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6th April 2025 - (IMPORTANT) Avoiding Confusion

We're going to go over some common misconceptions and clarify to best represent us, our friends, and the entire RS hobbyist community.

Lost City exists for the generations after us. It's just a cool bonus that we all get to enjoy it now, we would do this regardless if we had 0 players or 1000 players.
We're able to leave the world a culturally significant experience playable forever. This our moral obligation - the best thing we can do is leave things that outlast us.

1. Lost City is NOT RuneScape Archive (RS Archive). This assumption falsely legitimizes our efforts and de-legitimizes their efforts. Please do not confuse this, linking us together only threatens them.

2. I, Pazaz, did not attend 2025 RuneFest nor communicate with Jagex on any matters pertaining to our project here. None of our git contributors did either.
RS Archive did attend and operated a booth there.

3. This is my first hosted project, I've datamined RS and reverse engineered old applets for the last 5 years - my focus was mainly on understanding. I'm thankful my career path has prepared me to host this effectively with no major issues.

4. Update schedule: We are following history chronologically, but it takes time to research, test, and release.
Chronologically does not mean at the original update cadence. We cannot do this full time - depending on the breadth of content some updates may be quicker, some may be slower, but generally as a player you'll advance a month or two of RS history at a time when those updates are ready to experience.
Part of the process of being able to work on a revision is making sure all of the data is available, organized, and our server/client engine is capable of using it properly. It isn't a matter of only writing server scripts.

5. Missing data: Yes, old RS is lost media. The clients and their caches aren't complete even for the ones that get archived, as much as possible is reconstructed and restored but best case is typically only to 99%. You can count on one hand how many are verifiably 100%.

6. Encrypted data: After the game engine update on 2006-05-16 maps began to get encrypted as they were updated. This was an anti-bot measure at the time. Modified clients would have to visit every encrypted region to save those keys, and re-visit them when that region received an update.

* OSRS still features this encryption today -- RS3 removed it in 2013! And no, it doesn't really help much nowadays.

7. Recovering missing data: If it isn't archived already, I have to use file checksums found in the original caches to have a chance at recreating missing models or maps.
I'm able to decompress, edit, recompress, and compare the checksum to see if I have a match. So far more than a hundred missing files have been recovered this way. After May 2006, encrypted maps without keys are impossible to recover and will have to be "recreated" by interpolating changes between two points in time.

Have fun playing with our thousands of hours of research and effort :)
We do not represent current RS offerings: RuneScape is only available as RS3 and OSRS.

Please remember that we're doing this as hobbyists on hobbyist time, we aren't a company nor do we profit. If we could do this full time or work with Jagex in an official capacity, we would.

View our non-affiliation disclaimer here.
Recreated and preserved 2023 - 2025.