Jagex has reached new stages of development with the upcoming Sailing skill.

Old School RuneScape is an MMO where you have been able to skill up its 23 skills so you can unlock more content like quests, bosses, or achievement diaries and ultimately get to level 99 with the end goal to get the max cape when you reach 99 in all of the skills. While Jagex has brought various other skills like Archeology or Dungeoneering to RuneScape 3, they have never introduced a new skill to the 2007 copy of Runescape, which had its 10th anniversary earlier this year.

Even though there have been attempts to bring a new skill to OSRS, they have all failed, but now, after 10 years of OSRS, Jagex is determined to bring something new to the scene and challenge the playerbase even further.

Initial Poll

After initially announcing their intentions to bring a new skill to OSRS during the winter summit in December 2022, they polled it by asking the players whether they want or not a new skill. The poll was a simple yes/no question that proved that over 80 percent of the players agreed that Jagex should add a new skill. Sometime later, Jagex presented three potential skills and asked the players to choose their favorite to be further refined. Players had to answer a short poll picking up their favorite from three potential skill ideas: sailing, taming, and shamanism.

Since the most popular pick was sailing, Jagex has moved to the refining stage with this skill and, after additional surveys and community feedback, decided to split the work and the feedback-gathering process into four phases, each asking on particular topics, such as sailing mechanics, the core gameplay, reward space, and game integration and lore.

Delay

Since there’s little to no experience in introducing a new skill, even though Jagex has unsuccessfully tried in the past to do so, things did not go as expected, and Jagex’s initial schedule for the discussions was delayed.

Adapting

Even though Jagex had initially planned on discussing the core gameplay, they quickly adapted to the community feedback. They understood that the navigation mechanics was the first to be discussed in detail. This is because many players wanted more clarification and clarity on this topic after the initial broad discussion and survey where Jagex suggested WASD as a potential control for the sailing skill.

Navigation

On their Navigation Mechanics blog post, Jagex admitted to having understood that the WASD is a no-go for the community and that the click-based options are the way to go but also admitted to wanting to make things a tad more complicated. The best solution Jagex seems to have come up with is that they will use a click-to-move option, and you’ll be able to both click to move around the ship and click on the sea to move the whole ship.

Turning

On top of this, Jagex is bringing a Reddit suggestion with ships being able to rotate and take corners differently than your character would. You’ll also be able to invite other players to navigate with you on the same ship and be able to join other players’ ships to sail together. However, only one person can navigate the ship at a time.

Vessel Size

Jagex also brought more news about the ship types and upgrades, and they currently plan on bringing three sizes of ships: small, large, and colossal vessels. They will have increasingly more floors and interest spots on them but will move and turn slower the bigger the ship. This is also closely linked to map scale and various types of water you can navigate on shallow, open, and deep seas. Jagex is considering restricting certain vessels from navigating in specific types of water.

Primary activities

Sailing’s primary activities revolve around charting the sea, shipwreck salvaging, port tasks, courier tasks, protection tasks, investigative tasks, combat, and ship racing. They offer a wide range of click intensity from low, low to medium, and medium to high as well as various averages when it comes to XP per hour gained, and many of them will also bring your OSRS gold.

Secondary activities

Secondary activities involve both the sailing skill and at least another skill. For example, deep-sea trawling involves sailing and fishing, and mineral dredging involves mining and sailing. If you want to make even more profit or the OSRS gold price interests you, then the secondary activity for you is Sea monster hunting, which involves sailing, hunter, and slayer. But if you want something more chill, you can go for coral farming to level up both sailing and farming simultaneously.

What’s to Come

In the near future, Jagex will explore with the community the rewards for the sailing skill and how to best integrate sailing in the game.

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