Runescape Beginner Guide: What to Do in Your First 10 Levels

Starting RuneScape can feel like drinking from a fire hose. Two decades of updates, a huge pile of skills, and a chat full of veteran players zooming past in gear you can't even name. The thing is, the first 10 levels are actually pretty forgiving, and most of the big choices are easy to undo. What trips people up is not knowing which decisions stick and which ones don't.

So here's the short version of what's worth getting right in your first few hours. Pick the right account type, breeze through Tutorial Island without overthinking it, train a few core skills, set up your bank so you don't lose everything, and dodge the classic mistakes that cost newer players their stuff. Get those sorted and the rest of the game opens up a lot faster.

Choosing Your Starting Account Type

Before you even load into the world, RuneScape asks you to pick a couple of things that matter more than they look. The first is which game you're actually playing, and the second is what kind of restrictions you want to live with.

Old School vs RuneScape 3

This catches a ton of new players off guard. RuneScape actually split into two separate games years ago. Old School RuneScape (OSRS) is the 2007-era version that gets updated by player votes, and it's the busier of the two by a fair margin. RuneScape 3 (RS3) is the modern branch with fancier graphics, more quality-of-life features, and a different combat system.

Your login works on both, but progress does not carry over. Start OSRS and you begin at level 1 there even if you're maxed in RS3. Membership, on the other hand, is shared, so paying for members unlocks it in both games. For most people reading a beginner guide, OSRS is the more popular landing spot, and that's what the rest of this assumes. RS3 is a fine choice too, but the details differ enough that mixing them gets confusing fast.

Regular vs Ironman modes

Once you're in, the next call is how much help you want. A regular account is the default. You can trade, buy gear off other players, and play however you like. This is the way to go if you just want to mess around and not grind for every single item yourself.

Ironman mode flips that on its head. You can't trade with other players, can't pick up their dropped stuff, and have to earn everything yourself. It's harder, but a lot of players love the feeling of actually earning their gear. There are a few flavors to pick from:

• Standard Ironman: no trading, fully self-sufficient.
• Hardcore Ironman: same rules, but you only get one life. A dangerous death drops you down to a regular Ironman.
• Ultimate Ironman: no trading AND no bank. Everything stays in your inventory. Pretty brutal.
• Group Ironman: teams of two to five players share a bank but can't trade outside the group. Good if you've got friends starting alongside you.

Here's the part that matters for a beginner. You don't have to lock this in immediately. On Tutorial Island you can flip between modes for free. Once you leave, you can only downgrade (say, Hardcore to Standard) by talking to Adam the Ironman tutor in Lumbridge, and there's a seven-day wait built in. You also get a one-week grace period to change your mind after picking. So don't sweat the choice on day one. When in doubt, try a regular account first.

Tutorial Island Essentials

Every new account starts on Tutorial Island. It's a scripted area that walks you through the basics, and you can't reach the mainland until you finish it. The whole thing takes maybe twenty minutes, give or take.

Don't grind here

The big thing to know: skills cap at level 3 on the island, and anything you gather disappears when you leave. So there's no point trying to power-level Fishing or Mining before you head out. Just follow the prompts, learn what each skill does, and move on. The real training happens back in Lumbridge.

There's one small exception. The mining and smithing bit is worth doing properly, because the rocks, furnace, and anvil are all right next to each other there, which is rare in the wider world. But even then, don't bother going past level 3.

What you'll actually do

The island runs you through a string of buildings, each with an instructor waiting inside:

1. The Gielinor Guide starts you off and asks how much you've played. Say you're brand new or returning, even if you're not totally sure. This unlocks the Adventure Paths system later, which hands out free starter tasks and rewards on the mainland.
2. Brynna the Survival Expert gives you a small fishing net, a bronze axe, and a tinderbox. You catch raw shrimps, chop down a tree, light a fire, and cook the shrimps. That covers Fishing, Woodcutting, Firemaking, and Cooking in about two minutes flat.
3. Lev the Master Chef shows you how to mix flour and water into dough and bake bread on a range. Quick and painless.
4. The Quest Guide explains the quest journal and the colored markers (red for not started, yellow for in progress, green for done).
5. Dezzick the Mining Instructor hands you a bronze pickaxe to mine copper and tin, then a hammer to smith a bronze bar into a dagger on an anvil.
6. Vannaka the Combat Instructor is the meaty one. You equip a bronze sword and wooden shield and kill a giant rat. You can't actually die in this part, so don't worry about your health bar. Then he gives you a shortbow and 50 bronze arrows for a ranged kill on another rat.
7. Brother Brace in the chapel covers Prayer and the habit of burying bones.
8. The Magic Instructor, Terrova, gives you 5 air runes and 5 mind runes and has you cast Wind Strike on a chicken.

