OSRS Combat Calculator

This OSRS combat calculator works out your Old School RuneScape combat level from your seven combat stats. Then it answers what the other calculators don’t: the fewest total XP to your next combat level, or any level you pick, when you’re free to mix skills, and how far each skill can go before your combat level rises.

About the OSRS Combat Calculator

Every combat calculator on the first page shows how many levels of one skill, on its own, get you to the next combat level. That’s a useful list, but it isn’t a plan. Four Attack levels and four Defence levels look the same in that list, and they can be thousands of XP apart. The OSRS Combat Calculator prices every option in XP and searches every mix of skills for the cheapest.

• Cheapest route, exact. Not a guess and not one skill at a time. Checked against a brute-force search in our tests.
• Locks for builds. Keep Defence at 1, Prayer at 52, or anything else where it is, and the route works around it.
• Level caps. For each skill, the highest level it can reach before your combat level goes up. Pures plan around this.
• Levels or exact XP. Switch to XP and part-levels count, so the XP still needed is what you actually have left.
• The working. The formula with your numbers in it.

It runs in your browser. There’s no hiscores lookup: the OSRS hiscores don’t let a web page read them directly, and routing your name through our server would break our rule that nothing leaves your browser. Typing seven numbers takes ten seconds.

How to use the OSRS Combat Calculator

1. Enter your stats. The levels from your skills tab, or switch to “Exact XP” and paste the XP.
2. Lock what you’re keeping. Tick “Keep as it is” on Defence for a pure, Prayer if you’re holding it, and so on. Hitpoints starts locked, because you can’t train it on its own.
3. Set a target. Leave it blank for your next combat level, or type any level up to 126.
4. Read the result. Your combat level, the cheapest route in XP, each skill’s cost on its own, and how far each skill can go at the same combat.

The OSRS combat level formula

From the OSRS Wiki:

• Base = (Defence + Hitpoints + half of Prayer, rounded down) ÷ 4
• Melee = 0.325 × (Attack + Strength)
• Ranged = 0.325 × (1.5 × Ranged, rounded down)
• Magic = 0.325 × (1.5 × Magic, rounded down)
• Combat level = Base + the largest of Melee, Ranged and Magic, rounded down

The wiki’s own example: Defence 70, Hitpoints 60 and Prayer 43 give a base of 37.75. With 1 Attack and 1 Strength that’s 37.75 + 0.65 = 38.4, so combat 38. A new account is 3.4, combat 3. All 99s is 126.

Put another way, each level is worth:

Ranged and Magic are worth more per level, but they only count if they beat your melee total, and a Ranged or Magic based account tops out at combat 109.

A worked example

A mid-level main: 60 Attack, 80 Strength, 45 Defence, 75 Hitpoints, 52 Prayer, 70 Ranged, 60 Magic. The OSRS Combat Calculator gives:

1. Base. (45 + 75 + 26) ÷ 4 = 36.5.
2. Offence. Attack + Strength is 140, beating 1.5 × Ranged (105) and 1.5 × Magic (90). 0.325 × 140 = 45.5.
3. Combat level. 36.5 + 45.5 = 82.000, so 82, exactly on the line.

Here’s what each skill alone costs to reach 83:

A levels-only calculator lists “+4” for Defence, Attack, Hitpoints and Strength alike. In XP, Defence is 32 times cheaper than Strength. The cheapest route is four Defence levels, 30,209 XP, and on the way you’d pick up about 10,069 Hitpoints XP from the Defence training.

When a mix beats one skill

Now lock Defence, as if this were a build that holds it at 45. Attack alone would cost 133,273 XP. The OSRS Combat Calculator finds something cheaper: Attack 60 to 62 and Prayer 52 to 56, 120,442 XP in all. Two Attack levels give 0.65 and four Prayer levels give 0.5, enough to cross the line, and the low levels of each are cheaper than Attack’s 63rd and 64th.

That’s the whole point of searching mixes. As a skill gets higher, each level costs more, so spreading the gain across your lowest relevant skills is often cheaper. Our tests check the route against a brute-force search of every combination on several small accounts.

