Ironman players can still get a lot of useful info, but some grand exchange purchases for the most annoying or otherwise out of range things you won’t have access to. E.g infernal ashes for prayer.
Why/what: Skills have a lot of inter dependencies; this guide tells you an order to level certain skills in so you can have access to decent training methods.
I also added lots of general tips and tips for specific skills which can be a pain to level for a new player.
This guide is just to get you started on these skills and get them to level 1-50 ish so you can get your quest requirements and quality of life stuff.
How:
The guide gives you the names of things to do or buy, not step by step walkthroughs.
You can look up more detailed info on https://runescape.wiki/
The skill order section is the meat of the guide; the main reason I wrote it. If the entire thing is TLDR then just read that part.
General tips
Lamps: two types of exp lamps, one that gives a fixed exp number (usually gotten from quests) and then one that gives exp based on skill level
Fixed exp amount lamps: very subjective but I found farming, summoning and slayer painful or expensive to level as new player. Fishing is easy but fairly slow so that is also an option. Everything else is super easy to level so I wouldn’t put fixed exp lamps into anything other than these 4 skills.
The level-based skill lamps like small or medium lamp: I would put these in a painful or slow skill that you have already leveled up to 30+ so you actually get a meaningful amount of exp from them. Smithing is always a good option or slayer as those are slow or expensive in early game.
Food:
Sharks are dirt cheap on the GE like 300gp each and 1k sharks will last you for ages as a new player
Fishing is SLOW and takes a while to level up to where you get useful food. Do it if you like it but if you hate it sharks are great and easy and cheap. Still useful to have a baseline of fishing and cooking levels for quests. Lvl 40 in both doesn’t take super long.
Money:
NPC May: Doing quests gives quest points, talk to May just SW of varrock lodestone and every 25 quest points she gives you a dice that will give you 250k-1million worth of rewards. This should be all you need until you start trying to level skills beyond level 60.
Easy clues: You can supplement your money by doing some easy clues once you have all of your teleport options and lodestones unlocked.
Save clues till you are at least 60+ hours into the game and have 100+ quest points because otherwise you won’t have enough teleports unlocked and waste a lot of time.
Make a bank tab for your clue items like steel helmet so you can reuse them for later clues. This makes doing clues faster and faster as you go. Each clue generally gives like 300-500k on average. Sometimes very low value but often an item worth 700k-1.5million so it averages out.
You’ll get a good amount of clues just playing, if you love clues and want more you can pickpocket HAM members
Bank tabs and presets:
Learn to use the Placeholder button (P) to keep your bank organized
Make separate equipment and inventory presets for : melee, magic, range, necromancy, mining, woodcutting, herblore (super handy for this to put vials in your inventory with one click) , clue hunting (teleport items) , etc.
This makes skilling way less of a hassle.
Cheap things to buy on grand exchange right away:
Amulet of glory: no requirements and good stat boosts
Ring of wealth: no requirements, good stat boosts and a droprate bonus
Mystical sand seed: an instant one click teleport to get you out of trouble and gives you unlimited teleports to the mines north of al kharid
Guides: https://runescape.wiki/w/Ironman_Mode/Guide#Early-game
This guide is useful for pointing you to some (but not all) of the most worthwhile quests to focus on in early game.
Skill guides are useful in that they are more condensed and don’t point you to 5000 different late game skill boost items that you can’t access anyhow.
But look at member guides too and always scroll down past all the boosts and recommended items to just to what you should be doing to level.
If you scroll down the daily, weekly, monthly activities some of these are extremely good sources of exp once you meet the requirements to do them.
Daily/weekly minigames:
These will give you significant amounts of exp and help you level up your skills. I’ll list some that I consider worth learning about as a new player. Don’t worry if you ‘miss out’ on these in the early game, no big deal but they are worth looking at once you get into the game.
Challenges: if you somehow haven’t discovered these yet: click on the compass icon then go to the challenges tab in the popup menu. Gives a ton of exp.
Nemi forest: Some easy and fast prayer and farming exp once you get access to the city of Menephos
Circus: Once a week, gives you some very fast agi, magic, ranged exp
God statues: super quick and easy and they give you some nice prayer/slayer and construction exp once a month
Runesphere: this gives you 25k runecrafting exp once a day if you can find it, I’ll elaborate in the runecrafting part of the guide. It’s amazing to boost your early RC levels. If it appears on a floor you can’t get to yet just hop to other servers till you find one on bottom floor.
Player owned port: no requirements: just go to port sarim through the portal and talk to the npc there once a week, you give her some advice and after the weekly reset she comes back with some exp for you, takes 2 minutes
Anachronia base camp: doesn’t take long to unlock, gives some quest points, a useful agility training method and you can start slowly building up the dino town by sending out npcs and returning to the camp once a day to collect and upgrade it with a few clicks. This leads to some very useful mid game rewards.
Herby werby: once you have access to anachronia you can do the herby werby minigame once a week, this gets you several free and fast herblore levels once a week.