Leaving the island

When you're done, Terrova points you to the Lumbridge Home Teleport spell in your spellbook. Cast it and you pop into Lumbridge, the starter town. If you told the Gielinor Guide you were new, a fellow named Adventurer Jon will flag you down right away and set you up with Adventure Paths plus a free combat starter kit. Talk to him before you wander off.

First Skills Worth Training Early

Once you land in Lumbridge, the whole map opens up and it's easy to drift aimlessly. For your first 10 levels, a small set of skills does most of the heavy lifting. Focus on those and the rest can wait.

Combat first, almost always

Combat is the backbone of the game, and it levels itself while you do almost everything else, so it's a fine place to begin. Head to the chicken coop just north of Lumbridge, at Farmer Fred's farm. Chickens are combat level 1 with only 3 health, they can barely scratch you, and you need zero food to fight them. Each kill is worth about 12 combat XP, which sounds tiny, but the levels fly by at the start.

They also drop feathers in stacks of 5 to 15, which sell for a little profit on the Grand Exchange, plus bones you can bury for Prayer XP. Once you start hitting 4s with your weapon, chickens stop being worth your time for combat training, though they're still handy for feathers and Prayer.

A step up from chickens are the giant rats over in Lumbridge Swamp. They're combat level 3 with 5 health, and they always drop raw rat meat, which you can cook into food that heals 3 per bite. Free food while you train is a nice deal early on.

Pick a style: Strength does the heavy lifting

When you swing a weapon, your attack style decides which combat skill earns the XP. Accurate trains Attack, aggressive trains Strength, and defensive trains Defence. For raw damage, Strength is the one that bumps your max hit, so most players train it first or keep it a few levels ahead of the others. Honestly, don't obsess over a perfect plan. Keeping your melee skills within five or ten levels of each other is plenty good for the early game.

Your weapon of choice is the scimitar. It swings fast and puts out more damage than almost anything else you can wield at a given level, so always grab the best one you're allowed to equip. The long-term goal is a rune scimitar at 40 Attack, but that's a long way off. For your first 10 levels, bronze and iron will do the job just fine.

Gathering skills for food and cash

A couple of skills pair naturally with combat and keep you self-sufficient instead of broke:

• Fishing and Cooking: catch shrimps in Lumbridge Swamp and cook them on a fire you make yourself. Cooked food is your healing, so this one's worth touching early.
• Woodcutting and Firemaking: chop regular trees around Lumbridge and burn the logs. Cheap, simple, and the spare logs sell for a little pocket money.
• Mining and Smithing: slower to get going, but it ties into making your own weapons and armour down the line.

Don't skip Agility if you're a member

This one's members-only, so feel free to ignore it on a free-to-play account. For everyone else, Agility earns an early mention because every 10 levels it speeds up how fast your run energy refills. Run energy is what lets you sprint instead of walk, and a low-level account recharges it painfully slowly. Pushing Agility to 10, 20, or 30 early makes the whole game feel less sluggish. Those first couple of breakpoints come quickly, so it's a cheap quality-of-life boost that pays off every single time you run somewhere.

Setting Up Your Bank and Inventory

Your bank is where you stash everything you're not using right now, and your inventory is what you carry on your person. Keeping them straight from the start saves a lot of headache later.

Find the bank and use it

The first bank you'll bump into is on the top floor of Lumbridge Castle. Talk to a banker at a booth to open it up. Think of the bank as your giant storage chest. Anything valuable, anything you're not actively using, goes in there. Your inventory is for what you need in the moment: food, a weapon, maybe a teleport.

A common rookie move is lugging everything you own around in your backpack. Best not to. When you die in most of the game, you only keep a handful of your best items and the rest is at risk. Travel light. If you wouldn't be sad to lose an item, sure, carry it. If you would, bank it.

