# RuneScape Community Discussions & This Week in RuneScape

- Product: RuneScape (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/runescape)
- Vendor: Jagex Ltd
- Date: 2026-02-09
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1343400/view/537752181137212466
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/runescape/releases/2026-02-09-community-discussions-this-week-in-runescape

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Functionality to allow players with remaining shards from the inverted skillcapes event to exchange them with Hans between the 9th and 15th of February
- **added** — Hints to make it clearer that you need to have Princess with you as a follower to progress Princess and the Pauper
- **added** — A bowl of water to the required item list for Princess and the Pauper
- **added** — Follows events of: The World Wakes to The Death of Chivalry quest
- **changed** — Chaos Altar buff to be acquired through the Wilderness area diary instead of requiring the Demonic Skull
- **changed** — Planned changes to the Crystal Mask for Thieving and increase high level pickpocketing buffs
- **changed** — Bird catching success chance to start at 75% success chance at unlock level instead of 39% for Crimson Swifts at level 1
- **changed** — Reclassified the Stellar Born quest from Ambiguous to Age of Chaos due to its Sixth Age skill requirements and reference to Tuska
- **changed** — Kili Row quest position in Timeline sort to appear between Necromancy and Rune Mythos rather than after The Spirit of War
- **changed** — Flashbang in the Chosen Commander quest to fire off only once
- **fixed** — Typos in Princess and the Pauper quest
- **fixed** — Bug that prevented the bottom four quests in Timeline->World Guardian sort from appearing
- **fixed** — Princess is now correctly visible at the start of Princess and the Pauper for all players
- **fixed** — Delivery package item is no longer visible when a player attempts to harvest wisps
- **fixed** — Chat message now correctly states what happened with the reward when capturing a Seren Spirit
- **fixed** — The Sparky pet is no longer transparent in the pet preview interface

##### **Community Topics:**

##### **In Case You Missed It + Our Reactions to Last Week**

- Last week we shared what we want to achieve on the [Road to Restoration](https://steamcommunity.com/games/1343400/announcements/detail/537752181137211567) and also shared a preview of our upcoming [Early Game Rebalance and DailyScape Overhaul](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/road-to-restoration--early-game-rebalance--dailyscape-overhaul).

- Having posted the latter blog on Friday and let discussions run their course for the weekend, we're spending this morning looking at what feedback we might be able to implement as part of the respective updates or where we can provide clarification. While we're moving in the overall right direction and are firm in our resolve to get there, your feedback, as always, helps identify areas of change where a little more consideration is required. With that in mind, here are just a few short (non-exhaustive) notes below:

- An easy one to not go ahead with is the Chaos Altar and the Demonic Skull. We've heard you loud and clear on this point, and will not require the Demonic Skull to be used at the Chaos Altar. Instead, we will change the Chaos Altar buff to have it be acquired through the Wilderness area diary.

- Livid Farm, Sacred Clay and RuneSpan points have, amongst other things, featured heavily in your discussions. We are considering what can be done about these - while we're not yet ready to commit to anything yet, we just want to let you know that we're taking your thoughts on board.

- For consumables like Vis Wax and Wicked Hood Teleport charges, you will be able to continue using your remaining ones. A brief reminder: They will not be removed from your inventories at this time.

- For Thieving, we will tweak the planned changes to the Crystal Mask as well as look to increase high level pickpocketing buffs. We still want to position the Crystal Mask as the best unlock for thieving when used in combination with Light form.

- Additionally, in Friday's blog we mentioned there were further Hunter buffs in the works for the early levels. We'll be buffing Bird and Kebbit catching methods, such as increasing the success chance on catching birds and XP when caught.

- For example, Crimson Swifts currently have a success chance of 39% at level 1, increasing with your Hunter level. We'll be buffing all birds to start at 75% success chance at their unlock level instead.

- There is a concern from some folks that we're removing AFK activities. This absolutely isn't the case, we're just looking to ensure that they are balanced appropriately against the effort, to allow for other more "lean forward" methods to have a place too.

- We also updated our [Combat Modernisation Beta](https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/combat-styles-improvements---beta-update-2) on Thursday and have continued to take your thoughts about it on board. We've got another week ahead of us with the Beta and will continue to work on the Combat Modernisation update throughout it - there is a chance that we'll update the beta once more this week, but we'll confirm that via a blog post on the day.

##### **The Week Ahead:**

- **Regrounding Items**

- Part 3 of our Road to Restoration blog series, the "Regrounding Items" project is about making visuals and worn items fit better thematically into the world of RuneScape as we work towards something that is more immersive and consistent with the game. We're planning to preview some of this work on Thursday February 12th, with the associated update coming into effect during the week of the 23rd.

- **Aura Overhaul**

- Another blog in our Road to Restoration series, we'll be previewing our design direction for how to tackle Aura's this Friday, **February 13th**. Note that the update itself to overhaul Aura's is still some weeks away.

##### **Upcoming Maintenance**

Just a quick reminder that we plan to have a short maintenance tomorrow February 10th at 9am UTC which should last for appr

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1343400/view/537752181137212466]_