H

Hi all,

On 19 November 2025, Oldschool RS released perhaps its biggest update; the introduction of a 24th skill called Sailing.
Since its release, we've been hard at work figuring out the ins and outs of the skill to bring it to Alora as quickly as possible.
And now, after many months of hard work we have made substantial progress and are excited to showcase some of the content as we head into the final stage of development.
Without further ado, lets hoist our sails and navigate our way through some of the things we've been working on and what you can expect on release.

Starting off
To start, head to Port Sarim and speak to Shipwright Sam in order to buy your first boat. As a beginner, you will only be able to buy a raft. The other two boats have different Sailing level requirements to use. Players will start with a wooden raft by default upon release.

Boat Customization
Once you have obtained your boat, you can speak to Shipwright Sam about customizing a boat. He will send you to the Shipyard where you can upgrade various features on your boat such as the hull, sails and helm. There are also facility hotspots on each boat type, with the Raft having 1 hotspot, the Skiff having 7 hotspots, and the Sloop having 11 hotspots. Each hotspot will allow players to build a specific set of facilities in that spot.
These upgrades are locked behind sailing and construction requirements and considerably improve your boat. Lost Schematics have also been implemented in the game, which will lock various upgrades to the boat and facilities behind treasure hunts, requiring players to visit islands and discover schematics to build them.

Setting sail
Once you are happy with your boat, head back to Port Sarim through the Shipyard Portal and make your way to the southeast dock and board your boat using the gangplank.
In the Combat Options tab, you'll see a sailing options button. In this tab you are able to control your boat, read stats regarding your boat, and find information about the crew.

Shipwreck Salvaging
Shipwreck Salvaging is a low-intensity activity that requires you to deploy your salvaging hook at a shipwreck site. This activity rewards you with small amounts of experience and salvage which can be sorted at a salvaging station for some loot. Salvage and other sailing related items can be stored in the cargo hold.




Death and Capsizing
Each boat has a hitpoint counter which can be increased by upgrading the hull. If you happen to find yourself in trouble out in the sea and your boat hits 0 hitpoints, it will capsize and you will be sent back to Port Sarim.
To retrieve the boat, speak to Shipwright Sam.

Technical Hurdles
A large portion of our time so far has been invested in making necessary changes to both the server and client. Without getting too technical, this primarily involved retrofitting the client to support rendering smaller scenes (boats) on top of the existing game scene, while correctly handling player and NPC visibility, movement, and interactions. This was by far the most difficult hurdle to overcome for a project like Sailing. It required a massive client overhaul, a complete rewrite of server-side player updating, and the addition of a brand-new updater to handle boat visibility and movement. Furthermore, Sailing relies on a depth buffer for rendering. Because the client was originally designed to render the game without one, this required significant behind-the-scenes work. Fortunately, this new depth buffer implementation is also responsible for the large FPS boosts recently seen in the GPU plugin, and we plan to bring these improvements to the 117 HD plugin in the near future.

What's next?
Some of you may be thinking, "What are you waiting for then? Release it, cowards!", however there is still a lot to be done before we're ready to release the new skill. While we're happy with how everything visually looks, as well as the movement of ships, there are still a few milestones that are either in progress or need to be completed before we can release sailing. In all likelihood, this will come in a 2-part release, with the first part opening up access to all the new islands, salvaging, port tasks, and hopefully a few other things.

What's done:

-Boarding a boat and taking control of it (basic movement)

-Trimming sails for a speed boost

-Boat capsizing mechanics

-Sea hazards

-Boat upgrading

-Facilities upgrading/customization

-Lost Schematics

-Docking and Mooring

-Boat Recovery/Purchase

-Cargo Hold Functionality

-Boarding another player's ship

-Assigning another player as a navigator

-Salvaging

-Depth buffer support for various graphics modes, such as LD/GPU/117HD

-Crab trapping

What's currently in progress:

-Populating islands with NPC spawns and functionality

-Native HD support

What needs to be done:

-Mobile client depth-buffer support

-Barracuda trials

-Deep sea trawling

-Bounty tasks

-Courier tasks

-Charting

-NPC crew management

-Ocean encounters

-Sailing combat

-Functionality for many boat facilities

-Shellbane Gryphon

-Etc...

