What a lovely TL;DW. Thanks a lot Rubic!

When we start discussing Archaeology in greater detail we'll cover this.

Those are classified as varanusaurs, which were mentioned, but the word might be new and the connection not made.

This.

The intention is that it should be a nice easy entryway to the other ones, rather than a destination in itself.

It's niche definitely, but there's a lot of potential there with how it can be used. Sailfish, for example, is very close healing, but that's a definite 4 slots in the inventory taken up. Consider, for example, the use of a primal feast and 3 sailfish. Whereas before those inventory slots were worth 9,600 in total healing, with 3 sailfish and one primal feast, they're now worth 17,200. That's an additional 7,600 (which would require another 4 inventory slots of sailfish to achieve).

For some players this will allow them to engage with PvM encounters that they physically couldn't do before. Albeit with a hefty upfront effort before hand.

It shouldn't be thought of as "the new food" that is the exclusive healing object used, but it should be considered as part of a wider suite of PvM gear.

Venomous, Ripper and Feral dinosaurs are all "varanusaurs". Brutish dinosaurs are their own category and are there.

For the new seeds, exclusive to the ranch at this point in time.

Will the Harvest Potion only be obtainable with beans or can we make them with Herblore?

You can make them with herblore. We wanted to give an option of purchasing them for beans if you are a farmer. The shop bought one is only a single dose I believe, the ones you create are the normal dosage.

Can some of the now low value seeds like palm, dwarf weed, calquat, and magic seeds be partial replaced by the new farming seeds from our bosses drop tables?

In future maybe. But we've not done a full drop table rebalance as part of this project.

Will the Remote Farming machine only allow use you check growth stages of our patches and cure diseases like the spell, or can we also remotely harvest and plant seeds with it?

It works like the spell, but now you can cast it for free and without needing to be on the lunar spellbook. You do need to have unlocked the spell to build the device.

Can the Brassica Primer effect be tradeable so 200m farmers can sell them?

It's untradeable I believe. But you get other rewards from the contract buyers as well, so you can safely just destroy them when you get them.

And lastly, can bombs be used in PvP and can they skull you?

No, bombs do not work in PvP.

So it's worth remembering that OSRS and RS are two fairly different games right now. I know they share a lot of similarity and are descended from the same place, but there's been over a decade of difference between the two now and they're quite different.

One of the big differences is in terms of memory space and limits on certain memory intensive systems. As it stood with POF we pushed some of the game to its limits and we've really pushed it up against the wall with this update (don't panic, it's all stable and good, it's just a reality of stuff we're dealing with) and seed storage would be an additional demand on this limit.

OSRS isn't there yet with it's codebase, because it simply hasn't had that decade to build up those objects, locations, npcs and inventories.

Now, there were cheats that would let us build this storage bag, but they introduced dangerous issues and a high chance of bugs which might result in the loss of stored seeds. All while still only really skirting the technical issue. We decided it probably wasn't a good idea for us to take that route.

It's easy to rag on the RuneScape codebase, but you have to remember just how much stuff there is in RuneScape. Like there's LOADS of content and it all feeds in to other things. Which means there becomes problems when you try and interact with a lot of that. For the seed storage it basically boiled down to do we want this, or do we want to give players content at every level of the 120s? Every piece of content we add is at the expense of something that "could have been", which is just a reality of developing anything. When we say "expensive" we mean in terms of costs to you and the content you get, not in terms of money we spend on it.

Now the good news is we've got some time to focus on post-release stuff and part of the reason for telling you all about this content now is so we can get a headstart on major concerns. I've flagged seed storage as one of the big points of feedback and we'll look into it again. I can't promise we'll do it, the technical issues still remain, but it's not forgotten.

I've mentioned this above, but I feel it important to clarify what we mean when we say something is too expensive.

What we're not saying: "It costs a lot of money"

What we are saying is: "Creating this means removing other, arguably more impactful, content from the players"

I.e when we say "expensive" we mean in terms of what it will cost the player experience not what it will cost our wallets. The reality of developing anything is that when you do one thing it's at the expense of something else that could have been. We have to choose between which things we create and we always aim to give players the best, most impactful experiences with the content we release.

