Perhaps no place on Gielinor has a more storied history than Tutorial Island. Initially added to RuneScape in 2002, it was removed as the game's tutorial in July 2008 and replaced with Learning the Ropes, but the location itself remained in the game.
Learning the Ropes was short-lived, and Tutorial Island returned later in September 2008. It was then removed again in September 2009, when Unstable Foundations became the new tutorial. Again, the location itself remained, but only until November 2012, when it was wiped off the map due to the Wizards' Tower revamp.
By that point, the game was already onto yet another new tutorial. Introductory tasks replaced Unstable Foundations in May 2011, and Troll Warzone replaced the tasks in January 2012.
From there, Tutorial Island took two very different paths.
In February 2013, Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was released, after 449,351 dedicated members of one of the top MMORPG communities on the planet voted to bring back an archived 2007 version of the game, largely due to displeasure with the Evolution of Combat update from November 2012.
Because the vote tally fell shy of 500,000, Tutorial Island – and all of OSRS – remained pay-to-play only. That is, until February 2015, when what would have been the free-to-play version of the game back in 2007 was made free for everybody.
Again, although the vote tally was just over 50,000 away from the original 500,000 goal, it became clear that the game would receive an additional dedicated development team, rather than just a small team.
And Jagex have certainly done a remarkable job since then, adding an abundance new and exciting content to the game while never stripping it from its true 2007 Old School feel.
But getting back to the beloved Tutorial Island, its comeback was not restricted to OSRS. In RuneScape itself, now known as RuneScape 3, its mysterious removal was solved in December 2015, when the Beneath Cursed Tides quest came out and revealed that the island had sunk to the bottom of the sea.
The nostalgic throwback-style quest did not end the changes to the beloved island's storied history, as in May 2018, the above-water Tutorial Island was reinstated, albeit in a revamped modern form, as the game's official tutorial, replacing the Ashdale Tutorial that had been in place since May 2013 as Troll Warzone's replacement.
It remains available to this day, though the Davendale Tutorial was added in February 2021, primarily for mobile players.
On the OSRS side, the only changes to Tutorial Island have been minor, such as the addition of information about in-game polls, the renaming of the RuneScape Guide to the Gielinor Guide, the renaming of the Financial Advisor to the Account Guide, and the addition of an Ironman-only section, among other things. The overall feel of the island is much like it was back in 2007.
But in October 2025, Tutorial Island quietly received arguably its most significant fundamental change yet.
More than 12 years after the release of OSRS, Tutorial Island is now officially classified as a quest. The change was made on October 22, 2025.
In addition to its inclusion in the Quest Journal as a trackable quest, the completion of the tutorial now awards one quest point. The current max quest point tally in the game is 332 across 178 quests.
The quest rewards are the rewards that were already given even before the reclassification, including a bronze axe, a bronze pickaxe, a tinderbox, a small fishing net, shrimps, a bronze dagger, a bronze sword, a wooden shield, a shortbow, a bucket, a pot, a loaf of bread, 25 coins, 25 bronze arrows, 25 air runes, 15 mind runes, six water runes, four earth runes, and two body runes.
And of course, we can't forget the Lumbridge Home Teleport spell, which requires no runes to cast but can only be used once every 30 minutes. The mainland unlock also guarantees that Tutorial Island is the first quest officially completed by all new players.
Following the October reclassification, Tutorial Island is listed as the 174th of 178 quests currently in the game, slotted in between the three quests released in July 2025 as a part of the Varlamore: The Final Dawn update and the four quests released in November 2025 as a part of the addition of Old School's first new skill, Sailing, to the game.
But if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, Tutorial Island would technically be the 37th of 178 quests in the game's history, since it was first added back on September 24, 2002.
The Waterfall Quest was released that day as well and is officially classified as the 37th. Also released that day was the King Black Dragon, which held the record for the game's strongest monster for nearly two full years afterward.
Using its initial release date, Tutorial Island would be the 18th of 23 free-to-play quests, instead of the 23rd, as it would be slotted between Dragon Slayer I (September 23, 2001) and Rune Mysteries (March 29, 2004).