Items
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In Old School RuneScape, items are physical objects that a player may have in their inventory or bank. Players distinguish them by their names and graphics. The game additionally seems to distinguish items by ID numbers that are not visible to players in-game.
Characteristics
Items can be described by a number of characteristics:
- ID: All of the items in Old School RuneScape have a unique number that identifies it, invisible to players in-game. Only one item has the same ID, unlike how multiple items can have the same name. The ID of an item can be used to lookup Grand Exchange prices and get additional information about an item from the database, such as the examine text and value. Seemingly identical items may have different IDs as they are used for different purposes.
- Unobtainable items, such as Hazelmere's book, exist within the game's code, have an ID number assigned to it, but are never seen via normal gameplay. Instead, they are found within the game's cache.
- Item IDs can be shown on this wiki by navigating to the user preferences page and enabling the "advanced data" gadget. The ID will then be shown on item articles at the bottom of the infobox.
- Graphics: All obtainable items have graphics. There are four main types of graphics items may have:
- All items may be held in the inventory and therefore have inventory pictures, restricted to a size of 36 x 32 pixels. The inventory icon also appears in the Grand Exchange box and the equipment screen, albeit its outline and shadow may vary.
Mod West showcases the program used to generate inventory icons. - The inventory icon is not created individually from other models. Rather, it is generated by taking the model used when the item is dropped on the floor (as such, destroy-only items have models when dropped on the floor as well) and displaying it. Artists set the angle/rotation/translation that the model should be displayed at in the item's config file, and lets the game engine take care of the rest. However, the artists have no control over how the game engine decides what to render and what to ignore on a pixel level when dealing with small details within a model.
- The third kind of item graphic is equipment that is equipped on the player, which is a 3D model that is usually more detailed than the inventory/dropped appearance.
- A fourth appearance for items is an appearance in a chatbox, such as when an NPC gives you an item, and it appears as a larger version of the inventory icon (with textures).
- In addition, some items may have graphics for other situations, such as animations, POH mountings, or the player's head when talking to an NPC. All of these graphics will usually look similar to each other, normally only varying in detail.
- All items may be held in the inventory and therefore have inventory pictures, restricted to a size of 36 x 32 pixels. The inventory icon also appears in the Grand Exchange box and the equipment screen, albeit its outline and shadow may vary.
- Name: Most items have a unique name for that particular item. Some may have the same exact name, yet have different purposes.
- Items in-game use ucfirst capitalisation, wherein the first letter of a string is capitalised, but the rest is not. For example, as an inventory item, TzTok-Jad's pet is called Tzrek-jad, but as a follower it's called TzRek-Jad.
- While items in-game can share the same name, such as "Key", every item has a distinct config name within the game's code. For example, the item "Key" used during the Witch's House quest has the config name "
witches_shedkey", while the item "Key" used during the The Lost Tribe quest has the config name "lost_tribe_chest_key". These config names are used by Jagex Moderators to more easily identify items when creating or fixing content.
- Tradeability: Many items may be traded between players; however, many quest-related, holiday, and miscellaneous items cannot be traded (and cannot be transferred in any other way such as the Party Room) and therefore are often called untradeable items or non-tradeables. Almost all tradeable items may be traded on the Grand Exchange and therefore are associated with a certain price range of numbers of coins, which can change when the Grand Exchange updates its prices. The only tradeable items that cannot be traded on the Grand Exchange are a very small number of useless items such as burnt fish. Naturally, coins are an item that cannot be bought on the Grand Exchange either as they are the main currency in Old School RuneScape.
- Weight: All unstackable items have weight which affects the player's ability to run. The higher a player's weight, the faster they lose energy while running.
- Item stacking (Stackability): Some items such as runes or coins will pile up in a single spot in the inventory. Other items such as buckets will take one spot per item and therefore are non-stackable. All items that are "stackable" have zero weight. Most non-stackable items may be converted to a stackable form using a bank note, but bank noted items lose most of their properties as they just become a piece of paper. Bank noted items may be deposited in the bank and then withdrawn back as usable, unnoted, non-stackable items.
