Undead Pirates Tweaks, Varlamore CAs & More

We're stepping up the challenge this week with Varlamore Combat Achievements!

Things are heating up in the Wilderness this week as players flock to join the battle between the Elder Chaos Druids and the Undead Pirates.

Since last week’s update, we’ve made the following hotfixes:

• The Elder Chaos Druids’ teleblock is now correctly removed upon leaving the Wilderness.
• We've also stopped those pesky Druids from closing your bank if you'd recently been in combat.
• Drop rate of the Teleport Anchoring Scroll from the Zombie Pirate's Locker has been made 1 in 275.
• The Teleport Anchoring Scroll is no longer doubled when obtained from the Locker.
• Zombie Pirate Keys now drop at a rate of 1 in 24. On average, assuming you use up all of the keys you obtain, this makes the Teleport Anchoring Scroll around 4 times more common.

This week, we’re making the following changes in line with your feedback:

• Reduced the wander range of Elder Chaos Druids.
• Artio, Callisto, Calvar'ion, Spindel, Vet'ion and Venenatis won't attack for a short period after respawn, giving you the chance to manage your supplies and Inventory if needed.
• Increased the despawn timer of consumables dropped in the Wilderness to 15 seconds.
• Fixed an issue stopping you picking up loot on a particular tile at the Chaos Temple.
• Players can now take a pause between Wilderness Agility Course laps by logging out, although they will lose 25 laps for doing so. Leaving the arena or dying will still end the streak.
• The skeletons on the surface of the Wilderness Agility Course now deal less damage. Watch out though, underground Skeletons still hit for a max of 4.
• Damage now correctly applies through the ladder animation in the Wilderness Agility Course.
• The Wilderness Agility Course lap streak and loot now display while Game Chat is set to 'Filtered'.
• When paying the 150,000 GP fee to use the Agility Course, you'll now receive a looting bag if you don't currently own one.
• The Ring of Wealth(i) now interacts properly with Medium Clue Scrolls at the Wilderness Agility Course.
• The spikes underneath the Wilderness Agility arena no longer stop projectiles from travelling over them.
• Moved the location of Clue Steps inside the Wilderness Agility Course to a slightly quieter spot.

The Hard Clue step formerly requiring you to enter the Wilderness Agility Course has been moved to the Ice Plateau - watch out for Ice Giants!

The similar Master Clue step has been moved just south-east of the course. Keep an eye out for traffic between Larran's Chest and the revamped Agility Course!

You’ve had plenty of time to get to grips with the new combat challenges Varlamore offers – so we’ve thrown a few complications into the mix! You may now take on 12 new Combat Achievements for Perilous Moons, and 13 for the Colosseum, ranging from Medium to Grand Master.

In other news, we’re updating our guidelines for Third-Party Clients, including RuneLite and HDOS.

Firstly, the following have been adjusted our ‘disallowed features’ list:

• Any plugin which unhides, hides or moves components of the Spellbook Interface.
• Resizing components of the Spellbook interface is still prohibited.
• Any plugin which adds additional menu entries which cause actions to be sent to the server.
• This one now includes exceptions for the Max Cape and Diary Cape.
• Any plugin which modifies menu options for Construction, such as prioritising build or remove options.

We’re allowing players to change elements of the Spellbook largely to give people greater flexibility over their gameplay experience. Most of our interfaces are over two decades old, and difficult to work with, but this legacy shouldn’t discourage us from giving players more freedom to make the UI comfortable. This change also gives us the flexibility to add new spells without worrying that we’ll mess up people’s muscle memory, as was the case with the new Teleport to Kourend requirement.

Next, we’re allowing players to add additional menu entries specifically to allow for Max Cape and Diary Cape usability improvements. As we add more teleport options, the menus become harder to navigate – so we’re allowing small tweaks that spare players from clicking through multiple dialogue boxes.

Saving the spiciest for last, we’re allowing players to modify menu options for the Construction skill. This is something we’d like to roll out to our own client at some point, and springs from a desire to make ‘traditional’ Construction training more approachable. Such changes won’t improve XP rates, but they will save your wrists!

These changes go into effect immediately, though you might have to wait a little while for our talented community developers to make the best use of these updated guidelines!

We’re gearing up for our fifth internal game jam! This is the time of year when our devs come together to work on passion projects. In the past, this work has led to content like Scurrius, Project Rebalance, and Perilous Moons – so we can’t wait to see what the team comes up with this time!

Game Jam V will run from April 22nd through to May 6th, which means April 24th will be a smaller update than usual, and May 1st will see no update at all – although there may still be downtime.

