I heard through the grapevine some of you thought this is a nothing burger update, or the last update of 2025! Wowza. To me neither of those statements are true.
I understand some players want to see content relevant to them ASAP, a big example for the combat lovers being Kalphite Queen.
Jagex had a full paid team assigned to making updates constantly so it felt like there was always something new. Typically it was one developer per feature back then.
These updates took them months to do behind the scenes! We can tell because we’re able to see remnants of things added early. They had a sizable team able to design and create content full-time constantly. To make their players happy they had a backlog and thousands of man hours a week being thrown at their game.
We are a handful of hobbyists who do what we can as much as we can 
The only easily found sources are from a game that’s overwriting its history (OSRS), giving us irrelevant noise to filter if it’s been changed. We do a lot of research: watching countless videos, asking players / our own anecdotes, reading forum posts, official news posts, you name it we dig through it. Before we can write and commit something we need to understand it.
We don’t have to create the art which saves a lot of time compared to the original team, but reverse engineering is time consuming. Writing code with bugs in mind requires writing it in specific ways to get their output. Think of it like a big Sudoku puzzle and we sometimes we have to redo a square to fit.
In my roadmap you can hover over the cache integrity of each update to get a breakdown — maps are missing from the September 2004 version meaning I have to recreate them (if possible) or move onto the next version where we aren’t missing as much data. Or hope it magically gets archived before I get to it. Missing data is a huge blocker for preservation, if you don’t care about that you could always mix map versions but it wouldn’t be true to history. Some tile, some flag, some object would be wrong. We do care, because this is a preservation project first and foremost.
Now, the reason I don’t give estimates until it’s nearly packaged and ready to go is because this is all done on volunteered time. It doesn’t mean it has to take “ages” (it’s been quite fast imo!). People are welcome to help if they want it faster. Nothing is gatekept and we’re happy to teach you RuneScript. Researching is more time consuming than actually writing the code at times though.
There’s no reason September 2004 has to be a 2026 update. Other than this whole effort is carried by a few people’s free time
We aren’t working toward an “ideal version,” remember the difference: we’re trying to save everything we can while we can.
I don’t care about a “penultimate” version any more than the current ones we’ve finished. It’s all part of the bigger picture. Digital archeology.
The live server you play on is a nice to have but what matters is the code. It’ll outlast all of us, so we have to do it right.
Have any thoughts, questions, concerns? Please allow me to answer
wooooo