Runescape Bug Abuse - My story

Hi everyone. I'm going to tell you my story on how I got into the world of RuneScape bug abuse, a world most of you
find 'dark', something you shouldn't get involved in due to the possibility of losing your precious account you work so hard on.
The purpose of this is to let people know what happens behind the scenes of the game, why I did what I did and
how I did it. I will also describe a few old bugs me or my team found in detail.

Most people know me as Hej and before I go any further I'd like to give credit to my team (which I will go into detail on how I got
into contact with); Fluid Karma, Sayank, Quint, Iceforg, Roy and Jasper (who later left the team).

It all began with me being the usual RuneScape player. I had my goals that I tried to achieve, my friends list with people to talk with
regarding the goals, events etc. Even throughout my early days of playing RS, I was always fascinated by how people did things you shouldn't
be able to, such as walking through walls (no-clip), duplicating items to gain in-game wealth incredibly fast, being invincible etc - you
get the idea. At this time there was a group called "Tainted-Ones" who specialized in exploiting the games flaws,
allowing you to do all these things. I registered an account on their forum and started to observe the things they found.
It was via this forum I got into contact with my first 'bugging' partner, Jared. I could never have imagined at the time what I was
getting myself into, what I was going to experience.

Jared and I shared the same interest of finding the 'holes'. I remember the very first bug I got to know which Jared told me how to do,
it was how you could get people to stand up while they're sitting on a chair in a POH which was by using a gnomeball on them. It was also
Jared who gave me the alias 'Hej' which at the time was my screen name on MSN (Hej = Hi in Swedish).

Jumping forward a bit, Tainted-Ones got sued by Jagex and had to shut down, it was the end of their RS careers.
I later got into contact with 'Sayank' via Ezud, a forum which was established a bit after Tainted Ones closed where exploits were discussed.
Me and Sayank became close friends and could discuss all kinds of things, it was with him I found my first 'real' bug, the BA smuggle.

Bug number one: The Barbarian Assault smuggle (Later found by leakers which ended up in a patch)

When the summoning skill got released I immediately started experimenting with it but found nothing major in the mechanics itself at the beginning.
I started to look into how you could combine the specific familiar properties with the game, such as getting the familiar into places it shouldn't
be in which could result in further exploitation, in this case The Barbarian Assault.
I got the idea of getting a familiar into a BA game which possibly could end up in you being able to put runes in it and simply leave the game,
because why would Jagex think of patching that if they made you unable to bring them there in the first place?

(Note to Jagex: When you patch things, always think as if you're trying to abuse it yourself, prevent things from happening before they do)

So I started to think about possibilities worth testing, and thanks to my attention to detail and knowledge about the game itself, I knew that the Tutorial
which you need to view before being able to play the minigame, places your character below the ladder without checking you for restricted items.
Now there was only one problem, your character was stuck in a cutscene with the items, unable to move or get rid of the summoning pouches,
but thanks to a previous bug which allowed your character to have 0 hp but still being alive by keeping an interface open, allowed us
to die in the cutscene. This was done by opening an interface as soon as poison hit you for your remaining hp.
So what I did was clicking the NPC to start a conversation (which is an interface) about viewing the tutorial which places your character down the ladder.
By doing this, we could have 0 hp while being down the ladder in Barbarian Assault with summoning pouches ready to die,
from here all you did was to cancel the interface and you would die in the cutscene, dropping everything you had on you where you died.



I immediatly went and tested my idea, and to my surprise, it worked and I litteraly shit my pants:



There was also another much more easier version of this bug which got it leaked and patched, it was done by getting a familiar with pouches in it
stuck in a personalised area then simply going down the ladder, call the familiar and retrieve the pouches. This worked because the game wasn't
able to detect that you had a follower. We made around 300M with this bug, none of the accounts we used got banned.




Bug number two: Pest Control (Double LIFT & Safety)

This was a leaked bug, but it also gave me alot of knowledge on how the game mechanics operate. What you did was to simply teleport as a PC game
starts which ended up in the game giving you a 'safety', an effect applied to your character which prevents you from loosing your items as you die.

A double lift is could most easily be described as a form of force teleport where you first get forced to a certain area, then log out to get sent back
to where you previously was, this was the case with Pest control. If you had the safety and died before the game was over, you'd get sent back into the game,
then when logging out and back in you'd get sent to where your character was when you died. We exploited this is various ways, one thing we did was
to die in a Bounty Hunter viewing orb with the previously described poison bug, this allowed us to smuggle in various items such as borrowed ones.



