Wyrmscraig hits Old School RuneScape on July 29 as RS3 ships its mid-game rebalance

Jagex moved both of its pieces in the same week. On Monday, July 20, RuneScape (RS3) got the Mid-Game Rebalance live — the patch the studio had been teasing for months, touching Fletching, Agility, Divination, the God Wars Dungeon and a handful of drop rates. Almost in parallel, it locked in the date the other half of the community was waiting on: Wyrmscraig, the new Old School RuneScape island, opens on July 29. Massively Overpowered broke both down, and the official blogs fill in the rest.

Wyrmscraig didn't come off an internal whiteboard: it's the winner of the 2026 player-designed island contest, created by ScreteMonge, reshaped by community feedback and built out by the Old School team. It sits in the Unquiet Ocean, defined by its basalt column geography and its ties to the Icyene race. Even the name did its homework — it fuses the Old English wyrm with the Irish craig, roughly "wyrm's rock." Docking there requires 62 Sailing, which makes the island a nice carrot for anyone still grinding the game's newest skill.

The way in is Fallen From Grace, a short quest built to introduce the island and its new content. It asks for 62 Sailing, 60 Crafting, 47 Runecraft and 53 Mining, and completing it unlocks the repeatable boss: The Mad Angel, tuned for mid-game players (think Fire Cape level) with damage windows that reward sustained pressure rather than punishing a single slip. Its headline drop is Hallowfell, a two-handed sword requiring 75 Attack that cleaves into up to two additional enemies within 5 tiles for as much as 50% of your max hit. Unlike the Scythe of Vitur, the damage falls off only once instead of per target — which, per Jagex's own rewards blog, makes it the strongest melee weapon by a significant margin as long as you keep three targets in range. The boss also drops a tradeable teleport scroll to the cathedral, granite dust, a jar and the pet.

The addition making the most noise isn't the boss — it's Mortimer, Old School's first new Slayer Master in roughly seven years. His twist: he doesn't hand you one task, he offers two or three options with their own modifiers, so picking a task is an actual decision rather than a formality, with a focus on superior monsters. To cut the travel time, players polled in new teleports: the slayer ring drops you at Mortimer's cavern, and the necklace of passage adds a general Wyrmscraig destination once the quest is done.

The island also brings two skilling activities that feed each other. Golem crafting uses furs from hunting and hands out Crafting XP comparable to glassblowing, except on demand instead of gated behind a timer; its unique reward is the jeweller's chisel, which guarantees gem cuts at certain levels and gives a 10% chance to cut two at once. On the other side, goat hunting is a high-intensity Hunter activity aimed at the 60-80 range, dropping horns — turned into dust for combat potions — plus furs that loop straight back into golem crafting and, pending a poll, the pet Mr McGroot. There's a video rundown walking through everything landing on the 29th.

Across the hall, RuneScape got its patch on July 20, aimed squarely at progression's most awkward stretch: the middle levels. The deepest change is the Fletching re-tier, which cleans up years of inconsistency: yew shortbows and longbows move to level 70 and become members-only — free-to-play keeps Ranged options at 40 and 50 via maple and acadia — shieldbows are retired wholesale in favour of their equivalent-tier longbows, and bane ammunition is unified with regular arrows and bolts through the Tune Bane Ore spell. Agility got an XP realignment all the way to 99, with sizeable XP-per-hour bumps on nearly every course, and Divination was tuned on the gathering side rather than raw XP, so unlocking a new energy type never feels slower than the one before it.

The rest of the patch is a long list of fine-grained tweaks: the God Wars Dungeon eases both its difficulty and reputation gains, specific drop rates were retuned, and so were the luck stat's application and Invention perks — in fact, between the preview and launch Jagex removed negative perks entirely and buffed XP for full Anachronia laps and Harmonic Dust. Construction carries the biggest numbers: the eternal plank goes from 200 to 520 XP, eternal furniture requirements drop (stool to 94, chair to 96, bookcase to 99, table to 100), and a new Fort Forinthry reinforcement at level 105 pays out 499,200 XP for 65 eternal magic frames and 6 stone wall segments. Full breakdown lives in the official patch notes.

Taken together, the week says a lot about how Jagex is running its two games. RS3 keeps pulling old systems apart and rebuilding them piece by piece — the mid-game rebalance follows the early-game one — betting that its retention problem lives in progression rather than in a content drought. Old School, meanwhile, is adding new territory with the community inside the process: an island that was voted on, designed by a player, with even the pet subject to a poll. Two different philosophies pointed at the same goal.

The mid-game rebalance is already playable in RuneScape; Wyrmscraig lands in Old School RuneScape on July 29. Primary source: Massively Overpowered. Further reading in the official Wyrmscraig announcement, the unique rewards blog and the RS3 rebalance post.