We’ll be sharing what the team gets up to using the #OSRSGameJam hashtag – so keep your eyes peeled!

Next week will bring some usability improvements to the in-game ‘Report Abuse’ interface. The current menu is awkward in various ways – it can be interrupted during combat, cannot be opened while in another menu, and on Mobile the keyboard obscures the interface completely!

So, here's an updated version to address all three of these problems, which you can expect to see next week. Hooray!

• This opens in the chatbox area rather than covering your game view, so it doesn't need to be dismissed by combat.
• That also means it can stay open while menus like the bank are in use.
• Plus, it won't be hidden under the keyboard on mobile devices.
• We've enabled a keyboard short-cut for each rule, too. For example, '7' would report this player for macroing, or '9' would report them for advertising websites. This may be handy if you're often sending reports for the same few rules.
• The menu's scrollbar remembers its position, too, where possible, so you hopefully won't have to scroll up and down too much when you use the menu.

If you need to type or edit the name of the player you're reporting, that can be done in the Chat Box too:

As a little extra feature, we're also adding a right-click option to the congratulatory messages you receive when you PK someone, making it easier to report them if you think they were suspicious:

Now, while the game team is trying to improve what we can about the game's menus to help you report rule-breakers, the back-end systems are not changing in this particular update. This means that other rules, like not being able to report someone if they haven’t spoken or traded recently, will remain unchanged.

Rest assured that our colleagues in the Player Support and Anti-Cheating teams are doing all they can to root out the rule-breakers from our community, and they do appreciate the in-game reports you sent them. We hope that next week’s update will make it easier for you all to help them out!

An extra feature you may notice is the 'Law-breaking content' button. We've added this new button to make it more straightforward to report illegal content to us. Very rarely, you may see chat related to illegal topics that are not fully covered by our game rules. For now, reporting illegal content is restricted to residents of EU Member State countries, although we may expand this rule in future.

To be clear, most of the rule-breaking behaviour players encounter is already covered by our game rules, and in those situations, the regular in-game 'Report' option is the best way to let us know about the issue.

We want to take a moment to congratulate the mods over on our Official Discord Server for hosting a super successful event this past weekend, including Guardians of the Rift runs and a mass Hide and Seek!

We’d also like to thank everyone who took part in our recent Discord survey. We've gone through all your feedback and can't wait to start introducing fun new opportunities to the server! Meanwhile, you can find clan recruitment spaces and our Discord Stages Modcasts, plus links to previous recordings there already. Keep an eye out for updates soon! Click the button below to visit the server.

• Removed the 2024 Easter Event.
• Wall Beasts in the Lumbridge Swamp Caves will now stay inside the walls.
• The new left-click options on the polar and jungle eagles now work for completing the relevant Achievement Diary tasks.
• Fixed an issue with the Collection Log search function on mobile, so you'll now be able to check your wins wherever you are.
• Justiciar is now categorised correctly as metal armour by Ava's devices.
• Resolved a crash issue observed inside the PoH dungeon under specific circumstances.

The PvP rota has moved to Period A:

• 539 - (US) - PvP World
• 318 - (UK) - Bounty Hunter World
• 548 - (Germany) - High-Risk PvP World
• 577 - (US) - Free-to-Play PvP World
• 559 - (UK) - LMS Competitive

World 390 (AUS) for LMS Competitive has been activated with this rota.

World 569 (AUS) for Bounty Hunter has been de-activated with this rota.

The PvP Arena is using 'Zerker' loadouts in Ranked Duels and Tournaments this week.

You can also discuss this update on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

Mods Abe, Abyss, Arcane, Archie, Argo, Ash, Ayiza, BigRig, Blossom, Boko, Bruno, Chilly, Criminal, Crystal, Curse, Daizong, Dylan, Ed, Elena, Enigma, Errol, Gecko, Gengis, Gizmo, Goblin, Grub, Halo, Harold, Hend, Hooti, Hornet, Husky, Jalo, Jerv, Keyser, Kieren, Kirby, Kurotou, Leebleh, Lenny, Light, Liron, Mack, Manked, Markos, Maylea, Meat, Moogle, Morty, Necro, Nox, Nylu, Other, Pumpkin, Redfield, Regent, Rice, Roq, Ry, Sarnie, Saiyan, Shogun, Shroom, Sigma, Skane, Skylark, Smithy, Sova, Squid, Starry, Suharun, Surma, Sween, Tide, Titus, Torrance, Tsourorf, Tyran, Veda, Vegard, West & Wolfy

The Old School Team.