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OSRS Botting - Learn about OSRS BotsOSRS Botting - How does it work?
Every RuneScape player has heard about it at least once during their years of playing the game. Maybe you were chopping down wood and two guys nearby had a conversation about bots. Or maybe you have encountered a bot yourself when fishing lobsters: dozens of characters stacked on top of one another with strange names that remind of some code sure should’ve looked suspicious. This blog post is dedicated to botting, which, unfortunately, still remains a big part of the game.Botting: What is It?
Botting is essentially the process of a program playing the game instead of a player. This is mostly done to farm gold, resources or to level up skills without the need to actually play the game. As such, it is viewed to be a form of cheating in the community. Jagex shares this view and botting is not only against the rules but heavily punishable as well. You can learn more about the risks of running a bot in our blog post dedicated entirely to this specific topic.
What Can Bots Do?
Bots can perform a huge variety of tasks, from simple mining to sometimes even being able to complete quests and minigames. Most bots perform simple tasks. For example, a bot can mine ores, collect them until the inventory is full, bank them all and return to mining again. A bit more advanced bots might be able to collect a customizable amount of ores and/or sell them on the Grand Exchange. The same goes for any other skill. Usually, bots have certain routes they take and they can be noticed if you’re paying attention. Although they try to mimic a player in their actions, most of the bots are not so advanced.
The most concerning types of bots are those that are able to perform complicated tasks and with higher efficiency than some players, too. Not only can they complete quests, but there are also bots that make OSRS gp by farming Zulrah, Revenants and even completing such tasks as Mage Arena 2. You can already realize why almost everyone but botters themselves hate botting so much. Not only it belittles your own achievements, it also wrecks the game’s economy and gives an unfair advantage to botters.
Types of Bots
While bots can be categorized differently, e.g. by what tasks they perform or how complicated those tasks are, and that would make up for a huge list, we decided to get to the more technical side of things and discuss the three categories from the technical standpoint.
Color Bot
Color bot is the most straightforward type of bot. In a way, it resembles a human. While humans are still smarter, color bot interacts with the game the same way a player does: by using their vision. While bots do not exactly have eyes, color bots read the visual information i.e. code that dictates that visual information, to recognize items, locations and everything else. This type of bot is considered to be the most primitive of all, not only caught relatively easy by Jagex, but also countered, since it’s enough to change item coloring a bit to trick the bot, while players will not notice any visual change in items’ color at all.
Injection Bot
Injection bot does exactly what the title implies: it injects itself into your OSRS client and reads the code. This type of bot is more advanced that the previous color bot. First, it can be entrusted with more complicated tasks, meaning that it is harder to notice and is more useful to the botter. Second, they are harder to counter: simply changing the color code of an item is not enough to prevent these bots from functioning. However, while in the dawn of OSRS they were running rampant for some time, Jagex quickly found a solution. They’ve written lines of “fake code” which do nothing in game and players don’t notice them at all. But these lines of fake code are visible to the injection bot and it reads them thoroughly as a dutiful machine it is and this action is registered by Botwatch. Such action exposes the bot and guarantees precise blow of the ban hammer on the cheater’s account.
Reflection Bot
Reflection bot is arguably the most advanced kind of bot there is. This type of bot creates a fake copy of the user’s client and reads that instead of reading the code directly from the legitimate client. This means that it can still read the lines of fake code, but that all happens on the fake client. Reflection bot then generates “orders” it sends to the actual client and avoids detection by bypassing Jagex’s lines of fake code and it, therefore, cannot be detected this way. In all other regards, it essentially works as an injection bot. These two types of bots are often used in tandem for maximum efficiency. That still does not mean that they don’t get caught.
If you want to continue reading and learn more about bots, feel free to check out our full blog at
OSRS Botting - Learn about OSRS Bots
