OSRS Sailing Alpha - Everything You Need To Know
22.03.2025 - 19:31:38
Game Guides , OSRS Skills & Skilling , Runescape
Sailing, a meme made into reality coming as the brand new skill of Old School Runescape. This skill is unlike anything we have seen before. It will focus on exploration, and with exploration, it will connect everything else Runescape has to offer to it. As we train this skill we will unlock different parts of the map, and will be able to travel to unique islands which can offer awesome new spots for training or combat. This week Jagex released their alpha version of sailing in private servers and we have finally got the chance to test this brand new skill in its early stages, even in this stage it looks pretty darn good and promising. In this guide, we will look at everything we have learned from this Alpha and predict what the future can bring so that you can be better prepared for this enormous update!
What is Sailing?
Sailing is the brand new 24th skill of Old School Runescape. With this skill, we will get to have our own boat and sail across the high seas of Runescape. This skill is not an instanced skill which makes it all the more exciting. Sailing will be all about discovering new points of interest, hunting new monsters and sea creatures, salvaging old sunken ships, and much more. This skill will no doubt change how we play Old School Runescape. In the Alpha we got to have a glimpse at all of these systems so let's talk about it.
Everything That Was In Alpha
At the start of the skill, it looks like we will be doing a quest to unlock the skill, just like completing the Druidic Ritual for Herblore. The quest is pretty simple and short without any requirements so nothing to worry about here.
Boats and Customisation
After completing the introductory quests, we start our journey with a humble raft. Yes, we're beginning with a simple raft, but as we level up, we can upgrade to larger and more advanced ships. What makes this even more exciting is the ability to customize our vessel. Similar to the Construction skill, our ship features designated build spots where we can construct various upgrades using the structures we've unlocked. This requires Construction levels.
On the starting raft, there is only one build spot and that is used for a storage unit. Storage units are used for storing cargo or plunder you get whilst traveling the sea. This unit will probably be really important for AFKing and increasing your profit from sailing. I can easily imagine islands without any banks or deposit boxes on them, where you need to store whatever you get on the island in your storage unit.
Alpha only had 2 boats and the second and the bigger boat had 3 build hotspots where we got to see what else we could build. One is the storage facility, and the other is the utility facility. You can build salvaging hooks, cannons, and windcatchers on these spots.
Mechanics of Sailing
Jagex has done a great job with sailing as the basic controls of the boat are pretty intuitive. Once you are on your boat you can actually walk inside of it. To control your boat you must click on the helm. Once you start navigating the helm anywhere you click your boat will try to move. It is just like controlling your own character you point your mouse to where you want to move and click, pretty simple.
You will also notice some interfaces for your boat. From those interfaces, you can speed up, slow down, and stop your ship. You can also enable reverse mode to move backward with your ship. This interface also shows your boat's health. As you are sailing there are storms and obstacles that you must avoid to not take any damage. If your boat's health goes down to 0 you will wash up on the nearest island. For now, it is unclear as to what this will cost you but we can speculate that it will cost you some money and resources to repair your ship.
There are also other interfaces for crew and stuff but they are inactive for now and we will need to wait and see how they will turn out.
How to Gain Experience
Gust of Wind - Passive Experience
As you are sailing around the sea, you will notice a box on the top left with a wind rune icon. Once the timer under that icon reaches 0, you will have a gust of wind hitting your sails. You can click on your sails to use that wind to speed up for a short duration of time. If you have a windcatcher built on your boat you can instead store that gust of wind and use it whenever you want to. Either way doing this action will give you some sailing experience which is quite nice and rewarding.
Exploration - One Time Experience
There are exploration missions that can only be done once. These missions require you the player to go to a certain area and examine the area from different angles using your spyglass. Checking out the area from all the required angles will complete the mission and will give you a decent chunk of Sailing experience. This will encourage players to go out and explore the world of Runescape while not wasting any experience which is amazing.
Salvaging - AFK Experience
This is the AFK way of gaining some Sailing experience. Throughout the ocean, you will find locations like shipwrecks that you can use your salvaging unit to extract resources from. Doing so is pretty simple you dock your ship near the spot and click on the salvaging unit. Once clicked you can AFK and your character will pull out items until your inventory is full. Here is where the storage unit on the ship comes in handy. You can store your items in the unit and continue salvaging.
Once you are done you can move to the nearest port and use a salvaging station to salvage some items out of your plunder. Salvaging spots will have different tiers and you will have access to better tiers as you level up meaning better loot and better AFK experience.
Board Tasks - Repeatable
In every port, there will be notice boards where you can click to view and select a mission. As of now we only saw two types of missions. The first one is a cargo mission where you need to take some cargo, deposit it onto your ship, and head to the required destination to deliver resulting in some experience and item rewards. The second one that was disabled was a bounty mission where probably the game will assign us a sea creature or maybe a creature on one of the islands to kill which in turn will yield Sailing experience and some reward items.
Boatlethics - Intense Fast Experience
We have arrived at our final method of training Sailing, for now. As you level up, you will unlock these race tracks like Agility obstacles. You can go over to these tracks and take a mission to complete the track in under a certain time. These tracks are full of speed boosts and storms (which will slow your ship). Your goal is to navigate through these and collect cargo and rum to deliver back to the starting point. Once a track is completed you can do a more challenging one. Doing these is extremely click-intensive and hard but gives out the most amount of experience.
Duck Chasing - One Time
There are also missions to figure out the currents of certain areas of the map. To do this you simply navigate to the required location and drop your rubber duck and follow it. Once the duck comes to a stop you can pick it up which will complete this mission
How Does Sailing Interact With Other Content
Sailing is an amazing skill that interacts with the rest of the game pretty well. All skillers and efficiency enjoyers can rejoice because you can train other skills as you are navigating your ship! You can fletch, high alch, bury bones…etc while you are going from one location to another. This makes it so that if we want to we will never waste any experience.
Another good aspect of this skill is the brand-new islands that will arrive in the game. Even in the Alpha, there are a lot of interesting islands with resources and caves. So as you unlock more islands you will have a lot more to do. So having an overall high total level will be to your benefit.
How to Prepare Your Account For Sailing
In the Alpha Jagex automatically gave everyone some Construction and Smithing levels meaning this skill will probably need those skills as a baseline. Constructing items on the ship required planks and construction levels so it is a good idea to train these two skills and stock up on some planks and nails just in case they skyrocket on release.
As mentioned before we can never know what awaits us on those islands so it is a good idea to have a high total level overall to really capitalize on those new training methods and collectible resources. There is no doubt that there will be brand-new trees and planks (we actually got to see some this alpha) so a higher woodcutting level can be nice. There will probably be also new nails so smithing and mining will probably come into play. They even teased us with a huge new Slayer dungeon on one of the islands so train your account while prioritising Construction and Smithing. You can also stay tuned in to our Runescape Blog for any new information and news about this skill!