OLD SCHOOL RUNESCAPE. A NEW ADVENTURE.
RuneHunter
Your next adventure
is hiding in plain sight.
Just around the corner.
A very small Barrows brother
Wait. Is that Dharok?
All of the axe. Less of the height.
He looks like he could use a friend.
Website demo · separate from your RuneLite collection
The scene still is ready. You can try the catch below.
01 / The loop
Your normal grind is the RuneHunter grind.
Nothing here asks you to stop playing the game. Orbs come out of the kills you were already doing, and the creatures show up in the places you were already standing.
Orbs drop from kills
Four tiers, from the basic unpowered orb to the near guaranteed eldritch orb. Rates scale with combat level, so bossing pays better, but a chicken killing ironman still progresses.
The species lure
Killing a real NPC raises the local spawn chance of its RuneHunter counterpart. On an abyssal demon task? Mini abyssal demons start showing up around you.
Hunts roll with your world
Spawns use your world, region and a 30 minute window. Different worlds roll differently, and your kills can attract personal encounters. No RuneHunter server needed.
Battles are prayer flicking
Real time, on the tick. A warning gives you time to flick the matching overhead. Choose Relaxed, Standard or Fast to set the pace. Rares smite your prayer off. Epics hit through it.
Companions
Set any creature you have caught to follow you around, using its own walk animation. A mini TzTok-Jad trailing you through Varrock is the entire pitch.
Trade and duel your friends
Join the same RuneLite party, then trade creatures with a two screen OSRS style flow, or duel their companion in real time prayer combat.
02 / The roster
87 creatures, five tiers, and shinies.
Rarer means harder to find and harder to catch. Each of the 87 public creatures has a shiny variant at roughly one in five hundred and twelve, and every model is a real OSRS NPC loaded from your own game cache and shrunk down.
There are a handful of creatures that never appear in your dex until you have caught one. No hints, no silhouette, no counter that tells you how many are left to find.
Roughly one in three hundred and fifty spawn windows. Nobody has posted all of them yet.
Metamorphic dust detected. You are hunting shiny.
03 / Battles
It flicks like the real thing.
Catching is only half of it. Wild creatures pick fights, and the fight is real time prayer combat on the game tick. The attack telegraphs before it lands, and you get that long to be on the right overhead. Try the interactive website demo below. Flick the matching overhead.
Three paces
Relaxed is the default and gives you seven ticks of warning, because flicking is a skill and not everybody has it yet. Standard tightens it. Fast is the old speed, and it is properly hard.
What the tiers do
Commons swing slow and telegraph honestly. Rares smite your prayer off mid fight. Epics hit straight through protection, so the answer is never one button.
Your collection stays yours
A defeated companion needs three minutes to recover. You keep your collection. Friendly duels record a win or a loss without fainting your companion.
04 / Community
This gets better when people tell me what is wrong with it.
RuneHunter is one person's project. Catch rates, orb drops, battle pacing and shiny odds are all tunable, and none of it is settled.
Report a bug
Something spawned inside a wall, a battle desynced, a model looks wrong. Post it with your RuneLite version and I will chase it.
Request a creature
87 is not the ceiling. If there is an NPC you want shrunk down and placed in the world, say so. Requests genuinely drive the roster.
Shape the balance
Catch rates, orb drops, battle pacing, shiny odds. All of it is tunable, and none of it is settled. Loud opinions welcome.
Show off catches
Shinies, full dex runs, first to catch races, and the secret creatures nobody has found yet. Screenshots encouraged.
No RuneHunter account or telemetry. If you join a RuneLite Party, the plugin shares party presence and trade or duel state with that party. It never talks to Discord. Prefer not to use Discord? GitHub issues work just as well.
05 / Questions
The ones that actually get asked.
Will this get me banned?
