Ever feel like you’ve hit a wall while playing Old School RuneScape as a F2P player? If you’re wondering when’s the perfect time to cave in and start your membership subscription on OSRS, the simplest answer is just “now”, but let’s go over some tips and milestones that you can try to go for first if you’re still hesitant to take the plunge!
In my opinion, there’s two different mindsets a player can have when considering membership: “the grinder” and “the casual or new player“. We’ll start with the latter first, since that’s what most of you are likely going to be if you’re reading this.
The Casual/New Player
Tip #1 – Finish The F2P Quests First
Before you take the leap over to the members’ worlds, you should at least try to complete all of the F2P quests. Not only will you need to do them later on anyway, it’ll also give you a bit of a glimpse of how quests are gonna be like in general.
Unlike most other MMORPGs, RuneScape handles quests a little differently. There isn’t really a “structured” approach to it since you often start them by accidentally stumbling into an NPC or checking for their requirements and starting point in the ingame quest list and figuring out the rest from there.
The F2P ones will ease you into the experience, and that should help you decide if this type of gameplay is even right for you. In addition to rewarding players with a decent chunk of experience in various skills, quests in this game are worth doing as they can unlock various game-changing features. This can range from unique gear, resource gathering methods, side activities, and even whole new regions.
While it’s true that the free ones and their rewards may not be representative of the quality and scope of their more recent releases (to be fair, it’s been decades now), the “just figure it out lol” approach and humorous writing remain consistent in almost all the quests. With F2P being confined to a relatively small portion of the world map, it’ll at least not feel overwhelming.
You only get to be a complete newbie once. It only feels right that you should go through the true “new player experience” while you still genuinely can, and finishing every free quest up to Dragon Slayer is exactly that. Nothing in F2P hits as hard as slaying a dragon and unlocking the ability to wear your very first rune platebody.
Tip #2 – Don’t Stress Out About Skills
There really isn’t any point in grinding your F2P skills to a specific level to “prepare” for membership. My take is that you only need to dip your toes into each of them and train them for a bit to familiarize yourself with the basics. Mine and smith for a bit until you can work with iron, or maybe even chop some trees until you can start gathering willow logs.
Once you have the basics down, you’re pretty much ready to go. Don’t try to aim for high F2P stats, because you’ll just be confining yourself to needlessly slow and painful grinds. Just because you can mine and smith mithril in F2P doesn’t mean that you should.
Hitting 40 Melee Stats
One thing that you can consider is hitting 40 attack, strength, and defense just so you can experience wearing and using rune armor and weapons for the first time. That, and it lets you go through the early game gear progression that, in my opinion, feels incredibly satisfying.
Again, you only get to be a newbie once. The jump from steel to mithril gear, and then adamant or rune later on? Those are milestones that you can easily achieve in F2P, and the gear/stats will come in handy once you take the leap to members’ content.
Tip #3 – Bonds Are A Trap
For the uninitiated, bonds are something that you can purchase through the Grand Exchange in Varrock, and these are mainly sold by players who buy them with real money. Each of these will give you 2 weeks of membership, but the downside is that they’ll cost you a whopping 15+ million gold, at least as of writing this.
If you’re still new or just playing casually (member or otherwise), I highly advise you to ditch the idea that you can “earn” membership as you’ll just burn yourself out trying to get the amount needed for a bond. It’s possible, but you’ll be doing absurd things that won’t progress your account in any meaningful way for tens of hours.
Leave the bond earning grindset behind until you reach the later stages of your account as a member. Seriously, for the average person, the grind to try and maintain your membership through bonds early on is neither fun nor healthy. Even later on, you’d need to be skilled enough to breeze through endgame content to farm the required amount of gold at a reasonable pace.
Either way, you’re better off just working an actual 9-5, cause that’s what grinding for bonds will feel like. I started a new account in early 2024 after a really long hiatus, and you know what I did? I just bought a year’s worth of membership because I don’t have the time or energy to focus solely on grinding endgame content for gold (my account is an ironman, so I can’t trade anyway lol).
The Grinder
By “grinders“, I’m talking about those who are looking into reaching mid to late game content as quickly as possible and have the time to grind hard and often. If you’re like that, then just get membership ASAP.
Even if you’ve already done some of the free ones (or maybe even all of them), following one of those “optimal quest routes” is something you might want to try out. This one from the wiki is particularly good.
Those optimized guides will rush you past a lot of early levels by railroading you through various free and member quests. Just the first handful of “optimal” quests on a fresh account will skip you right into having an overall combat level of almost 30 right off the bat.
Members-only areas also contain a lot of alternative training methods and minigames that can help speed up your progress for certain skills. These will help you mix things up to break the monotony of all the mandatory grinds, which can burn you out quickly if you try to do them in one go.
The thing is, as a new player, stuff like raids and high-level bossing will still take you a long time to reach even while you’re being efficient. Unless you literally aren’t sleeping and are glued to the game for hours on end, it’s gonna take at least a month or two to get anywhere near that point.
Many useful features and late game content are locked behind a lot of quests, and quests require skills, and skills require a lot of grinding, and… I think you get the point.
That’s really all I can say here. Basically, if you’re trying to sweat it, you’re better off getting a subscription as soon as you can and using those tried and tested efficiency guides to speedrun yourself straight into mid-game.
On the flip side, if you’re just chilling and taking it easy, enjoy the early game and free quests first before you pay up, because hopping right into the full game from the start might feel too overwhelming. It’ll also let you spend more of that first month doing non-free stuff, so I think it’d just be better value in general to clear F2P stuff first.
