep Pit, so slightly better gear is recommended to forage here.

Fishing

Fishing is useful source for ingredients used in cooking and is a great source for end-game food.

Items to consider:

• Fishing is using a node system, which allows the player to find nodes, which in turn allows the player to gather a lot of different fish from a single zone. A node could be explained as a mini-zone within a zone.
• To get started with fishing the player doesn't require anything, but it is strongly recommended that the player has a minimum of a low-tier tacklebox (Novice Tacklebox or Basic Tacklebox) and a pair of boots or gloves enchanted with Fishing (Enchantment).

Popular zones:

• Like all gathering skills the end-game zones often gives the best gold per hour, but as marketplace prices fluctuate a lot and different ingredients are in demand the player can choose their own zone to farm, it is best to level in a zone were the player have a good node find and gather length.
• Lower tier fish such as shrimp and anchovies are a great source of early cooking experience as well as food for early-game combat.
• Cooking 1‒5 fish with a 1 or more shrimp will provide Seared Fish with the shrimp lord buff, which gives a chance to gain free shrimp when cooking any food.

Smithing

Smithing is highly useful for crafting and can eventually be a decent source of income.

Items to consider:

• Obsidian boots with the inferno enchantment.
• Black opal ring/necklace with the pyromancy and wealth enchantments.
• Crest of Chaos, end-game helmet used to increase your effective smithing level.
• Rune gloves with the efficiency enchantment.

Popular Ores:

• Iron Ore: Very high experience rates until you get to runite ore. When smelted into bars, they are used in large quantities by high-level players.
• Mithril Ore: When smelted into bars, they are used in large quantities by high-level players.
• Runite and Stygian Ore: High experience rates. Used in many of the top tier items in the game.

If you have an opal ring/necklace with the wealth enchantment, you can often find runite, adamantite, and sometimes gold ore at a low enough price that if you buy the ore and smelt it, you can make profit by smithing ores into bars. For example, if you have wealthx5:

1. Purchase 15 runite ore at 1,000 gold each and smelt them into a runite bar.
2. Wealth procs when the bar finishes, causing the bar to automatically sell at 18,000GP, twice the vendor price of 9,000.
3. 30‒50 seconds will earn you 3,000 gold and some decent experience.

Note this is less money than you can make elsewhere in the game, but it is very passive and steady income that lets you level smithing fairly quickly through the higher levels.

Cooking

Cooking is useful for combat as well as creating food to buff other activities in the game.

Items to consider:

• Obsidian boots with the cooking enchantment.
• An augmented ladle.
• Black opal ring/necklace with the haste and pyromancy enchantments.
• Black opal ring/necklace with the scholar enchantment.

Popular recipes:

• Cooking fish with the scholar enchant to get the highest possible experience while getting fish oil which is used in crafting and quite valuable.
• 1 x pepper, 1 x sugar, 1 x salt, 1 x shrimp.
• Combining 4 of the following: wildberry, potato, carrot, tomato, apple, with one of the following: banana, chili pepper, sugar.
• Combining any 2 meats (including fish) with any 2 veggies (usually potato) and 1 x ichor.

Notes:

• Your effective cooking level determines the quality of your food and how many stacks of a certain buff it will have. Every 30 levels in cooking will offer a +2 to the number of stacks on a food item. This means that expensive ingredients such as chili peppers, pumpkins, and sharks is usually a waste of money at lower levels.
• When prices are high you may be better off leveling other skills or looking for items such as fish which you can scholar for the oil and sell on the market.

Combat

Combat can eventually be an incredible source of income from the general loot you obtain as well as various rare drops such as ladles and obsidian gear, and much later end-game rares from giants. It is also considered one of the most enjoyable activities in the game by many, and a place to spend your gold on long-term projects. However, it does require lots of money to buy gear.

Level range	Zones	What to wear	Notable drops	Notes
1‒20	Farm, Caves	Nothing/Bronze armor Bronze daggers/bronze scimitar	Raw Chicken Raw Beef Milk Goblin Brain Ladles	Getting bronze gear at the start will increase survivability and kill time, which will save you food. You can move on to caves quite early on, at around level 5‒10 in your combat skills. There is little gold gained in early combat. Combat can require more attention than other skills due to the fact that if you die, you end up idling doing nothing.
20‒50	Caves, City	Obsidian/Stygian boots with the treasure hunter enchantment (stygian is more expensive but better) Obsidian armor, but substitute the obsidian helms with a mithril full helm Obsidian Daggers/Obsidian Scimitar If possible, you should attempt to buy inexpensive high augment versions of these items	Goblin Brain Ladles Mind Runes Gems Obsidian Helm Obsidian Full Helm Obsidian Greatsword	Black Knights in the City can be very difficult to defeat until you level up and get higher augmented obsidian gear. It's recommended to have better gear and high levels before trying to tackle them. Both encounters in City drop actual gold as well as all of the various obsidian drops, which will sell on the market or vendor well.
50+	City, Lava Maze	Obsidian Boots/Stygian Boots with the treasure hunter enchantment Runite Breastplate Runite Plate Leggings Runite Full Helm Runite Scimitar (preferably +5 or higher) Runite Shield with healing enchantment	Gems Obsidian Helm Obsidian Full Helm Obsidian Greatsword Ichor Mind Runes Adamantite Boots Runite Boots Burnt Fish Gold Ore	Demons from the Lava Maze can hit fairly hard, but also tend to evade your attacks less often. Lava Maze is a well known high-profit zone and is an ideal place to AFK. Runite Scimitar +5 is often very cheap compared to other runite weapons due to it having the potential to transform into a rare sword (Zero Edge) when augmenting from +4 to +5, when it does not, some players will dump large amounts of the now failed +5 swords on the market for cheap. Your next steps will be getting runite gear with augments and enchantments such as healing, critical strike, reinforce, protection, and recklessness. At level 60 defense you can upgrade your boots from obsidian to stygian, still with the treasure hunter enchantment.

