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I used Rune Headquarters (RuneHQ) a lot back in the day as my main help site. I cannot remember when I first discovered it, but I was definitely using it by mid-2005, and continued to use it each time I started playing RuneScape again. It has been an incredible help with almost every aspect of the game, from its skill guides to dungeon maps to mini-game guides to quest walkthroughs to full clue scroll solutions to skill calculators to full monster, item, and NPC databases. (There was much more material on the site than I can discuss in a few paragraphs here.) It pretty much made the official game manual obsolete (though I still liked to read it on occasion). Sometimes, instead of playing the game, I would just browse RuneHQ and read some of the guides out of pure interest.
I knew, of course, that there were other help sites around, such as Rune Tips (Tip.It) (which I think was more popular than RuneHQ back then) and Sal's Realm of RuneScape. I would visit these other help sites irregularly, maybe if I was looking for a piece of information that I couldn't find on RuneHQ, but I preferred RuneHQ (if only because I found out about it before the others) and overwhelmingly used it rather than the other sites.
When Old School RuneScape (OSRS) launched in February 2013, I jumped right in and started playing, but when I went to RuneHQ again, I discovered that it focused on the main
RuneScape game, not OSRS; the other major help sites were like this as well. Instead of using the OSRS Wiki (like I imagine a lot of other players did), I instead turned to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has an archived version of RuneHQ from August 2007. I realize this may strike some people as strange and even extreme, but this is a nostalgia site, after all, so this decision of mine shouldn't surprise you.
The heyday of the help sites is over, and has been over for years now: when OSRS was released in February 2013, I could tell that the wikis were where most players turned to for help, and even a few years prior to that, the wikis had already become pretty big. But I will always prefer the old RuneHQ to any of the wikis—again, this is a 2000s nostalgia site. In recent years, after I stopped playing OSRS (after realizing it wouldn't stay the static nostalgia game it was meant to be) and started playing RuneScape private servers that seek to emulate the 2006/2007 era, I still use an Internet Archive version of the RuneHQ site from the proper time period as my main source of game help.
All written materials on this Web site are my own, and all are released under the Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License Version 2.
This page last modified on 2 May 2021.