Archery

A second way to fight. Hold a bow, load arrows, and every hit trains Archery.

The Archery skill page — every level, every item and the xp, in tables.

On this page: Getting started · How it works · Going further · Tips

Bom's Prize Counter sells a rough shortbow, a rough quiver and bone arrows, all Archery 1.
Put the bow in your weapon hand and the quiver in your offhand (it takes the shield's place), then click the arrows in your bag to load them. Arrows stack to 1,000 in the bag.
You shoot from where you stand. A shortbow reaches 4 tiles, a longbow 6. Click something inside that range and you never move; click something farther away and you walk only to the edge of your reach.

While you hold a bow, every roll uses your Archery level instead of Combat: accuracy, max hit and defence. Every hit pays Archery the xp Combat would have gotten. Hitpoints trains alongside it at a third of melee's rate, since you're not the one getting hit. Your combat level takes the higher of the two.
One arrow per shot, hit or miss, and only from the quiver. Arrows in your bag don't fire: load them into the quiver first. When the quiver is empty, the bow stops.
The arrow is the damage. Every arrow adds half its strength to what lands, from +10 for bone to +180 for singularity; the bow sets the pace and the reach. Each arrow has its own Archery level.
Big targets are hard to miss. Arrows do a fifth more to large monsters and bosses.
Stand and shoot. With a loaded quiver, when your target dies you aim at the next one of the same kind in reach without a click. The fight's idle timer is three minutes, the same as a sword's.
Some things only an arrow can reach. Thunder Geese sit over the tear in the Thunderhead's floor, on water nobody can walk to. A sword is told so; a bow just shoots.
In the Wilderness, first blood goes to the bow. An archer gets free shots while a sword closes four to six tiles, and shoots back from range once it arrives, at Archery's defence.

Short or long is a choice of how you fight. A shortbow fires every 1.8 seconds; a longbow every 2.8, two tiles farther, with heavier shots that add up to the same damage per second as the shortbow of its wood.
Gem-tipped arrows (Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, Opal) sit half a step above the arrow they were made from. Rimefang, the best arrow, takes one frost shard for every 50.
A better quiver saves arrows: 3% of shots use nothing from a willow one, rising 3% a tier to 27% from a cycad one, on top of the Arrow retriever and anything else that saves them (half your shots at most).
The Ranger's cape: at Archery 99, Wren the Ranger, in Cloudreach sells it for 99,000 tickets. Your bow reaches a tile further, and 20% of arrows come back.