Old School RuneScape Adds Hardcore Worlds and a New Raid

Old School RuneScape got its turn on the RuneFest 2026 stage, and Jagex arrived with a long list. The main RuneScape game had already set out its own plans at the Saturday showcase. Now the older, nostalgia-driven version has a roadmap of its own, and it is a busy one.

There is a catch, though, and anyone who has spent time in OSRS will expect it. Most of what Jagex showed is not locked in. Old School RuneScape has long let its community vote on proposed content, and much of this year's lineup still has to pass those polls. Two pieces are dated and confirmed. Everything else is a pitch to the players.

Fractured Archive: A Raid Arrives First

The first new thing goes live on Tuesday, October 20th. Fractured Archive is a new raid, and it is aimed at experienced players. Jagex says you will need high-level gear and well-trained skills to take it on, but the full requirements have not been shared yet.

The setup is simple. Guthix keeps a collection, a group of thieves wants to raid it for their own ends, and your team has to defend it. Beyond that premise, the details are still under wraps.

Hardcore Worlds: One Life, Two Choices

On Wednesday, November 4th, Hardcore worlds go live. These are permanent servers that sit apart from the standard game. Characters on them get everything a normal account gets, with one big exception: they only have one life.

What happens after that death is the interesting part. A fallen Hardcore character can start again from nothing. The other option is to leave the Hardcore server for a standard world. If you take that route, you keep your progress, but not the items you dropped when you died. Losing gear still hurts. Losing your whole account does not have to.

The Wishlist: Bosses, Cities and Fairy Gangsters

From here on, it is all subject to the polls.

Dungeons of Gielinor would put five new bosses into dungeons players already know well. Most of them are still in development, but Jagex did show one group, the Gemstone Dragons.

Menaphos the Golden City is the biggest pitch. It would open a new city and push the long-running Kharidian storyline forward. The package includes a grandmaster quest, the ability to craft soul runes, a new skilling dungeon, new underground areas, and a new Sailing port with its own activities.

Fairytale III: Nexus of Power brings back the Fairy Godfather, who is exactly the kind of mobster fae the name suggests. It would add a repeatable boss and what Jagex calls "a new, slightly more reclined method of Runecraft training". That will be good news for anyone who has suffered through the skill.

Chosen Commander is a quest that sends players back to Dorgesh-Kaan, the city of the cave goblins. It would bring new skilling activities for Agility, Firemaking and Crafting.

Smaller items round out the list. Jagex wants to remaster the Smithing and Mining skills and plans to survey players on those ideas later. Several quality-of-life updates are planned for November. And there was a short, cryptic tease for a place called the Tower of Xophros, with almost nothing said about it.

Our Take

The two confirmed updates point in different directions, and that seems deliberate. Fractured Archive serves the endgame crowd, the players with maxed gear who are always after the next big challenge. Hardcore worlds feel aimed at people who want a fresh start with something real at stake. That second group may matter more. A separate one-life server gives returning players a reason to come back, and the option to move to a standard world takes away some of the fear of losing everything to one bad fight.

The poll system is the wildcard. OSRS players have turned down ideas before, and Menaphos in particular is a large addition to a game whose audience cares a lot about its old feel. Watch how the Smithing and Mining remasters go over, too. Reworking classic skills is the kind of change that tends to split a community like this one.

It is also worth noticing what this says about Jagex overall. The company now runs Old School, modern RuneScape and a fourth RuneScape MMORPG in Unreal, and its oldest branch still looks like one of its most ambitious. Whether the vote supports that ambition is the question for the coming months.