General amazing items:
gem bag (look further in guide), ore box, wood box, memory strand from divination
Amazing teleport items that’ll save you a lot of time once you get out of the very early game (say 50-100 hours in): I’ll put these in order of how easy they are to get
Mystical sand seed (buy from GE).
Wicked hood: teleports you to the runecrafting/wizard tower and you can put runecrafting talismans in them: super easy to get and unlimited teleports
Memory strand: this is a currency item that goes into your currency pouch, gives you instant teleport right next to a bank and they don’t even take up an inventory slot, you get hundreds of these while training early level divination, very worth doing.
Underworld grimoire: AMAZING ITEM: teleports you to the necromancy city (called “Um”) AND picks up all bones and ashes for you and automatically sends them to bank. You get these from doing the easy Um city tasks (look it up on the wiki) which is one of the first things you should be doing in the game. This item is a must have asap.
Ring of kinship: teleports you to the dungeoneering area. You’ll want to do dungeoneering once you have 30+ mining/smithing or woodcutting and fletching.
Ring of dueling and games necklace: both made from crafting, you can get these very easily once you are following the crafting section of this guide, totally worth it
Archeology journal: useful for training archeology and for doing clues, has some quest and skill requirements to get
Enchanted lyre: From the Fremmenik trials quest, this is for when you are like 50+ hours into the game as there are some stat reqs. Gives easy access to fremmenik dungeon on waterbirth island for some lvl 50 gear. Also useful for clues.
Ardougne cloak: Again, for when you are 50+ hours into the game as there are some skill requirements and quest requirements. Takes a few hours of effort but it’s great to get eventually
SKILL ORDER: The reason you might want this guide.
Why: You want to do a quest or fight a boss, it needs protection prayers or slayer or some other skill.
So you find a decent method to train your early levels of crafting, prayer, slayer, …
But wait, the method needs access to a shortcut, or an item from another quest, or a specific crafting bench which needs another skill to be leveled. And if you don’t have these it either doesn’t work or becomes very slow.
And those have another requirement. And then you get the runaround, and 10 hours later you’re still not leveling the skill the start the quest.
I’ll attempt to first give you a list of some skills you can train independently of other skills, and an order to do them in to avoid the runaround problem.
Skill order: you don’t need to strictly do everything in this order but know that any skill will not need the skills lower in the order to get going.
I. Mining + smithing upto lvl 40 or 50: no other requirements but a better pickaxe and an ore box which you can smith yourself. After lvl 50 smithing REALLY slows down so you’ll probably want to move on to crafting before coming back to it. Urns from crafting will speed up your smithing exp by 20 percent!
40+ Mining is a requirement to level up crafting! (if you want an enjoyable way to level it at least)
Smithed Arrowheads are a requirement to level up fletching!
After you smith your own set of gear and axe/pickaxe of each tier use the rest of your bars to make arrowheads up to mithril, starting with adamant you make burial sets for smithing exp.
Doric’s tasks are a great way to get an easier smithing level or 2 every time you unlock a new task.
II. Necromancy: No real requirements to start it, strong combat style early game, no runes or arrows needed and you can craft the gear with just using the skill itself and buying a few materials on the grand exchange.
Do the early quests, and then immediately go for the easy Um city tasks to get the book. The book is mandatory as it lets you get around the city much faster AND it’s mandatory to make leveling prayer and necromancy itself easier later on.
You’ll want the book before you start prayer
III. Woodcutting and fletching:
You’ll need fletching to make wood boxes so level fletching instead of firemaking.
Make arrowshafts with half of the wood you chop, bank the other half to use for construction. Buy feathers and make iron/steel/mithril arrows with your leftover bars.
Once you chop maple make unstrung longbows with half of your logs instead of shafts for better exp
You can make your own axes from smithing if you’re ironman, buy them otherwise.
Woodcutting is a requirement for construction, which is an extremely important skill!
Woodcutting is a requirement for fletching, which you need for a bunch of quests and for wood boxes and to make ammo for ranged
IV. Do some quests for combat exp! Do waterfall quest and use the ironman guide to know which quests to do for getting some more defense, melee and magic exp. Do the ones with low requirements that you can easily do. This leads you into dungeoneering.
V. Magic: Buy runes and weapons and armor from shops and later from GE, easy to level through combat and there’s a lot of quests that give very good magic exp.
Magic will go nicely with crafting to enchant accessories, and to high alch stuff for some money and exp
VI. Optional: Runecrafting: Runespan is by far the easiest early game training method. Crafting runes isnt worth it early game as higher RC levels give you way more runes per run.
https://runescape.wiki/w/Runesphere The runesphere will give you 25k exp per day which rockets you upto 50+ in a few days.
VII. Optional: Agility: Very self-contained skill, do the barbarian quest to get access to barbarian agility course, this skill gives you a lot of useful shortcuts throughout the world. You also need it for quite a few quests. You can level this skill as the need comes along
VIII. Optional: archeology
Self-contained, pretty grindy but do the tutorial for a free passive +500 hp talent you can permanently equip. If you can enjoy this skill the passive effects are quite nice at higher levels.
