Update 2.5: Herblore & Farming

It is out. This is the biggest thing to land in RuneClick since the Combat Update, and it has been in the works for a long time. Two brand new skills arrive together, they feed each other, and they drag a pile of new content in with them. Here is the whole thing.

Herblore

A brewer’s craft, built to feed the fight. Herbs come out of the ground unidentified, so the first step is sorting them: grind a pile of mystery leaves and each one resolves into a clean herb, with the rarest showing up about once in eighty thousand sifts. From there you brew, one clean herb plus an empty vial plus a secondary ingredient, up to a four ingredient super mix at the very top. Nineteen potions to learn in all, and an apothecary bench you upgrade across three tiers to squeeze more experience out of every batch. Spare gems crush down into dust for the trickier recipes, and the higher the gem the more dust it gives, though the onyx is deliberately left out so a stray click can never destroy one.

Farming

Farming grows in the background while you do everything else. No babysitting and no timers to race, which should surprise nobody by now. Seeds arrive unidentified the way herbs do, so you sort them the same way, then assign a crop to a patch and it matures on its own, auto-harvesting to your bank and replanting from your seed stock. You start with four patches and can buy your way up to eight. Thirty-four crops wait to be grown: quick allotment vegetables, the fifteen herbs that feed your Herblore, a few flowers, and trees and fruit trees that take real patience and pay a large lump of experience when they finally come in. Tree seeds get potted into saplings first, spare produce rots down in a compost bin to toughen a patch, and a cheap Plant Cure item, used automatically, saves a crop the instant disease strikes.

And because every crop is drawn for each stage it passes through, here is the full set laid out, from bare soil up to a mature harvest.

The Chaos Elemental

Past the Abyssal Lord, a new apex boss is waiting, and it does not hold still. The Chaos Elemental is a fourteen thousand health monster that rotates through three phases, answering with magic, then ranged, then a heavier melee, and it drains your combat stats a little with every exchange. That last part is exactly what the new Super Restore is for. Bring it down and it may hand over piles of gold, dragon bones, rare gear, and a baby of its own. It stays locked until you have beaten the Abyssal Lord, so it really is the new top of the mountain.

The horde around it

The Chaos Elemental did not come alone. Seven new enemies join the roster, each carrying ingredients your new skills want, from imps and unicorns up through ents and moss giants. You can supply both Herblore and Farming by fighting as much as by gathering, since the new drops were seeded across a good number of existing enemies too.

Potions and food, reworked

All of this needed room, so the buff systems got reworked. Potions now live in their own stack: equip as many as you have brewed through a picker that stays open, each one showing a live count of doses left and doses in the bank, turning red when you run dry. They decay in combat and take effect per action now, so a boost is fuel you spend rather than a switch you leave on. Same-stat potions take the higher value instead of piling up, different stats stack, and prayer potions drip points back as you fight so your overhead wards stay lit. Antipoison and Super Antipoison finally do what they say, they did nothing at all before this. Food moved to a single slot, the cooking stations became a gold sink you buy into across three tiers with your existing progress carried over, and dying now refills your whole prayer pool on the way out.

The new pets

Three new pets bring the total to ten. Farming turns up a Sproutling, Thieving finally pays out with a Magpie, and the Chaos Elemental drops a small chaos of its own. The sneak peek held that third one back until there was a boss to beat for it. Here it is.

The rest of it

There is a lot more packed in around the headline features. Around 117 new items. The first non-fish cooking line, twelve produce dishes from a Baked Potato up to a Garden Feast, tuned so they never outclass the fish at the same level. Twenty-four new achievements bring the total to a round one hundred, eighteen of them max-level capes, including one cape for reaching level ninety-nine in every single skill. Two new leaderboards for Herblore and Farming push the total to twenty-one, and the Completionist bar moved up to match two more skills reaching the top.

Under all of it, every change is additive. No existing rare or supply drop was nerfed and there is no forced save migration, so returning players keep everything they had and simply find Herblore and Farming sitting at level one. The character also picked up a whole new set of motions for all this new work, visibly brewing, tending, sorting, potting, and composting, with every piece of jewelry repainted to sit right on the new poses. There is a major bank performance fix, a rebuilt equipment panel and shop, two new in-game guide pages, and a full localization pass so everything new reads in all eight supported languages. The full notes are on Steam.

That is eighteen skills to max now, and a character who can brew a potion, tend a farm, and still walk into the hardest fight in the game. More when there is more.

— Vosk