How Sailing Combat Works in OSRS

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Created - 17.12.2025 Updated - 17.12.2025

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Ship combat is one of the most exciting parts of Sailing in Old School RuneScape, combining cannons, crew management, and smart positioning into fast-paced naval battles. Whether you’re hunting sea creatures or pushing for efficient kills, understanding how ship combat works makes a massive difference. This guide breaks down every core mechanic, from cannon tiers and crew roles to advanced positioning tactics, so you can fight smarter, take less damage, and dominate encounters at sea.

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Ship Combat Mechanics

First, let’s take a look at each combat mechanic that governs ship combat. There are few basic mechanics that you need to know:

• To build a cannon on your ship, you must own either a skiff or a sloop. The sloop is best suited for ship combat, as you can build two cannons instead of one, and it has higher hitpoints than skiffs.
• To shoot cannonballs, you must first have a stack of them stashed in your cargo hold or inventory. If you want your crewmates to use the cannons, you must have them in your cargo hold.
• Crewmates' privateering stat determines their proficiency at using cannons. Both rune and dragon cannons require level 4 privateering, which only Oarswoman Olga and Jittery Jim has.
• Cannons attack every 5 ticks.
• The best DPS method is by having 2 crewmates helming the cannons while you, the player, deal damage via Ranged or Magic. This is also much more expensive.
• The most cost-effective method is by having 1 crewmate on a cannon and helming the other yourself. This will increase your kill time by 10-20 seconds.
• You can fire your cannons even when you are out of range of your target, resulting in wasting your cannonballs. Always make sure to click the “clear target” option whenever this happens.

Cannons

There are 7 tiers of cannons currently, alongside 8 tiers of cannonballs. Each of them have Sailing, Construction, and Ranged requirements. Here is a detailed overview:

The damage of the cannons is affected by a few factors:

• The tier of the cannon, and cannonballs, dragon being the best one.
• Players' visible Ranged level, so stat boosting potions such as Ranging potion increase your damage.
• Having perildance bitter in your keg. This drink can be obtained after charting 8 seas in the Western Ocean, and it increases the damage of your cannons by 1.

Using high-tier cannons and cannonballs alongside repair kits can become extremely expensive quickly. One solution to this might be using cheaper materials, but that will greatly reduce your kill times, costing you a lot of time overall. If you want to have the best upgrades available and use the best ammunition, always check out our OSRS Gold Store to satisfy any of your OSRS gold needs.

Regular Weapons

You can hit sea creatures using Magic or Ranged weapons from your ship, but your damage will be severely reduced. On average, your hits will be approximately 23.75% of what they normally are. Here is a detailed overview of how it works:

1. On each regular attack, the game rolls a number between 1 to 100.
2. Rolling 1 will hit 100% of your damage.
3. Rolling 2-5 will hit 50% of your damage.
4. Rolling 6-60 will hit 25% of your damage
5. Rolling 61-90 will hit 20% of your damage.
6. Rolling 91-100 will hit 10% of your damage.

However, sea creatures have extremely low defence, and players can take advantage of this. Krakens are extremely weak to magic, and other creatures usually are weak to everything, so a blowpipe works wonders.

Ship Defences

For now, ships have 2 defensive values: health and armour. You can increase these by upgrading your ship's keel and hull. Armour works differently in ship combat. It reduces the incoming damage by 1 per 100 armour your ship has. So let’s say a shark can hit a 5, if your ship has 500 armour, you will be immune to the shark's attacks.

This mechanic makes it so that if you own a dragon keel, your ship is practically invincible against all sea creatures except great white sharks, orcas, spined, armoured, and vampyre krakens. Here are the armour and hitpoints you can get for your sloop:

• Large mithril keel parts x16
• Lead bar x5

+90+400

Adamant

• Large adamant keel parts x16
• Lead bar x5

+100+600Rune

• Large rune keel parts x16
• Cupronickel bar x5

+120+800Dragon

• Large dragon keel parts x16
• Cupronickel bar x5

+120+1000

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Ship Repair

These are the equivalent of food for ship combat. Repair kits can be used to repair your ship in battles. This repairing effect is positively affected by the deckhandiness stat. Crewmates with their deckhandiness will repair more hitpoints per repair kit. Here are all the repair kits currently available and how much health they restore:

• Normal repair kit: 5
• Oak repair kit: 10
• Teak repair kit: 20
• Mahogany repair kit: 30
• Camphor repair kit: 40
• Ironwood repair kit: 45
• Rosewood repair kit: 50

Combat Tactics At Sea

For ship combat, it is recommended that you never steer the ship yourself and use a crewmate to do it instead. This will allow you to manoeuvre the ship with ease in combat. You should also never repair your ship yourself, but instead have a crewmember repair it for you, since repairing via a crewmember does not delay attacks and heals more.

Double Cannon Single Target

This is a crucial mechanic that every player should know. You can actually have both of your cannons shoot at a single target. This does not work with smaller creatures because of their hitbox, but for bigger creatures such as the krakens, it works every time.

To do this, it is recommended that you tag all krakens using Runelite to really see their hitbox. The easiest way to achieve this is by moving the ship in reverse towards the creature and keeping it aligned with the middle of the ship. You can also do it with the front of the ship, but it is much harder to do so.

Positioning

Most of the sea is multi-combat, so you must single out your targets as best as you can to avoid taking unnecessary damage. You can also rotate your ship to delay melee creatures' attacks during combat. Make sure to have a windcatcher on your ship. In the case of an emergency, you can use a wind mote to outrun any sea creature.

If a sea creature is under your ship, it cannot attack you. Therefore, if you wish, you can keep it under your ship constantly by moving at a certain speed.

Wiggle

Another way to hit a creature with both cannons is by “wiggling” your ship. This is done by targeting a creature, moving into attack range, stopping the ship and clicking left and right. This will allow you to shoot both cannons without proper positioning.

2 Targets At The Same Time

If you are fighting lower-tier creatures, you can also kill 2 at the same time. To do this, you must use the crew management interface. You can have 1 crewmate hitting one enemy while the other hits another by using the “stop following captain's target” command. You can toggle this option on for one crewmate and select a target for the other to attack. Afterwards, you can turn it on for the crewmate who is firing at a target and turn it off for the crewmate who is not firing, and select a new target. Doing so will not interrupt your first crewmate.

That about wraps up ship combat in OSRS. Once you get comfortable with cannon setups, crew roles, and positioning, naval fights become way smoother and a lot more rewarding. Take some time to practice, tweak your setup as you go, and before long you’ll be tearing through sea creatures like it’s second nature. Fair winds, and good luck out there on the open seas. You can check out more of our guides on Sailing on our RS Blog!

Hull Type	Materials	Hitpoints
Wooden	Large wooden hull parts x16 Bronze Nails x600 Swamp tar x25	+40
Oak	Large oak hull parts x16 Iron Nails x600 Swamp tar x25	+60
Teak	Large teak hull parts x16 Steel Nails x600 Swamp tar x25 Lead bar x5	+80
Mahogany	Large mahogany hull parts x16 Mithril Nails x600 Swamp tar x25 Lead bar x5	+100
Camphor	Large camphor hull parts x16 Adamantite Nails x600 Swamp tar x25 Lead bar x5	+160
Ironwood	Large Ironwood hull parts x16 Rune Nails x600 Swamp tar x25 Cupronickel bar x5	+200
Rosewood	Large rosewood hull parts x16 Dragon Nails x600 Swamp tar x25 Cupronickel bar x5	+240