As you can see, there's still a lot to be done, but the progress is moving fast, and we look forward to keeping you updating along the way as things progress!

We're hoping to share more details on the release soon, and we hope you're as excited as we are to experience it!

Kind regards,

Alora Team

Congrats to the winners, and amazing work by @Pase as always!

Looking good, congrats on all the drops so far and here's to another 100 days!

First to complete a GWD log (except pet) collectively - 1,000 tokens

what a great and unique idea. as far as highscores are concerned, doing them like this would be a simple fix for anyone looking for a specific xp rate ranking.

also id like to add that these xp rates should not nerf the gp given from money caskets in regular pvm, nor should it nerf the bonus's like well of good will or vote book bonus xp to give less xp than what a normal ironman gives already.

Yes, that's how the hiscores would look.

There wouldn't be any specific restrictions. Whichever way it is on the game modes right now, that's how it would be across all of them.

Why not allow XP to scale (increase or decrease) automatically when a player changes their XP rate?

We would like to keep it as simple as possible. A simple change of experience rates from x to y is the easiest way to go about that.

We won't be offering the option of going to slower experience rates, and scaling their experience because it's easier to get to the fastest methods on 40x and gaining a lot of experience and then scaling down to high stats on the slow rate.

8x for HCIM (dead) so Ironman after HCIM death would be good. to keep low exp rates. 

Yep! If you set a rate of 8x on your hardcore account, it'll stay at that rate when you die and convert to an ironman.

with some thought, this would make maxing a hardcore (normal or uim) too easy, maybe leave those at their respective xp rates and only change the non hardcore ones? so normal and uim basically :v

Some players might want to play a hardcore with slightly faster rates. We're looking to roll this out for solo ironman modes and then potentially GIM modes as well so that it's nice and even across the board and everyone has the option. Limiting it creates a bunch of ifs and buts so we'd like to avoid that.

1st infernal

Hi all,

We recently began discussing the idea of expanding how our experience rate system works.

At the moment when you create an account, the game modes have fixed experience rates that were set on release, for example 8x for HCIM, 40x for UIM and so on. Over the years, we've seen players decide against playing some game modes because they might be too easy or too hard. 

We'd like to address that concern by giving you the option to select from three different experience rates upon account creation.

When you create an account and select a game mode(e.g UIM), you will be asked to select from three experience rates;

• 40x(15x post 99)
• 8x
• 4x

Will I be able to move between the different experience rates as I wish after account creation?

You will be able to bump up your experience rate if you're not happy with your choice, e.g from 4x to 8x to make it easier. You will not be able to move down from 8x to 4x to make it harder.

Will this be an option for all accounts?

For the time being, this will only be available for solo ironman modes(IM, HC, UIM, HCUIM).

Why did you decide on 40x/8x/4x?

The reason we decided on those rates is because the solo game modes fit perfectly in the proposed exp rates without causing any disruption to existing accounts.

We discussed changing experience rates of existing accounts to something else(e.g 20x, 10x, 5x), but it would diminish the achievements of other existing players.

What about my existing account?

Existing accounts will remain at the same experience rates, with the option to move up for HC and HCUIM.

What about other game modes, such as GIM?

There is a little more to take into consideration with the other game modes, so we'd like to hold off for the time being and focus on the solo ironman modes to ensure we do it right.

Regarding normal, classic, and realism modes; those will stay exactly the same.

Why can't I pick my own experience multiplier, e.g 12x?

Although that was considered, we'd like to keep accounts within set groups. Some players like competing for ranks so it would be a nightmare figuring out a system for the hiscores.

Will there be a way to differentiate different exp rate players?

Yes, we're brainstorming ideas on how to differentiate different exp rate players in-game. If you have any ideas, feel free to suggest below.