We're certainly interested to see how guild reputation goes down as a system. This farming guild is a little different to most guilds (which are in reality largely just a hub for that skill) and we want to see if this is an avenue worth exploring more in future. Certainly I would love to create more impressive guilds that use reputation to add more content and functionality as you improve.

I mean, yeah, of course we did and vice versa. I realise there's a community rivalry between the games, but in the office we're cheering each other on and we often get together to talk over what worked where and whether it's a good thing to add to the other game. This just gets players more good content and that's the goal of all content developers.

Wonder if the Frogs and Jadinkos have farming perks.

They do! I won't say what, but they do have perks.

I think the Dino combat perks should be a bit more spread out between abilities so they aren't as niche, otherwise it massively encourages a very specific playstyle or is useless most of the time.

The design intention behind farming animal perks has always been to focus on the niche. Something that boosts all ultimates is certainly wonderfully powerful, but it means why would you ever keep any other animals? Making it niche means making it tailoured to your playstyle.

Choice is gameplay after all.

So, don'tpanic about this just yet. When I say "will take into account" I don't necessarily mean "you must absolutely have this or you will die".

What I mean is, we can consider it for higher difficulty moments as a possible solution and we can take it into account for the overall balancing of an encounter. We may choose to ignore it for that balancing, but we may choose to make certain encounters substantially harder without it.

We may decide at some point to make something super difficult to face that will require ALL of the best stuff and still be a challenge. But that doesn't mean that all content will be like that.

Basically it's one of the tools in our arsenal of balancing, but it's just one among many.

I have no current plans to. ;)

You should not need to plant all 4 for the achievement no.

Maybe, but the current issue is still there even in that format. I've flagged it again for consideration for post-release but it's something that will need further investigation I'm afraid.

Ehhh this is simplifying things a bit and only really thinking of things as they are now, whereas we're looking at the game as a constantly evolving and improving thing. So sure, in the short term more people will be able to engage with the top tier content, but in the longer term we'll be bringing in more top tier content (not giving any sort of deadline before anyone asks) which will push the challenge higher still.

Generally people don't want to be doing the same thing the same way forever, it's best to think of changes like this as changing up the gameplay, opening up the possibilities and preparing the groundwork for future content that we could create.

No bait does not count. But beetle bits and flies do.

No it does not overheal.

It's hard to do for ironmen, sure, but it's absolutely possible to manage it yourselves. There are multiple options for the farm of ways to diminish involvement, if that's your thing, or you can focus on specific things at a time.

Ironman mode is, as requested by the players, a difficult mode to do. It's about choosing your battles and planning your game carefully and it's about finding the best ways to deal with difficult situations. Economy and trade is a huge part of RuneScape and cutting yourself off from that is going to make life tough, that's the nature of the beast.

We could put special ironmen shortcuts in, but that would devalue the challenge of ironman mode and I imagine a lot of the ironman community would be unhappy with that.

In short, it's tough, but it's doable.

As promised we'd come back and elaborate on how the HiScores would function when Farming and Herblore would go from a 99 to a 120.

If everything goes the way it should be, those who already have 200mil XP (or have more than 13,034,431 XP) in farming or Herblore should not lose their place on the HiScores tables.

We should have something in place to stop players from sniping the first place (we'd believe)

I've raised both of these options, but they do still share many of the same limitations that prevented the seed storage in the first place. We'll look into it. Definitely won't happen for launch (as that's Monday) but it's a reward/QoL space that we'll investigate heavily in for the future.

This is a nice idea, but from the bank would require us to rewrite how the banking code works to account for this and that way madness lies. It's a possible reward space for future consideration, but it's definitely not something we could get anywhere near launch I'm afraid.

It's something to consider. I doubt it can be a thing that comes from the bank, but there might be alternatives.

Alternatively, there might be animal perks that could help you out there... ;)