Using the resources you bring back from the Eastern Lands, you’ll be able to build and upgrade structures within your port. As well as making your port truly distinct, these offer benefits when managing your captains and crews. If you want to attract potential crew members with better-than-average Seafaring stats, for example, adorn your port’s bar with nautical regalia to get the saltiest sea dogs in Gielinor on board.
Your port will grow to be a living town that’s well and truly yours. The content is fully voice-acted throughout, the decor and buildings are of your choosing, and your captains (whose appearance can also be customised) and adventurers can be found at the town bar for a chat.
Random events will occur while you’re away, and you will determine their outcome by taking the role of a port inhabitant in flashback. You’ll help the Black Marketeer ward off some dangerous debtors, and get the Barmaid through a particularly rough shift, in exchange for items conferring helpful effects, such as temporary stat bonuses for your ships.
Scrolls
Forgotten scrolls, pieced together over the course of your voyages, will unlock the permanent ability for your character to make some of the best food and gear in the game.
Melee fighters will find themselves honour-bound to wear the lordly tetsu armour; eagle-eyed rangers will love the Death Lotus gear; and the elite mage will settle for nothing less than the sea singer’s robes. These come in both tradeable and non-tradeable versions. The non-tradeable versions have even better stats than the tradeable ones, making them not only the best armour in game, but true status symbols for RuneScape’s most dedicated players.
High-level fletchers can also make accessories known as scrimshaws, which fit into a new equipment slot called the pocket. These impart a range of benefits, many of which are geared towards increasing level gain during that steep curve towards level 99.
Finally, RuneScape’s best food – rocktail soup – can also be made in your port’s workshop, if you happen upon the recipe.
Meg
Meg – a wannabe adventurer – can be found in the port, regardless of whether you have the levels to take over its management. Even those of you who do not have the levels to own a port will find that you can give Meg adventuring pointers, offering a taster of the player-owned port voyages. Even once you’ve taken control of your port, Meg will still hang around looking for advice – she needs all the help she can get!
Once a week, she’ll ask you a set of questions about adventuring scenarios and then head off to tackle dangerous dungeons and ferocious monsters. Depending on the quality of your advice, she’ll come back bright-eyed and beaming with a healthy cut of her profits for you, or bruised, abashed and with more meagre pickings to offer.
There’s months of amazing content and truly epic rewards here for high-level players, so what’re you waiting for? The East beckons!
