- 10 Dec, 2025 *
Oldschool Runescape’s most recent major update is its only new skill since launch in 2012: Sailing. Sailing does what it says on the tin; Players can buy and sail boats, sail them across the oceans of Gielinor, and discover new islands and resources away from shore. Sailing brought new foes to fight, four new quests, additions to other non-combat skills like Woodcutting, Mining, Construction, and Hunter, and has massively expanded the traversable gamespace. Sailing’s new additions have fit fairly seamlessly into their respective skills and locales, and Sailing itself is a lot of fun! While there’s a need for greater expansion of the playable content, and Jagex continues to negotiate with the playerbase how high experience rates should be, Sailing has been a resoundi…
- 10 Dec, 2025 *
Oldschool Runescape’s most recent major update is its only new skill since launch in 2012: Sailing. Sailing does what it says on the tin; Players can buy and sail boats, sail them across the oceans of Gielinor, and discover new islands and resources away from shore. Sailing brought new foes to fight, four new quests, additions to other non-combat skills like Woodcutting, Mining, Construction, and Hunter, and has massively expanded the traversable gamespace. Sailing’s new additions have fit fairly seamlessly into their respective skills and locales, and Sailing itself is a lot of fun! While there’s a need for greater expansion of the playable content, and Jagex continues to negotiate with the playerbase how high experience rates should be, Sailing has been a resounding success and is one of my favourite updates Runescape as a whole has received.
The greatest strength of Sailing is its fantasy. Runescape is a game that is heavily abstracted. Despite the fact it has the granularity to express melding ores in a furnace into alloys that can be shapen into swords, maces, and armor, Runescape makes no attempt to simulate those steps. If you have level nine smithing you can, through the magic of clicking, turn copper and tin ores in to bronze bars in to bronze warhammers. You don’t need to know what shape a warhammer is, you don’t need to know when to heat the molten metal and when to cool it, your character handles it and your smithing level is a reflection of that. Sailing, unlike Smithing, is primarily experienced through actually controlling your sailboat. A good sailor can pilot their way through a narrow inlet at level one Sailing, and a bad sailor will complain on reddit that it’s too easy to get stuck or that the Jubbly Jive is too laggy to complete within the goal time trial times at level 99. That sounds simple, but it’s actually fairly new territory for Runescape, and to execute on a new type of skill so beautifully is really impressive.
Sailing’s training activities are less focused than its core gameplay. Primarily, Sailing is broken up into a few categories: salvaging (going to nodes in the world to gather salvage, which you can then process to gather resources), trials (time trial races that require some fairly technical driving and offer big milestone experience drops for meeting goal times), and exploration and traversal. Salvaging has been the source of much consternation as Jagex tries to decide how high its experience rates should be, but the core gameplay offers players a range of activity levels that make it highly satisfying and a good background activity. The resources fill some odd gaps in Ironman character progression as well, and help to cover some of the resource costs of upgrading your boat. Trials are the highest repeatable experience per hour at almost every level bracket, and reward mastery of sailing the player skill, not just Sailing the character skill. Trials also serve as a major milestone as hitting goal times unlock new unique items. Finally, exploration and traversal is largely divided into one-time charting tasks – where you record a current, interesting location, or climate in an area for an experience reward – and repeatable port tasks, asking you to travel between ports. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it covers all the major training methods players have been using.
All of these training methods are fairly enjoyable in themselves, but there are gaps. Currently, outside of trials, there’s a lack of active methods that feel deliberate and focused the way other skills have collected with time. All of these methods, outside of charting, also feel very contained within dedicated zones, and the liminal zones between designated trials or salvaging areas feel empty. There are resource collection training methods like sailing combat and trawling that occupy some of these zones, but most of these methods are things that happen at singular, very small areas in the larger sea. This feeling of isolation is exacerbated by Sailing literally disconnecting itself from the rest of the game by happening off shore. I’d like to see more spontaneous and interesting things to do while on your boat moving from point A to B that are active but also don’t require individual static nodes.
What’s here is a great start, and there’s a lot of room for improvement that’s sure to come. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a new update more than this, and I was pleasantly surprised to have friends who have otherwise been disinterested in Runescape asking about Sailing. I hope any new players brought in by the promise of the open seas enjoy their stay.