Another thing this bug allowed you to do was to stay in a PC game after it ended when everyone got booted off. What we did was to get a 'splatter' to attack us while
having a spinner healing the yellow portal which weakness is melee. You could leave the account there forever and gain a nice amount of XP by doing nothing.




Bug number three: Zanik (Familiar null, safety)

Zanik the little goblin which follows you in the 'Death to the Dorgeshuun' quest was an interesting NPC which deserves it's own section.
One of the things Zanik allowed you to do was to 'null' a familiar, meaning that the game would not recognize you having a familiar while it's
still attached to you. What you did was to go where Zanik's boundries was, where it stopped following you, and click to
walk where it would normally dissapear while having an interface open, this stopped Zanik from completely dissapearing. You would then at this point
summon a familiar, the game would try to remove it but fails since it's not Zanik which ended up in you having a nulled familiar. (This enabled you to have
multiple familiars, giving you an advantage in certain situations)

Here's a Dreadfowl acting as Zanik:



Another thing Zanik enabled you to do was getting a safety, you had to be up to a certain part in the Death to the Dorgeshuun quest where Zanik showed
you a cutscene. What you did was to get Zanik stuck in a personalised area, this enabled you to go anywhere in the game without having Zanik dissapear.
You would then go to the Fight Caves, call for Zanik then have it show you the cutscene and cancel it, you'd spawn outside the cave with a safety effect on you
because the previously loaded area (Fight caves) would get deleted because noone was in it and you can't get sent back into an unloaded area.




Bug number four: The Slug Menace (PAFT, Infinite Prayer, CFT)

PAFT = Personalised Area Force Teleport, more info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z10kZo8ixPQ

CFT = Controlled Force Teleport, a forced teleport activated on command.

The Slug Menace quest, the most poorly coded quest in the history of Runescape. I shall start off by explaining how I first came across this huge failure.
Not long after experimenting with Zanik, I came into contact with 'Fluid Karma', which at the time was the 'king of bug abuse', he seemed to know everything about everything.
After days of talking and discussing theories, Fluid Karma joined myself and Sayank, it was also him that told us about this flawed quest.

The 'PAFT'

First off, the PAFT. This interesting bug occured when you tried to enter the cave to fight the 'Slug prince', and for some reason
the game would occassionaly give you a message saying "Invalid teleport!". What that means is that the game tried to take you to an unloaded 'instance' or personalised area,
why it's programmed to take you to another area then the one you originally are meant to be in, I have no idea. Anyhow, if there was no area loaded at the coordinates
where the game tried to take you, you'd end up with the Invalid teleport! message while remaining at the cave entrance. Now if there was an area loaded at the
destination coordinates, you'd get sent to that certain spot. This allowed us to access areas which you normally can't get to without requirements.


Me and Fluid Karma where he PAFT'ed into my personalised cave.







There are multiple ways of performing this bug with newly discovered methods, patching the bug itself will be a hard task for Jagex.

The 'CFT' & Infinite prayer

After messing around with the PAFT for a while, Jagex started catching up with us, spying on what we did and tried to get us to help them. They found out about
the PAFT and patched it. Along with the patch they opened up a whole new range of bugs, this time in the cutscene (still the same cave). While viewing the cutscene
you could interact with the environment without getting kicked out of the area, so what we did was to teleport out of the cutscene with any kind of teleport fit for
this situation since you had no tabs or interfaces, such as having a familiar which would teleport you out, eating a 'rock cake' while having low hp and a ring of life equipped then enter the cave
to have the rock cake it you while in the cutscene, and the ring of life would teleport you out. What this did was letting you have the cutscenes effects while
being outside of the cutscene itself, and since cutscenes freezes any prayers active we got the infinite prayer bug as a bonus.
With this effect activated, you could not walk because the game still thought you were in the cutscene where the NPC's conversation interface kept popping up, we were
able to circumvent this issue by clicking where we wanted to go then quickly clicking an interface, this stopped it from occuring and allowed you to walk.
When you got to where you wanted to FT from, you'd simply carry on with the conversation with the NPC to where it'd normally show you 'part 2' of the cutscene,
the game would get confused and place you outside of the cave.