What's next?

We would like to get some discussion going and see if this is something the community wants to see. If you have any other ideas or would like to ask questions, feel free to do so below.

Please vote in the poll above and let us know what you think!

Kind regards,

Vote for who you think deserves MOTM for the month of Fbeurary. The winner will be announced on 8 March, best of luck to everyone.

Rules & Information:

- The winner of this month's MOTM will win 3 bonds (can be claimed on any game mode), a forum award, and also be featured on the main page of forums for an entire month.

- If you are caught asking others to vote for you, your name will be removed from the poll.

- If someone is asking others to vote for a specific person, they will be infracted.

- If you are caught voting multiple times on multiple different accounts, all votes will be removed and you will be infracted on forums.

- Any off-topic discussion will be removed. (Keep the topic clean and on topic)

1st solo cox

https://i.imgur.com/CZFIjFu.png

if not claimed; 1st fire cape https://i.imgur.com/Po3rdUh.png

Welcome to the February edition of the Alora Times!

For those that missed it, the Ironman PvP tournament concluded after a week long grind by the participants, ending up with saeed, ILikeHentai and Tezudo taking home a combined 4.5b in prizes. We also have Hardcore Ultimate Ironman releasing in just under 3 hours from now, there are some prizes to be won there, you can find more info at the link below. Now lets dive in and see what everyone else has been up to over the past month!    

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Bonus Schedule For February

February Vote Competition [February 1st - February 21st]

Ironman PvP Tournament

Hardcore Ultimate Ironman - Over $1,000+ in prizes! - February 27th

[26/02/26] Holy moleys, Hooded slayer helmets, Client performance, GIM Rename Ticket, Cosmetic Mystery Box Additions & more!

If you want to check out our past updates, click here.

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Alora's Official Rules can be found here.

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The latest Staff Changes are as follows:

To see our past Staff Updates, click here.

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Stay up to date with some of our community members' recent Goals & Achievements: 

Mieu

Mieu's Diary

 

II

oofies G&A

 

Obama self

Finally remembered the log in for one of my alts (0xp mining pet)

 

Sukiru

Road To A Max Skiller

 

Surprise HP

Hp's Road to maxing every account

 

 

Make a topic in our Goals and Achievements section or send your achievement in the #newspaper_submissions channel in Alora Discord to be featured here!

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Here we honour our fallen comrades from the last month and there were a few of them! We wish them the best on their new ironman journeys and better luck next time!

The winner of January MOTM is...

Phanny phart !

Congratulations! You have stood out in the eyes of the Alora community. Thank you for being great members here on Alora and enjoy your rewards. :)

The link to the Member of the Month thread can be found here.

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Make sure to check out our streamers and video makers. They would love to have you keep them company during their streams and check out the content they create for Alora!

ents v1 https://www.youtube....JUMSWnToW8RUH8Q

stylo rsp https://www.youtube....Gy1sNT44br8v4uA

casa https://www.youtube....xyxU--uIM8SSRkQ

Walkchaos https://www.youtube....QehS6ALll4nl3OA

Maxi rs https://www.youtube....cClqATArQ6zI28Q

No Bank Mate https://www.youtube.com/@Luckyrsps

Magnata https://www.youtube....iw7uRwhhBEjBxkA

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If you enjoy Alora content, make sure to hit the Subscribe button on their channels to show them your support!
 

If I've missed anyone I do apologize, just message me on the forums or on Discord with a link to your channel and I will add you in.

That concludes this month’s edition of the Alora Newspaper! If you would like to see something added to the paper make sure to message H!

You can read the previous edition by clicking here.

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Welcome to Alora Christian, enjoy your stay!

It's not that rare to come across the required invocations. Some combat achievements require perseverance to complete such as this one, so I'll go ahead and decline the suggestion.

Your suggestion has been declined, if you feel this was wrongfully done please contact a Senior Moderator+.

THE DAY HAS FINALLY COME

We all would love to see you collect 1000 of both the dragon and lucky implings.