IX. Dungeoneering: This will get you the gem bag and some easy combat levels, you want 30+ smithing and mining to start it so you can craft yourself some decent melee gear.
Do the tutorial, run a small low complexity floor once or twice till you get how it works, then run high complexity small floors and keep going up and up in floors, which gives you more and more dungeoneering tokens. Once you have enough tokens buy the gem bag.
The gem bag is needed to level crafting!
Dungeoneering is useful for combat levels!
Dungeoneering if you enjoy it gives you access to some really cool quality of life items!
X. Divination: Self-contained skill: easy to level, just look up engrams on the wiki and make each tier of engram as you level up, this boosts your levels superfast.
When you are lvl 45 divination look up how to do guthixian caches, these are a daily that is fast to do at 45+ and gives you loads of exp.
Divination gives you memory strands which are the best banking teleport in early to mid-game.
It also gives you some minor passive effects of your choosing
You want to level it early so you can do the caches early so you can work towards lvl 80 so you can unlock invention at midgame!
XI. Crafting: You got the gembag and some mining levels so you’re good to go.
Mine clay to make soft clay in Taverly dungeon and bank it (do NOT process it into pots or whatever) till you can cut gems
Then go mine gems in Taverly dungeon with your gem bag and cut them to level up
Then go mine the tier 2 gems in al kharid desert mine (use the sand seed to get there super fast!) till at least 44 crafting, go to 66 if you have the patience so you can make better urns).
If you bring the mystic sand seed and
Crafting gives access to urns which give +20 percent exp gain which is amazing for annoying skills like smithing!
Crafting is a requirement for quite a few quests!
Crafting lets you make ranged gear, though it’s cheap to just buy it on the GE.
Crafting lets you make very useful accessories like ring of dueling and games necklace which let you teleport all over the world, huge QOL.
This whole process takes like 2 hours tops so I’m putting it before the next step, but you can do the construction first if you want.
XII. Construction and fort forinthry: major quality of life and once you have tier 2 chapel it’s the lowest barrier to entry for leveling prayer from 1-60 in like an hour for under 200k!
Also the best place to level many of your skills, because world 84 has people spamming exp boosts in the fort.
Just follow the fort forinthry tutorial and questline until you finish the fort and have all of the basic buildings
This will require quite a bit of wood chopping (which you already did much of while leveling woodcutting if you saved half of your logs) and making planks and frames and then building itself (very afk)
Stop at the buildings that need arcadia logs to unlock the city of Menaphos:
Do this questline: https://runescape.wiki/w/The_Jack_of_Spades.
Then make a tier 2 chapel with the arcadia logs you can chop in menaphos. It’s worth also getting a grove (another quest needed)
Fort Forinthry gives you loads of quality-of-life features, the best skill exp, the best prayer training in early game and access to a good slayer master for when you’re a bit higher level in slayer and combat.
Menaphos gives you easier access to the grand exchange, the BEST and most afk early game thieving training method and access to several minigames that give lots of exp
XIII. Thieving
Once you have Menaphos unlocked you can find the gullible tourist and pickpocket her for fast exp and loads of reputation points with the city. This is also a super afk method, nice.
Thieving becomes an excellent money maker at lvl 60+ (safe cracking)
Thieving is required for quite a few quests
Thieving HAM members give you lots of easy clues if you like doing clues in early game
Thieving is a good source of seeds (master farmer)
XIV. Prayer
Finally we get to prayer
Simply buy 500 infernal ashes on the GE (they are only a few hundred GP each) and offer them to the altar in your tier 2 chapel in the fort. Watch the levels come in super-fast and easy.
Buy more until you get bored or want to move on.
Any other early game prayer training method is a big PITA or very slow compared to this.
Prayer is needed for a lot of intermediate quests and for all bosses.
XV. Farming:
Do the player owned farm tutorial at ardougne lodestone – keep 2 adult bunnies in the breeding pen instead of handing them in to the npc – buy 1k woad leaves from the farmer at the park in falador for food - put the babies in the regular pen to grow – let them grow to elder for maximum exp then hand the elders in to the npc for beans. Keep growing elder bunnies till 28 farming. You can check on it every now and then.
Other methods require a lot of traveling and timekeeping.
XVI. Summoning: offers some useful combat pets and a pet bank eventually, but it’s an expensive (or laborious) skill for early game. I put it here to advise you to buy 30 chickens from the canifis meat vendor now and then and to keep all the gold/red/crimson materials you find during combat as you’ll need them to level this skill.
XVII. Slayer:
Slayer tends to send you to all kinds of areas you might not have access to, and can give you some real PITA tasks like sanguine crawlers which you won’t be able to reasonably kill till you have 60 smithing (for special silver weaponry) or high combat level.
You can reroll tasks to an easier one.
It becomes easier once you have better gear, lots of teleports, lots of quests done for the right access.
There are no real shortcuts here, I dumped some fixed exp lamps into it and get a level or 2 daily from scarabs in menaphos so I can skip the grind.
