Intro
I got an itch to play a new game recently and after squabbling with my PS4 and my PC I decided to go old school literally with Old School Runescape... I played this game so much as a kid and it's so well preserved in 2025. I tried to bang out a ton today and decided to look through a few guides to try to level up effeciently.
Quests
There's a handful of quests and several are pretty attainable early on that give enough XP to blitz through the early levels of many skills...
Today I made it through doric's quest which bumped be through to level 20+ mining. Another player gave me a black pick-axe which made mining some iron pretty easy. From there I wanted to level up smithing a bit - and the guides say that "The Knight's Sword" is a good quest for it, though it's recommended to be combat level 20 before doing it... I decided to not worry about that, I've picked red-berries for a pie and am going to bring a haul of steaks and my black pick while I try to get the bluerite ore and run away from the ice giants that I know will destroy me at my whopping combat level 6... but for first day back I'm feeling great.
After that my smithing levels should be in the teens... Not sure what we'll do after that
I did do the Cook's Assistant while gathering things for the Knight's Sword, easy peasy and gets me access to the oven in Lumbridge Castle.
Plans
I'm using Affine to map out my questing - the mind map is great for tracking why I'm 6 mini-side-quests removed from the original thing I was after.
Update 01
After about 2 weeks I've done most of othe free-to-play stuff, with just another 2 quests to go. The game is so faitful to what I remember.
I was thinking about how I would tackle a new account, and I am starting to understand the simple appeal of having alternate accounts - a "pure mage" for example.... If money were no object then having a pure ranger and mage account would be pretty fun, and with a powerful main I think it's possible to make plenty of in-game gold and just trade between accounts. To my knowledge, this doesn't break any of the Jagex rules.
Putting the idea of a "pure" anything aside, I was thinking about how I would
more efficiently have played to the point in the game I'm at right now... For
gaining any combat xp the goal is the rune scimitar, which requires level 40
attack to wield. The stronger you are (ie. higher strength) the more xp you
can gain per second. This means upping attack to level 40 with the best
scimitar you can at every level until rune at 40, and then swapping to the
strength-gaining combat style and theoretically training strength to level 99,
and then train defense and attack from x and 40 respectively to 99 is
the quickest way to do it.
The issue with this is that due to the level-scaling of the game, it's totally
impractical to do this and would suck all the fun out of the game. I think I
handled my melee combat leveling pretty well by keeping the 3 stats, attack,
strength, defense more or less in step with each other up to 40, and from
then on began focusing primarily on strength.
I've also spent plenty of time on ranged and magic but these are expensive
to train quickly (and quickly isn't even THAT fast) due to resource consumption
(arrows / runes). Now, I have plenty of resources in game, so training these
has been fine, but in a more vanilla situation they could mostly be forgotten
about until you've leveled up in crafting or mining and smithing for the
sake of making some money.
On that note, combat can be paused from the onset and one can jump right to the
mines with tin + copper -> iron or else tan cowhides and craft leather...
either way, upgrading these skills opens the door for money-making routines and
if you have a good source of income in the game, then buying runes and arrows
for training is quite simple at the grand exchange
There are a few guides on the "optimal" way to play through the game depending on what you want to optimize. Personally, upon thinking about it through writing I can see how there's not a "one right way" to play the game "most efficiently".
If I were to start another account, not as one of these fancy schmancy "pure"
ones, I think I would train my melee stats to 40 via cows, chickens, and giant
frogs (then doubling up on prayer via big bones). The reason for this is that
there's places to mine and fish where the enemies are in level ranges 20-30 and
it's convenient to avoid hostility (ie. being attacked on site)
(south-east varrock mine for example isn't NEXT to the dark wizards, but they
are close and if you are sub combat level 21 or something, they are hostile
towards you).
The other skills I hadn't thought about from the perspective of a guide are firemaking, fishing, cooking, and woodcutting. Typically they're pretty easy to train together, but it's also really easy to focus on cooking by itself east of Barbarian Village where folks are trainign fishing by just dropping raw fish. Coincidentally, that's one of the fastest ways to level up fishing as well...
I've played the game these last 2 weeks I see that with enough money in the
game you are better off staying laser-focused on one skill at a time and then
buying the resoures needed for the other skills. For example, you can train
combat and prayer with giant frogs pretty effeciently since they drop big bones. But it's faster to just focus on killing the frogs for melee xp, and
then buying big bones to do focused bone-burying sessions at a bank, is going
to be a better use of time, but at the cost of buying the bones instead of
harvesting yourself. If you resign youself to this pattern of play, the game
pace moves a little quicker, the grind isn't so exhausting, and the enjoyment
is a big lighter (in a good way)