Here is Quint using the CFT to get himself out of the CastleWars lobby as a sheep








Bug number five: 'NIFL' (Non Interfaced Forced Logout, Invincibility)

Performing a NIFL had different uses such as invincibility and infinite prayer, the game would think you were logged out but you were infact still logged in.
This was done by performing an action right after clicking logout which would stop you from logging out, an example of this is from a very special quest, yes you
guessed it, The Slug menace. Being in the Slug menace cave during the cutscene also had an anti-logout feature which made it unable for you to logout, what we did was
to click logout and enter the cave, since the logout command was sent from outside where it is possible to logout then being sent into the area where you can't,
resulted in your character having the 'NIFL' effect where no monsters or players could attack you, you also had infinite prayer. Unfortunely, this effect
using this method only lasted about 2 minutes before you got forced off the server.

Another way of doing this was to pick something up in Bounty Hunter while having a penalty which would stop you from logging out for 180 seconds. You could
extend it by dropping an item and picking it up which added another 180 seconds to the effects length.

A demonstration of this bug can be viewed here where we PK'ed in the old Bounty Hunter crater with this effect applied:







Bug number six: Infinite prayer (Dragon's token)

There were literally around 20 different methods of 'freezing' your prayer (where some of them still works today), the most convenient and easiest one to
set up was by the use of a Dragon's token. Sayank found out that you could do this by putting on the desired prayers and clicked on the token to get sent into a cutscene, while in the cutscene you just
canceled it by clicking anywhere, you would then get sent back to where you were with infinite prayer. The bug itself was very usefull for some situations,
like putting the account at the Desert bandits for a few days to train.




Bug number seven: The Barbarian Assault Smuggle V2

SI = Stackable Interface, an interface that stacks upon itself, delaying certain commands to be applied onto your character.

A few weeks after I came into contact with Fluid Karma, I found the most profitable bug to date, another method of smuggling out from the Barbarian Assault.
Here we had to use our friend Zanik to gain the safety effect out of the Tzhaar cave. With the safety effect on, we would then go to BA into a game and start collecting
runes, arrows, or whatever we wanted to smuggle out of the game. When we were satisfied with what we wanted to smuggle, we would go and kill ourselves to spawn outside
the Fight cave while spamming a stackable interface, in this case a quick select prayer which we didn't have high enough prayer level to use. This worked beucase
the safety effect from the Fight Caves had a higher priority than the BA one, and while spamming an SI we stalled the command of removing the runes from your character.
While your character was stalled from being sent back to BA we would use whatever we wanted to smuggle, with imp boxes which puts that item in the bank for you. This
worked because you were no longer in BA where you are restricted from using an imp box.

Here's me first discovering this method:



Loot from the first day:





One of the accounts bank:



A demonstration of this bug can also be seen in this video:






Bug number eight: The Corporeal Beast Invincibility

This bug was actually found by mistake, it was no real invincibility bug. What you did was to get a cutscene effect on you then simply walking to the Corporeal Beast
and started killing it, and the reason why this worked is because Jagex programmed it not to attack anyone with the effect on them due to the 'peek' the cave has
where your character gets placed next to the beast with the effect applied. This bug lasted for a good year before they finally patched it, we even told Jagex how
to do the bug due to certain reasons, even then they ignored it and left it unfixed. We later decided to sell a guide on how to do it where they finally got forced into
patching it. We made a good billion or so with this bug (could have made alot more, we were just lazy).

One of the accounts bank after doing some corping:






Bug number nine: Stealing Creation Smuggle

This bug was found after the introduction of getting a gravestone outside of an instance, where the items you lost would end up where you entered the area if you died. The first thing that came into our heads when we read about this was to kill someone and logging out as they die, doing that results in the game thinking you died from a monster because the original player that killed you is no longer online. Therefore, the new update made the items you carried as you died, drop in inside the fence where you get sent into the Stealing Creation.