Level caps for pures and builds

The last column, “Train up to, same combat”, is for anyone keeping a combat bracket. Take a 1 Defence pure with 60 Attack, 99 Strength, 99 Hitpoints, 52 Prayer, 99 Ranged and 94 Magic. That’s combat 83 (83.175 exactly). Before combat goes up:

• Attack can go to 62 (each level adds 0.325, and 63 would cross 84).
• Defence can go to 4.
• Prayer can go to 59.
• Strength, Hitpoints and Ranged are already 99.

Those caps change as soon as any skill moves, so check again after each level.

Combat levels of common builds

What the OSRS Combat Calculator gives for some well-known account builds, with the stats shown. Your own build will differ in a level or two, which is exactly what the calculator is for.

Look at the exact values. The berserker at 99.050 and the 75 Attack pure at 88.050 have almost no room: one more level of Defence, Hitpoints or melee and they go up. The 60 Attack pure at 83.175 has a little more. The level caps column in the OSRS Combat Calculator tells you exactly how much.

Why the exact number matters in the Wilderness

In the Wilderness you can attack, and be attacked by, players whose combat level is within the Wilderness level of yours. At level 10 Wilderness, a combat 83 player can fight anyone from 73 to 93. One combat level more moves that whole range, so PKers who build around a bracket watch their combat level closely. That’s what the caps are for: train everything you can up to the cap, and stop before the next level.

Who the OSRS Combat Calculator is for

• Mains chasing a combat level for a quest, a minigame or a round number, who want the cheapest way there.
• Pures and other builds holding a bracket, who need the caps.
• Ironmen, for whom XP is time and every wasted level hurts.
• Anyone curious why their combat level didn’t move after a Prayer level.

The XP behind the levels

XP per level grows by about 10% each level. Level 2 needs 83 XP, level 10 needs 1,154, level 50 needs 101,333, level 70 needs 737,627, and level 99 needs 13,034,431. Level 92 is 6,517,253, about half of 99. That curve is why the cheapest route almost always trains your lowest relevant skill, and why the OSRS Combat Calculator prices in XP rather than levels.

Why Hitpoints starts locked

You can’t train Hitpoints directly. It gets a third of the XP you earn in melee and Ranged combat. A route that says “train Hitpoints” isn’t something you can do. So Hitpoints is locked to begin with, and the calculator reports the Hitpoints XP you’ll gain along the route instead. That XP may get you to your target a little before the route says. Untick the lock if you want to see Hitpoints as an option anyway.

Common mistakes

• Counting odd Prayer levels. 43 Prayer and 42 Prayer give the same combat level. Only every second level counts.
• Training Ranged on a melee account for combat. It adds nothing until 1.5 × Ranged beats Attack + Strength.
• Comparing levels instead of XP. “+4” can mean 30,209 XP or 965,305 XP.
• Forgetting the rounding. 82.999 is combat 82. The calculator shows the exact value so you can see how close you are.
• Accidentally leveling a pure. Check the level caps before you train past a bracket.

How the OSRS Combat Calculator works

All the arithmetic is done in fortieths of a combat level, so no rounding error can ever decide a level. For the route, it builds two lookup tables once: the cheapest melee XP for every Attack + Strength total, and the cheapest Ranged or Magic XP for every offence value. Then it tries every final Defence, Hitpoints and Prayer level, works out the offence the target still needs, and looks up the cheapest way to get it in each style. The cheapest total wins. It’s exhaustive, so it’s exact, and it still takes a few milliseconds.

XP comes from the standard OSRS experience formula. In level mode each skill is taken to be at the start of its level; in XP mode your real XP is used, so a skill halfway through a level costs less to finish.

The OSRS Combat Calculator recalculates as you type, so you can try “what if I get 2 Prayer?” in a second. Copy result gives you the full breakdown as text for Discord or a clan chat. You can also download it or save it as a PDF.

Limits

• It covers combat level only, not damage, accuracy or gear. Combat level doesn’t make you hit harder.
• The route is the fewest XP, not the fewest hours. Defence XP from a good method may be slower than Attack XP from another. Use the XP numbers with the rates you actually get.
• No hiscores import. Type your stats in.

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