Update 2.6.0 - Firemaking

New skill: Firemaking

Firemaking is a new production skill. Each input burns one log for experience and produces that log's own ash. The recipe ladder matches Woodcutting, so any log you can chop you can burn: oak at level 1, willow 15, maple 30, yew 45, magic 60, elder 80. Burning a log gives 1.5x the experience cutting it gave, which makes it the largest use Woodcutting has ever had. Each tier has its own animated bonfire in its wood's colour, and the character has a new burn animation with all seven jewellery overlays drawn for it. Firemaking is the 19th skill that can reach level 99.

Ash and compost

• Oak, willow and maple ash upgrade compost into Supercompost. Yew, magic and elder ash make Ultracompost. Higher-tier ash needs fewer units: 6, 4 or 2 per bucket.

• Supercompost: disease chance x0.2, +3 harvest lives, 10% chance of an extra item per pull.

• Ultracompost: disease chance x0.1, +4 harvest lives, 20% chance of an extra item per pull.

• Both are made at the Compost Bin and give Farming experience.

• Each farm patch row now has a compost tier picker instead of an on/off toggle, showing your banked count of each tier.

Compost rebalance

• Extra harvest lives and the new bonus-yield roll now apply to allotment and herb patches only.

• Trees and flowers keep full disease protection but no longer gain extra harvest lives from compost. They did before this update. Trees produce logs, logs produce ash, and ash produces compost, so the loop paid for itself several times over.

• Crops already growing in a composted patch mature under the new rule.

Sacred pyres

• Treating a log with Sacred Oil and lighting it as a pyre banks a Pyre Blessing instead of ash, for the same experience as an ordinary fire of that log.

• Burying bones spends your highest banked blessing for bonus Prayer experience: +15% oak, +25% willow, +40% maple, +55% yew, +75% magic, +100% elder. This stacks on top of your altar multiplier.

• Off by default, since each blessing costs a log, a vial of oil and an input. The toggle and your banked count are in the Prayer panel, above the altar rows.

• Sacred Oil has three sources: 2,000 gold at the general store, brewed at the Herblore bench from a Ravenweed and an empty vial at Herblore 30, or dropped by Skeleton Warriors, Zombies, Skeletal Necromancers, Lost Souls, Aberrant Spectres, Lesser Demons and Abyssal Demons.

Fire Spirit

• Burning a log has a small chance to trigger a Fire Spirit, which leaves a bonus item. Roughly 1 in 500 burns on oak, scaling with log tier up to 1 in 250 on elder. Pyres can trigger it too.

• Most common rewards are rune essence and seeds. Less common are acorns, uncut gems and Sacred Oil.

• The rarest reward is a raw onyx at 1 in 1,031 spirits, which works out to about 1 in 515,000 burns on oak and 1 in 258,000 on elder.

• Your first Fire Spirit gets a one-time notification, high-value rewards trigger the full rare-drop celebration, and the stats panel tracks a lifetime count.

New content

• 16 new items: 6 ash types, 6 Pyre Blessings, Sacred Oil, Supercompost, Ultracompost, and the Phoenix Chick.

• 19 new recipes: 6 fires, 6 pyres, 6 compost mixes, and the Sacred Oil brew.

• New pet: the Phoenix Chick, at the same odds as the other skilling pets.

  

• 6 animated bonfire props, one per log tier.

• A Firemaking guide page covering ash, compost, pyres and the Fire Spirit.

• A Firemaking leaderboard, bringing the total to 22.

Always on top and fullscreen games

With always on top enabled, launching a game in exclusive fullscreen caused that game to minimise every time you clicked it, and switching a borderless game to fullscreen flickered and reverted. The only workaround was disabling always on top. RuneClick now releases the topmost window slot while a fullscreen program is in front and reclaims it when you leave. Over borderless and windowed games it still draws on top as before, and input capture is unaffected either way. No settings change is required.

Fixes

• Opening a wide picker no longer forces every picker opened afterwards to that same width until restart.

• The in-game guide now lists recipes in level order. Smithing, Cooking, Crafting, Fletching, Herblore and Farming were all out of order. Crafting jumped from a level 85 bracelet back to a level 1 bowstring.

• Herblore and Farming were showing the generic firefly ambient effect because neither had its own. Herblore now uses brew bubbles and herb dust, Farming uses drifting leaves and tilled soil, and Firemaking adds embers and falling ash.

• Selecting a sapling or compost recipe now updates the on-screen readout immediately instead of on the next input.

• Imp animation frames cleaned up, and the fishing stall now shows fish on its lower shelf at every depletion stage.

Quality of life

• The 6 pyre recipes are collapsed into a single "Light a Pyre" cell with a log picker.

• Running out of your selected log now tells you instead of failing silently. An optional setting below the log picker falls back to your next best log.

• Burying with a blessing active reports which tier was spent and its bonus.

• 7 items renamed: Ranging and Super Ranging Potion to Ranged and Super Ranged Potion, Fruit and Vegetable Batta to Fruit and Harvest Flatbread, Snape Grass to Fenreed, Aldarium to Blackamber, Potato Cactus to Barrel Cactus. Display names only. Stacks, recipes and drop tables are unchanged.

Achievements

• 2 new: Firemaking Cape for level 99 Firemaking, and Ember Companion for the Phoenix Chick.

• Completionist raised to 1,881 total levels for the 19th skill, with updated badge art. Beast Master now requires all 11 pets.

• The 100-achievement cap was full, so 12 old one-time achievements were removed to make room for Firemaking and future skills: Blacksmith's Debut, Something's Cooking, Artisan's Touch, First Fletch, First Imbue, First Rites, First Brew, Green Thumb, First Blood, Magister's First Word, Loose and Sticky Fingers. If you earned any of them, they will no longer count toward your total. One in a Thousand is unaffected. The list is now 90.

  

Localization

• All new Firemaking content is translated into all 8 supported languages.

• 619 existing lines were also rewritten, 976 translated cells in total. If you play in a language other than English, this is the largest change in the update.

• Corrected mistranslations include Korean describing a spent crop patch as fully grown, Chinese stating that protector flowers only work once grown when they work from planting, and German and French giving the Goblin Warrior steel gear where English says iron.

• Terminology was standardised. Ranged used four different names across panels in Spanish, German, French and Korean, and Fletching and Runecraft were similarly inconsistent. All languages now use one consistent form of address.

Under the hood

• Saves upgrade on first launch. Firemaking is added at level 1 and no other progress is changed.

• Compost now has three tiers instead of one. Patches already composted keep their compost through the upgrade.

• Leaderboard validation was extended to cover Firemaking.

— Vosk