Runescape Autominer

A wide variety of auto-miners have been used with Runscape over the years. But what exactly is an autominer and why would anyone want one?

An Autominer is a piece of software that logs into your Runescape account and automatically mines Essence without you needing to do anything. This means you could let the "bot" run all night and build up essence for your character, without you doing a thing! Sounds great, right?

Well, just like most things that sound too good to be true, this is pretty much the same for auto miners. Several years ago, auto miners worked well and became rather popular, perhaps "too" popular. Many websites offered these autominers and many users began to download and use them.

And this became a problem. Why? Because these auto miners where a form of cheating, which shifts resources to players who are not honestly earning their power. This makes the game less fun for others to play.

So, to fight this cheating, the maker of Runescape began to implement ways to detect if a player was using one of these cheats. This is typically done by checking how the player is playing, and looking for things that only a human would do. Since humans are not machines, they tend to be more "random" or variable in their actions, whereas the actions performed by an autominer tend to be very precise and "robot like". Once these anti-cheats were put in place, a user who was detected running an autominer would often have their account deleted. For a while, auto miner software improved to make them look more "human" and not as easy to detect, but eventually anti-bot software became smarter and could detect these bots as well.

Today, autominers typically do not work very well and are very risky to use on your account. Even though there are many websites still offering "runescape autominer" software downloads (there are still over 3.5 million google matches for "runescape autominer"), you have to be very careful with these applications. Some of them will actually install a virus or trojan on your computer if you run them.

The lesson to be learned: These autominer programs were always a bad idea because they were effectively cheating, but today they are likely far too risky to try. You can easily get your account cancelled, or even wind up with a virus running on your computer. If you enjoy Runescape, play it for fun and stop looking for ways to cheat!