RuneHunter is built to sit inside Jagex's third party client rules: no gameplay advantage, no automation, no information the game does not already give you. The creatures it renders are not real game entities. It is a cosmetic collection layer that adds things and removes nothing. That is why it is headed for the official RuneLite Plugin Hub, where maintainers review submissions for exactly this.
Being straight with you: no plugin author can promise you will not be banned, and anyone who does is lying. Jagex sets the rules and can change them. What I can tell you is exactly what the plugin does, and the source is public, so you can check rather than trust me.
Does it send my data anywhere?
Your collection lives in a file on your own computer. There is no account, no login, and no RuneHunter server. None exists.
When you join a RuneLite Party, RuneHunter uses RuneLite's built in Party service. It periodically shares your OSRS display name, current companion and companion level with party members. Trade and duel messages also carry creature XP and gear plus combat state such as hitpoints, prayer and special attacks. Those messages are relayed to the party and filtered for the intended player locally. If you never join a party, RuneHunter itself makes no network requests.
Does it cost anything? Will it ever?
No, and no. It is free and open source, there is nothing to buy, and orbs only come from playing. A catch rate game with real money attached would be a gambling product, and that is not what this is.
Does it work on ironman and HCIM?
Yes. Collections are stored per account on your own machine, and nothing RuneHunter does touches your actual account state: no XP, no bank, no inventory.
Who made this, and why?
One OSRS player. Not a studio, not a company. It started as "what if a tiny Dharok was hiding behind Lumbridge castle" and turned into 87 creatures, prayer flick battles, and a trophy room.
The reason is simple: OSRS is better with more to do in it. Not more efficient, more to do. There are enormous parts of Gielinor nobody visits because there is no reason to go. RuneHunter puts a reason on those tiles. And the community keeps proving it wants this: the OSRS TCG plugin went viral within days of hitting the Hub on nothing but a booster pack loop.
Is this a Pokémon ripoff?
It is obviously Pokémon inspired and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But every creature is a real OSRS NPC model loaded from your own game cache and shrunk down. No borrowed art, no borrowed names, no borrowed code. You throw orbs, and that is where the resemblance stops.
Can I stream it, make videos, monetize that content?
Yes, unconditionally. No permission needed, no revenue share, no attribution required. A link is appreciated but not expected. Streamers and YouTubers make OSRS content a dozen different ways and every one of those formats had to be invented by somebody. Shiny hunts, dex races, first to catch Jad: they are yours. If you build something interesting, tell me and I will signal boost it.
Can I lose my collection?
If you wipe your RuneLite config directory, yes. Back it up if you care. An export button is on the list.
06 / Install
Not on the Plugin Hub yet.
Here is exactly where things stand, with nothing rounded up.
Core game at v0.8.0
87 roster entries, battles, companions, trading, duels and the Trophy Room are implemented.
Hardening and playtesting
Stripping developer tooling, finishing the compliance pass, and running the still open model, two client, persistence and regression checks.
Submit to the Plugin Hub
One pull request against the plugin hub repository, containing one file: a repository URL and a commit hash.
Maintainer review
RuneLite provides no guaranteed review timeline. A new plugin stays unavailable until its submission is reviewed and merged.
Live
Once it is merged, installing takes about fifteen seconds: RuneLite, wrench icon, Plugin Hub, search RuneHunter, Install.
Until then the source is public and you can build it yourself from the repository. Release announcements go out in the Discord first.
07 / Developers
An API is planned.
A local-only integration API has been designed, but it does not ship in v0.8.0. The draft below shows the intended direction, not a working release surface.
public class ShinyAlerts extends Plugin implements RuneHunterApi.Listener { @Override public void onCreatureSpawned(RuneHunterApi.CreatureSpawned e) { if (e.shiny) alert(e.name + " at " + e.worldX + "," + e.worldY); } }
Draft event surface
The proposal covers custom highlights, sound packs, TTS shiny alerts, OBS overlays, Discord webhooks and flick accuracy trackers.
The repository contains a draft specification. No broadcaster, state files or copy-paste consumer stub ship yet.