Lock it down with a PIN and authenticator

This part is boring but genuinely important. Set a bank PIN. It's a four-digit code you pick by talking to any banker. It takes seven days to activate after you set it, and removing it later takes three to seven days on purpose, so a hacker can't just wipe it out instantly. Entering it is done by clicking numbers on screen rather than typing, which makes life harder for keyloggers. As a small bonus, having a PIN active also gives you 20 extra bank slots.

Pair that with a Jagex Account and the RuneScape Authenticator on your login. The PIN protects your stuff if someone breaks in. The authenticator stops them from breaking in to begin with. Set up both, basically on day one. Account theft is a real thing in this game, and people have lost years of progress because they skipped these steps.

Grab RuneLite while you're at it

RuneLite is the approved third-party client most of the community plays on. It's allowed by the developers and adds a pile of helpful stuff: a Grand Exchange price checker, a smoother world hopper, idle notifications so you don't have to babysit every action, and a one-click wiki lookup button that pulls up the official page for any item or monster. That last one is a genuine lifesaver when you don't know what anything does yet.

You can stick with the official client if you'd rather, and that's totally fine. But RuneLite smooths out a lot of the clunk, and the wiki button alone makes it worth the swap for a brand-new player.

Keep your inventory tidy

Once you're banked up, build the habit of depositing loot you don't need right now. Bones, raw meat, random drops: dump them in the bank or sell them on the Grand Exchange. A clean inventory means you can actually see what you're carrying, and you've got less to lose if the worst happens. It's a tiny habit that pays off forever.

Common Newbie Mistakes to Avoid

A handful of traps catch almost every new player. None of them are game-ending, but sidestepping them early saves you time and gear.

Carrying your whole bank into danger

Covered above, but it's the number-one mistake so it bears repeating. You only keep a few items when you die in most places. If you stroll into a dungeon with three weapons, two spare armour sets, and your entire food supply, you're risking all of it for no good reason. Take what you need for the trip. Bank the rest.

Training Attack when you wanted Strength

This one sneaks up on people. If you leave your attack style on "accurate," you're pouring XP into Attack instead of Strength. That's not wrong, exactly, but if your goal is to hit harder (and for most early training it is), you want the "aggressive" style instead. Check which style you're on before you start swinging. It's a one-click fix that completely changes where your XP goes.

Camping chickens forever

Chickens are great at level 1. By the time you're hitting 4s and 5s, though, they're wasting your time, because they die in one swing and hand over almost no XP. Once you outdamage their 3 health, move on to giant rats, then seagulls over at Port Sarim (they literally can't hit you back), then whatever the next tier up is. The game keeps handing you faster monsters as your levels climb. Take them.

Skipping quests

Quests aren't just flavor text in RuneScape. They hand out big chunks of XP and unlock genuinely useful stuff, and they're one of the fastest ways to level a fresh account. New accounts also can't freely trade certain items on the Grand Exchange until they've racked up 20 hours of playtime, a total skill level of 100, and 10 quest points. Knocking out easy early quests like Cook's Assistant, Sheep Shearer, and X Marks the Spot fixes the quest-point part fast and showers you with XP while you're at it.

Falling for scams and lures

The Wilderness (the big PvP zone north of Varrock) is full of people trying to trick newer players into carrying their valuables across the border so they can kill them and take it all. If a stranger offers you free stuff, wants to "double your money," or keeps steering you toward the Wilderness wall, walk away. Free money offers in this game are basically never free. Keep your valuables banked, never drop-trade with someone you don't know, and treat any too-good-to-be-true deal as exactly that.

Putting off security until "later"

Tying back to the bank section: a lot of players skip the PIN and authenticator because their account is low level and not worth much yet. The catch is you'll blink and suddenly have a hundred hours in, and the pile of items you've stacked up is now very stealable. Set it all up while your bank is still mostly empty and you won't have to think about it later.

Ignoring food and carried weight

Two small things that make early life a lot easier. Always carry some food when you fight anything that can hit back. Cooked shrimps or meat cost you nothing to make, so there's no excuse to wade in empty-handed. And watch your carried weight: heavier packs drain your run energy faster. Bank the junk and you'll sprint a lot more.

Keep three pieces of cooked food, your best weapon, and a teleport in your inventory, and bank everything else.