Power of the Class 5 dagger:





Bug number ten: Dungeoneering (PAFT, Transfering, XP Glitch)

The PAFT

The day Dungeoneering got released I got really excited, a new skill = tons of new things to exploit, especially a skill like this. When it got released I immediatly went there and started
examining and found things which still aren't patched (will explain if it ever does). Anyhow, it was at this time Iceforg and Roy joined the team, I knew them from before but never really bugged with them
they had found something familiar from the past, a PAFT. The PAFT was done by delaying entrance to a Dungeoneering game, such as doing the Deamonheim teleport which 'delays' your character while you teleport,
stopping the game from applying commands onto your character. What we did was to initiate the teleport while having someone in the party you were in enter a game and leave the dungeon quickly, this made the game
put the character which was outside the whole time delaying, at coordinates which are 'free', and what I mean by that is that the coordinates the game will place your character at after you finish delaying are in an
unloaded instance.

Example: Player A makes a party with player B, player B initiates the Dungeoneering teleport, A enters the dungeon and leaves quickly while B is outside still doing the teleport delay which is around 8 seconds long. Since there is no player in the dungeon A created, the area gets deleted and player B ends up with either "Invalid Teleport!" or gets successfully PAFT'ed into a whole different area which used the empty instances coordinates to load its area. More information about this bug can be seen in this video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR4jpsAHOuE
















Transfering

The first few months Dungeoneering was out it had a rejoin function which enabled your character to rejoin a game you left or logged out from. This was a very usefull tool since it enables you to join a dungeon differently than creating a party and entering. What we did was to PAFT into a Player Owned house, then in that house another account of ours would come and lend the account that PAFT'ed in an item such as a partyhat. The account that PAFT'ed in would then leave via the house portal and end up in the rejoin room, this worked because the game thought you were in a Dungeon and the POH exit portal works by placing your character where you entered the POH. We would then have the owner of the lent item come and retrieve the partyhat, he would then drop it in the rejoin room and quickly start a dungeon with the recieving account. Once in game, the owner would leave the game and grab the hat then rejoin the game with the hat, this worked because Jagex didn't make a check for items when you rejoin a game. From here we would just give the partyhat to the other account because there are no trade limits within a Dungeon game, the recieving account would then be several hundred million gp richer in a few seconds.

We abused this for a few weeks before it got patched, we made several thousand dollars each handling GP. It got patched due to its simplicity, people got items into the rejoin room via nulled familiars and posted videos on Youtube which got Jagex's attention. I wonder if Jagex even has a Quality Assurance department.












The end

I have now quit RuneScape (April 2011) and am no longer looking for bugs, I compiled one last video which can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x8q2R1eYoE

These bugs are just a small fraction of all the bugs we ever did that I can be bothered explaining. RuneScape as a whole has been a truly life changing experience,
I've learnt alot from both playing legit and trying to abuse the system. We were always up for helping Jagex in teaching them how to make their game safer but they choosed to not take us seriously, bad move. We made thousands of dollars in total profit from the bugs we found. I hope you enjoyed reading this.

Here are some random pictures:

 

Wow very detailed story. Looks like you have made a killing from it
Now sell the money and get some good cash irl.

 

damn thats a crap load of bugs! lol and I love how your like just talking to Jmods like nothing, saying about bug abuse and what not.

 

I wish you would teach me any of these lol

 

Very in-depth I like it, you should add the dung. glitch and also the glitch taking the old man's blue party hat.

 

How we got the partyhat was described in the PAFT video, the bug itself still works and always will. I may add Dungeoneering bugs such as the XP bug though.

 

Sick stuff crab. Someone recently tried to sell me a PAFT glitch method claiming they were the only ones who knew it, guess they were mistaken.

 

I highly doubt that they or whoever it was, are the only ones knowing about it.

 

Haha, I forgot about tainted-ones... What a hilarious group

 

I'm impressed, the corp beast one is just plain madness, would that still work?

This was really pleasant to read

 

Very nice, read it all! I like mod dc lol , *sack him* nice bug abuse and i hope you kepp this updated .

 

wow i found this quite amusing

 

Its very detailed, I heard about some of these bugs but never learned how they were actually done! Thank you for that interesting read

 

Nice story I enjoyed reading it

 

Ha nice. pretty good to read

 

I must say you were quite the glitcher haha, i never even heard of the majority of these till now.

 

wow this is amazing.

does that barbarian assault bug still work?

 

Great thread, was a good read on boring evenning tbh
Cheers!!

 

You sir, Are a legend and Jagex should add NPC's named after you!


Edit~ Why has Jagex not hired you guys yet?

 

Epic thread

Going to read it all when I have more time