Enchanting

• Scrollcrafting is very profitable, with an average output of 800,000GP per scroll. Scrollcrafting takes scrolls, runes, and silver. It is recommended to make scrolls that you have a high chance to create. Scrolls also take a long time to sell, so it is recommended to find a client before scrollcrafting.
• Enchanting, a part of the enchanting skill, deals with applying scrolls to items. Enchantments do not stack over different items, and you can not have two different enchantments on the same item. You can enchant most equipment, with the exception of armors such as the shrimp armor set or Black Knight Great Helm. Enchantments can't fail.
• Augmenting obsidian equipment – like obsidian scimitars – is a cheap way to get enchanting experience. There is also a chance of transforming, but chances are slim and should not be used as an argument to augument until end-game. There is also a chance of it breaking, so it is a good idea to have boots or gloves with the chances enchantment. Augmenting is also usually done with an intuition buff, due to the large amount of bonus experience gained.

Marketplace

Verify Your Email

1. Open the menu in the upper left of the screen.
2. Go to settings, then verify your email.
3. You can now trade on the market!

Using the Marketplace

• Always sell your items to other players on the market. Do not vendor/sell to the NPC unless the item vendors for more than the offers on the marketplace, which it usually is not.
• Check the actual listings. When selling items, the game will show you the lowest listed price, however, players will sometimes list a small quantity of an item at well below normal market price in order to lure unsuspecting players into listing their items for too cheap.
• Stack Size is important. Players don't usually want to buy up 20 separate listing of iron ore with 20‒100 ore per listing if someone else has several thousand listed at similar prices.
• Undercutting is a controversial topic. The amount you undercut by and on which items can make people frustrated when they are trying to sell similar items or are very invested in a specific market. This is just something you will have to feel out yourself.
• Taxes: When you sell an item, 5% of the sale price is taken in taxes. This is to help combat inflation. Keep this in mind if trying to eke out slim profit margins, otherwise you can just ignore it.
• Items will stay posted on the market for 3 days and then they will be returned to your inventory where you can list them again if you wish. However, if your item is fairly common and doesn't sell after 3 days, consider lowering the price.

Tips and Tricks

• Burning coal is a cheap way to get heat, whereas logs can often be sold to players for more than their value in heat. Check the market for current prices on coal, logs, and pyres logs to see what the best heat to gold ratio is.
• CTRL/CMD + left-click will link an item in chat; you can link up to 3 items per message.
• You can link your gold and heat in chat by CTRL-clicking the money bag and flame above your inventory.
• You can link your skill level by CTRL-clicking the skill.
• The vault is where you can store items you want kept separate. Examples of such things might be an augmented ladle for cooking, a weapon you don't have the level for, boots with various enchants you are not currently using, rare drops, crafting projects you are saving for later, or excess blank scrolls you don't want to accidentally enchant.
• Geodes, birds nests, sunken treasures, and satchels are special chests that contain various items such as ore, seeds, runes, and talismans. Sunken treasures are the most sought after due to the extremely low chance of containing rare weapons.
• Getting a runite shield with the healing enchant will help you mine and forage in the highest tier zones as you will recover some health between encounters with the monsters there.
• Due to uses in other skills, iron, mithril, and adamantite are not usually recommended for tools or armor. They cost too much and are usually replaced fairly quickly so aren't worth crafting with raw materials.
• Switching stances in combat can be beneficial in reaching various breakpoints in defense or attack, but many people are lazy and would rather leave it balanced, which is fine.
• Crafting and enchanting are often considered big money sinks, take care before trying to level them too high as you may find large amounts of money gone with nothing to show for it besides some experience.
• It's a game, play it to have fun! If that means optimizing things in a certain way, playing the market, not trading ever, playing in non ideal ways etc., then go for it. People give advice to help you but in the end, it is you that is playing. 'If you ask for advice, you should consider taking it though.'

See also

• FAQ
• Calculators and Guides
• Individual Skill Pages
  • Mining
  • Foraging
  • Fishing
  • Farming
  • Smithing
  • Cooking
  • Crafting
  • Runecrafting
  • Enchanting
  • Combat
• Community Shorthand