- Equippability: Some items, such as weapons or armour, can be worn, giving bonuses or penalties to different combat styles. Many equipped items also have other effects.
- Coin value: Items that can be sold to a shop or that can have the spells High Alchemy or Low Level Alchemy cast on them have a value determining the number of coins players will get if they do one of these actions. Even if an item is untradeable, it sometimes may still be converted into coins via alchemy spells. An example of an item falling under this category is a partially degraded piece of Barrows equipment or the ecumenical key.
Tradeability
Not every item in Old School RuneScape is tradeable, and of the items that are, not all can be listed for sale on the Grand Exchange. All items could be traded when RuneScape was first released, until a 2002 update introduced the concept of untradeable items by barring players from trading certain quest items.
As a rule, tradeable items can be:
- Traded to other players via the trade interface.
- Picked up by other players if the item is dropped onto the ground for over a minute.
- Sold to a general or speciality shop.
- High or Low-alchemised into coins.
- Converted into notes.
These properties do not apply to all tradeable items however, as a membership bond for instance cannot be alchemised, despite being a tradeable item. They are also not exclusive to tradeable items; untradeable items may or may not be alchemiseable. In general, most tradeable items can also be listed for sale on the Grand Exchange. Numerous exceptions do exist, which are listed on Grand Exchange/Non-tradeable items.
Free-to-play accounts cannot trade members-only items with other players or sell them to shops, even if they are tradeable. Members' items can however be sold on the Grand Exchange, regardless of membership status or world type.
Dropping and destroying
A large number of items may be dropped on the ground through the right-click "Drop" option. How an item behaves once it is dropped depends on whether it is tradeable or untradeable. Tradeable items will become visible to other players one minute after being dropped to the ground, and disappear altogether after three minutes. This timer will keep ticking down if the player who dropped the item logs out, and will always stay on the same world it is dropped in. Dropped untradeable items however will not appear to other players, though they also despawn after three minutes. In contrast to tradeable items, untradeables are tied to the player who dropped them, and will appear in any world that player switches to. The despawn timer of these items is also paused while the player is logged out.
| UIM deathpile | Untradeable | Tradeable | |
|---|---|---|---|
| World location | Cross-world | Cross-world | Same world |
| Visible to others | Never | Never | After 60 seconds |
| Despawn timer | 60 minutes | 3 minutes | 3 minutes |
| Pauses on logout | Yes | Yes | No |
That said, dropped item behaviour can diverge from these rules in certain circumstances. Perhaps most notably, nearly all items dropped in the Wilderness become visible to other players immediately: this is to discourage players from dropping their items before dying and quickly travelling back to pick them up. The only exceptions to this are cooked foods and potions, which never appear to other players in the Wilderness, so as to prevent clans and teams from dropping supplies for each other during a fight. Chinchompas also cannot be released in combat in the Wilderness, to prevent chinchompa hunters from releasing them out of spite and leaving nothing for the player killer. Items dropped on Tutorial Island will disappear after only 30 seconds. Items placed on tables disappear after 10 minutes. Items dropped in instances tend to have a much longer despawn timer, which is typically – but not always – set to three hours.[1] Clue scrolls of all tiers have a despawn timer of one hour when dropped, except when dropped in instances with increased despawn timers, where they will instead respect the despawn timer of that instance.
Players can allow potions and food items to form a supply pile on death by enabling the corresponding option in the Settings panel, which will cause these items to persist across worlds and suspend their despawn timer on logout as though they were untradeable.
There is a limit on the total number of items or item stacks that can remain on the ground within the same 8x8 tiles game chunk.[2] If more than 129 tradeable items are dropped within that area, additional ones will begin to replace items already lying on the ground.[3] The order of priority is determined by the Grand Exchange guide value of the various items, which the lowest priced items being replaced first.[4] For item stacks, the value of the whole stack is taken into account when determining its priority.[5] Untradeable items and items that are part of a supply pile do not count towards this limit.
