Home > Video Games > PC > RuneScape > Rune Headquarters and Other Help Sites
I used Rune Headquarters (RuneHQ) a lot back in the day as my main help site. I cannot remember when I first discovered it, but I was definitely using it by mid-2005, and continued to use it each time I started playing RuneScape again. It has been an incredible help with almost every aspect of the game, from its skill guides to dungeon maps to mini-game guides to quest walkthroughs to full clue scroll solutions to skill calculators to full monster, item, and NPC databases. (There was much more material on the site than I can discuss in a few paragraphs here.) It pretty much made the official game manual obsolete (though I still liked to read it on occasion). Sometimes, instead of playing the game, I would just browse RuneHQ and read some of the guides out of pure interest.
I knew, of course, that there were other help sites around, such as Rune Tips (Tip.It) (which I think was more popular than RuneHQ back then) and Sal's Realm of RuneScape. I would visit these other help sites irregularly, maybe if I was looking for a piece of information that I couldn't find on RuneHQ, but I preferred RuneHQ (if only because I found out about it before the others) and overwhelmingly used it rather than the other sites.
When Old School RuneScape (OSRS) launched in February 2013, I jumped right in and started playing, but when I went to RuneHQ again, I discovered that it focused on the main
RuneScape game, not OSRS; the other major help sites were like this as well. Instead of using the OSRS Wiki (like I imagine a lot of other players did), I instead turned to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has an archived version of RuneHQ from August 2007. I realize this may strike some people as strange and even extreme, but this is a nostalgia site, after all, so this decision of mine shouldn't surprise you.
The heyday of the help sites is over, and has been over for years now: when OSRS was released in February 2013, I could tell that the wikis were where most players turned to for help, and even a few years prior to that, the wikis had already become pretty big. But I will always prefer the old RuneHQ to any of the wikis—again, this is a 2000s nostalgia site. In recent years, after I stopped playing OSRS (after realizing it wouldn't stay the static nostalgia game it was meant to be) and started playing RuneScape private servers that seek to emulate the 2006/2007 era, I still use an Internet Archive version of the RuneHQ site from the proper time period as my main source of game help.