When you are new to OSRS it can be tricky to know what to do, and all the things that are available to you. In this guide I will cover the basics to get you started on your adventure throughout OSRS.

When you first login you will start at tutorial island, this will explain how to use all of the F2P (free to play) skills in the game, as well as other account features like, friends list, banking and how bonds (membership) works. Follow tutorial island closely on your first time to fully understand everything as you can't go back here later unless you create a new account. In the final section of tutorial island you will meet the magic instructor, after using a basic magic strike spell on a chicken he will ask if you are ready to transport to the mainland and start your adventure. He will also ask if you wish to become an ironman. Ironman accounts remove the ability to trade with other players or at the grand exchange, giving more of a single player experience. There are different iterations of Ironman accounts that can make the game more challenging, but as this is a beginners guide I will assume you have chosen to start with just a normal account.

You will be transported outside Lumbridge castle in Gielinor (the name of the land of OSRS), from here you could be unsure what to do and infact it's completely up to you as OSRS is very open ended. I will assume you will be using a F2P account for the majority of this guide, but will cover some P2P stuff later. In F2P you have less access to all content but there is still lots to do. You will have a lot of items in your inventory from tutorial island that are unnecessary, so the first thing you could do is use the bank, which is at the top of Lumbridge castle, just climb up both stairs (there are two on each side of the castle, they both reach the same location) you click right click and select climb up, or just click and it will give you a dialog to choose, this is often the case in OSRS. Click on the bank in the middle of the top floor, and deposit some items, if you have many items it is usualy quicker to select the deposit all button on the bottom right and then withdraw what you want.

The easiest skills to train straight away due to their proximity to the start location are combat ( melee and ranged) and woodcutting. I will start with combat. Use all the armour and weapons you have, starting with melee, using the sword. The combat style selection allows you to decide which combat skill to train, whilst you can train in any order you like, it's favourable in combat to have high strength and attack more so than defence. Train strength and attack relative to each other, I like to do 10 levels of each. You have quite a wide choice of enemies to train on in the immediate vicinity of Lumbridge castle, there are rats, men and women, over the bridge there are goblins and further along that path you will find some cows. Training in the order I wrote is fine, it's quite possible you will die, particularly at cows and goblins, but you will just restart at Lumbridge so it isn't really an inconvenience. When you die in OSRS you can usually get your items back with an hour that you drop, you also keep your top 3 most expensive items on death as well as any untradable items (for example quest items). Around 15-20 strength I like to train at the Lumbridge swamp located south of the castle, through the graveyard. You will meet some stronger enemies like rats and frogs. Ranged training can be a bit annoying as you only start with 25 arrows, you can get training arrows as well as the training bow (the only work with each other) from the ranged combat tutor located outside the north entrance of Lumbridge castle, when you run out you can go back to him to receive more. Ranged can also be used to train defence. Most of the enemies you kill will drop bones, you can bury this as a fairly simple way to improve your prayer level.

Woodcutting is an easy skill to train and is also a fairly decent money maker for a bran new account, there is a tree inside the grounds of Lumbridge castle. That when chopped will give you standard logs, when you get to level 15 woodcutting you can move to oak trees which are also found at Lumbridge castle. You can bank a full inventory at the top floor, you should improve the axe you use using this money. The store “Bob's Brilliant Axes”, just south of the Lumbridge castle grounds entrance, sells many axes up to the mithril battleaxe. From the start you can use the iron axe as well as the bronze axe you will already have. A good tip for seeing which items you can use for training any skills at a certain level is by clicking on on the skill in the skills menu. At level 6 you can use a steel axe, a black axe at level 11 and a mithril axe and level 21. Axes also have an attack requirement to wield them, which will open up one more inventory space for more optimal woodcutting, however you can still use them even if you can't equip them.

Using the pickaxe you received during tutorial island you can make your way to the mining site located south-east of lumbridge swap. Just click on the ores to mine them, once mined ores will fade out and be unusable for a certain amount of time, it's good to find a location where you can quickly switch to other ores to mine so you don't have to wait. At level 1-15 your should be mining copper and tin ore (both possible from level 1), then at 15 move to iron ore which is located in the northern Al Kharid mining site. You can get here by going through the gate, you may have noticed it when training melee at the goblins, guards will ask you for 10 gp (osrs gold) to go through, if you don't have any gold to hand you could kill some goblins quickly as they regualrly drop gold. The mine has a spot in the north west with 3 iron ores surrounding an empty place you can stand, so you can constantly mine there. Because this spot is such a popular location to mine it will often be used by other places, even if P2P worlds this is the case, so change worlds until you find a spot that isn't in use. It isn't worth trying to compete with other players in this or other similar skills as it becomes frustrating for both players.

Questing is a good way to learn the game and also learn about the history of Gielinor with many interesting storylines, OSRS also has a good sense of humour that can be an enjoyable break from grinding out skills.  There are quite a few quests located in the immediate surroundings, such as: Cooks Assistant, Rune Mysteries (a good start to the runecrafting skill, also needed to allow rewards to be used for runecrafting experience), Sheep Shearer, the Restless Ghost (a good start for training prayer giving you level 9 prayer straight away) and X Marks the Spot (an easy quest that gives an experience lamp as a reward, which when used gives 300xp for any skill). At some point you will want to leave Lumbridge, a good place to go featuring more interesting quests as well as important locations/ buildings in Gielinor is Varrock. You can travel to Varrock by following the path north past the goblins and cows, keep going until you reach a northern fence. Go around the fence then go north west, there are some aggressive dark wizards as you approach Varrock's southern entrance so be wary of those and stick to the western side of the path if you can, also make sure you have some run energy, although if you are over combat level 20 (viewable of the combat style selecting box) they will not attack you. When you get towards the centre you can find Romeo, of the Romeo and Juliet quest (a humorous adaption of the famous Shakespeare story). This is a good quest to do as it gives 5 quest points for a relatively short quest (some later quests have quest point requirements).

Varrock also contains the grand exchange, a place to buy and sell all tradable items, in F2P you can only buy and sell F2P items but there are still a huge amount of items. Brand new accounts will need to wait a bit before being able to use it (7 quest points or 24 hours play time). It is also from here you are able to buy a bond, which will give membership to your account for 14 days, they can be bought for real money and sold here, from the Runescape website, or bought and sold with in game gold. The price of them varies quite a lot and is generally increasing over time, at the time of writing a bond is around 5.4m gold. It can seem a lot but there are some F2P money makers, such as tele-grabbing zamarok wines which will give you that amount of gp in around 10-15 hours of playtime. You can research these money making methods for your self. There is plenty to see and do in F2P though so no rush in getting to P2P.