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Glad to see more projects building on top of Lost City. This looks super fun and I can't wait to try it out. Writing RuneScape bots was how I first learned programming, and I think it's one of the most interesting ways to interact with the game.

Happy to answer any questions! I think one of the most interesting elements here is the way that the grounding a game environment allows agents to ratchet their engineering progress and run more autonomously than you might be able to for normal engineering tasks.

The demo gif uses Claude Code but looking at the readme it seems like the idea is for it to be a good environment for various machine/reinforcement learning type tasks.

If that's the case what led to the inspiration to use Runescape and are there any notable non-LLM machine/reinforcement models you think might have an interesting time with this?

I am super curious about using and fine-tuning smaller vision-language-action style models! There are also some interesting RL projects out there focused only on PvP: https://github.com/Naton1/osrs-pvp-reinforcement-learning

I've always imagined my last few days on earth as being in a nursing home playing Runescape Classic (2001-2003 runescape) with just me and a bunch of bots, recreating the glory days.

Open RuneScape Classic[0] literally has a live server with hundreds of bots for you to do that.. today!

[0] https://rsc.vet

I used to play on the regular world (RSC Preservation, non-bot). There's not enough people. And probably won't be hardly anyone there when I'm old enough to be in a nursing home.

I could join the bot worlds, but I'm fairly certain that they don't talk much or behave like a normal player in general (stumble through quests, make friends, trade with other random players, etc.). They probably just grind skills in some optimal way.

It's definitely sort of that. You can run your own server, as well, though this comes with its own limitations (and inherently takes away from the want for more players). Most of the developers have varying goals with the project. When I was working on the project, my care was primarily for making the game as close to the original as possible using "replays" by dedicated players before the original shut down. It was fun to write code for something that felt like it would give some folks a nostalgia hit.

I think optimally, you'd do something more akin to a "group ironman" with some friends. This guarantees you've got others around.

Wow Christofo I recognize your name! You were one of the founders right?

I'm OsrsNeedsF2P / Red Bracket. Funny seeing you here!

I did write a whole bunch of code for the project! I recognize your name, hope all is well. :)

thanks for your work on RS preservation!

Does AutoRune still work on there with auto catcher when PKing? The concept of "having catch" on another player based on player ID was just crazy. All these weird bugs that ended up being core mechanics of PKing.

Holy shit.

How realistic are they?

same, but honestly OSRS is so good at this point I'd probably wanna be there.

Amazing. Would be cool to see agents end up trading at varrock bank like during the old days. Sort of a facebook/moltbook equivalent - wonder how genuine it would feel

Please try running some bots and join the discord! Totally agree that we should add communication channels for the bots, potentially a bbs or global chat?

If Jagex would release a server of RS (ideally 3, but 2 is fine) where you could control your character with an agent like this... I would probably play it all day, every day, in parallel with whatever else I was doing.

Why wait for Jagex? OP released something 80% of the way there

Botting runescape is how many of us got into programming. Long live botting. If you want to do it, do it on an account that doesnt effect the economy.

AutoRune and SCAR! Though, I never cared much for Delphi.

This is also how I learned programming, though mainly with Simba, the spiritual successor to SCAR: https://github.com/Villavu/Simba

for me it was autoHotKey, amazing programming language with a built in recorder!

Great scripting language, but has a pretty troubled past.

Once the original creator moved on from ownership, the new owner also had a business with Runescape botting.

The story is that it didn't go well for the maintainers of Autohotkey until another person took the reigns.

Paris/ins3 (the RuneScape botting-related owner of AHK) had a fairly checkered past from what I understand, but most of it was before my time.

The direction RSBot took under his leadership was less than ideal. I lamented the loss of RSBot 2 and local scripts. The subsequent versions, dependent on the SDN, were never as good.

Don't forget color bots!

It is not said very explicitly in the description. Is this for use on the real RuneScape game servers or does it run a dummy game server and run bots on that one?

It runs on a dummy server built on the Lost City[0] source code

[0] https://github.com/LostCityRS/Server

So this is why RAM prices are increasing...

I’ve never played RuneScape before but this was very cool, it wrote lots of scripts as it went and eventually finished a quest to gain the ability to make runes

Already logged in and playing. This is incredible!

Going to be so awesome when we have native crypto rails live in game for mmorpgs.

autominer dream setup from my childhood.

was working on an openclaw bots only game called arenaclaw this weekend, runescape auto battler fighting game spin-off.

Holy shit,I'm gonna lose so much sleep because of this...

I mean, I guess you won't, because the bot can play the game for you while you sleep.

Personally I've never really seen the point of botting; I thought part of the fn of these MMOs was that you earned the leveling up.

A lot of tedium is added into these games to force the player into spending real money for skips & access to content. It is a valid way to incentivize customers into paying for given service, but also means there are many time wasting repetitive tasks that can ruin the experience if one does not grasp the concept of "when the game starts getting tedions, you are supposed to pay"

You're very much off the mark there. That may be true for gacha games or similar slop from the 2020s, but Runescape2/OSRS never had any sort of pay to win, or pay to skip the grind. Neither did WoW for instance.

RS2/OSRS definitely did have grind, but only grind that you sought out yourself. I don't believe there is a single quest that requires level 99 woodcutting or firemaking, you do it to earn a little token that shows that you did the grind.

There was also botting for money-making purposes. Real-world money to buy items wasn't much of a factor but obtaining resources still cost time and effort that many players (including myself) didn't particularly enjoy when you can only spend so much time on a game every week.

Botting to level up skills kind of misses the point, in my opinion. What's the point of a skill cape if you didn't do the grind yourself? Botting to earn in-game money makes a lot of sense, though: skip the grind to be able to afford armour and go straight for the interesting quests and fights.

I think RuneScape's choice to lock content behind a paywall rather than connect real money to timers/in-game items was the right one.

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Please please try to read a post before commenting on it

Its not connected to the main game. Its a private bot only server.

That being said, is copying the game outright legal?

> is copying the game outright legal

no it is not. a lot of runescape servers have recently been receiving UDRP disputes (to get domain + contact info) and subsequent legal communications from jagex

> rs-sdk runs against an enhanced web-based client (botclient) which connects to the LostCity 2004scape server emulator.

Back before ClusterFlutter (which was just a lot of Java object type-casting, large multi-dimentional arrays, and overflow math) botting was pretty easy to write yourself with very little JVM knowledge.

Bans were (and still are) pretty hard to come by as long as you pay for a membership.