Some items have a "Destroy" option instead of a "Drop" option as part of their right-click interface, as is commonly the case for quest items, event rewards, and untradeable items in general. Destroying an item will make it vanish instantly, rather than first being cast to the ground. A chatbox message appears in most cases when the "Destroy" option is selected, prompting the player for confirmation, coupled with a short description of whether and how it may be reobtained.
Discontinuation
Unlike in its parent game RuneScape, the team of Old School RuneScape have taken special care to prevent discontinued items. All holiday items are able to be reobtained every year at their respective holiday dates. Whenever an item is in fact discontinued, (e.g., the cabbage rune, kristmas kebab, and various other in-progress holiday event items), if the player has any of those items, they are removed from wherever they are stored.
In RuneScape, discontinued items can fetch billions of gold pieces. Although the Old School team was at first unsure whether or not to repeat the behaviour of discontinuing holiday items and letting prices inflate, ultimately they decided, like Andrew Gower did in 2003, "players hoarding huge numbers of the gifts we drop and then reselling them for massively unfair prices [...] isn't really in the spirit of the occasion."[6] Given a fresh slate, the Old School team has been able to avoid that legacy mistake.
Categories
Longest item names
Historically, item names in RuneScape could not exceed a certain amount of pixels.[7] As a result, the longest item names prior to the launch of Old School RuneScape did not exceed 20 characters. This limit was lifted sometime after the launch of the Nightmare Zone, where the item anti-dragon shield (nz) surpassed the limit at 23 characters. Due to an Update on June 1st 2023, Members' Items are now visible in Free to Play worlds with "(Members)" as a suffix, thus Corrupted morrigan's leather chaps (bh)(inactive)(Members) may take the lead. However the actual item name did not change leaving this open to interpretation.
Overall
| Item | Characters | Timeframe | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Strailblazer reloaded relic hunter (t3) armour set[sic] | 50[d 1] | 15 November 2023–23 November 2023 23 November–present (tied) |
7 days 435 days (tied) |
 |
Corrupted morrigan's leather chaps (bh)(inactive) | 49 | 24 May 2023–15 November 2023 23 November–present (tied) |
175 days 435 days (tied) |
 |
Hardened wristbands of the arena (broken) | 41 | 16 March 2022–24 May 2023 | 434 days |
 |
Trailblazer relic hunter (t1) armour set | 40 | 6 January 2021–16 March 2022 | 434 days |
 |
Trailblazer relic hunter (t2) armour set | |||
 |
Trailblazer relic hunter (t3) armour set | |||
 |
Rune scimitar ornament kit (saradomin) | 38 | 11 April 2019–6 January 2021 | 636 days |
 |
Charge dragonstone jewellery scroll | 35 | 6 July 2016–11 April 2019 | 1009 days |
 |
Dragon plate/skirt ornament kit | 31 | 12 June 2014–6 July 2016 | 755 days |
 |
Box of chocolate strawberries | 29 | 13 February 2014–12 June 2014 | 119 days |
 |
Unfinished broad bolt pack | 26 | 6 January 2014–13 February 2014 | 38 days |
 |
Anti-dragon shield (nz) | 23 | 5 September 2013–6 January 2014 | 123 days |
| On launch, item names had a pixel width limit of 20 characters. | ||||
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Trivia
- If one selects the option to "take" an item, and the item disappears before reaching it (or picking it up), a message that says "Too late - it's gone!" will show in the chat box.
- Items in the inventory will remain there even if the player is wielding them in an animation, such as chopping a yew tree.
- The maximum amount of an item the player can have on an interface (bank, inventory, Grand Exchange slot, etc) is 2,147,483,647 due to the amount being stored as a signed 32-bit Integer. In the Java programming language, an integer has a maximum value of 231 - 1 or 2,147,483,647, per the definition of a Java integer as 32 bits.