The majority of this guide is written by Username, mazunki, @ERRORMONSTER#8764 of the discord community with modernisation by @Zxv#0157 / Zxv975 / /u/Zxv975. If you have any questions, or if anything is wrong, please make sure to reach out to any of us. Feel free to edit the guide or add anything to it as needed.
HCCO stands for HardcoreCombat Only. This implies that you cannot use any non-Combat skills at any time, and must play on Hardcore. There is a secondary challenge, 12b, which means you may not buy any Bank slots, and are limited to the 12 provided to you by default. This guide is aimed more towards 12b players, but playing without this restriction just means you can spend less time on bank management.
Preface
Food is vital to a HCCO account, and your first food source (and one that you will be relying on for quite a while) is Plants. Starting out, you should fight Plants for the Potatoes they drop and to increase your combat levels.
Note about Attack vs Strength vs Defence: All three combat skills are very useful to level in their own ways. Attack increases your chance to hit and unlocks new weapons to use, Strength increases your maximum hit, and Defence increases your chance to not get hit (which saves you food). In general, they should all be leveled equally.
Defence should be the first combat skill that you level, as it greatly reduces the amount of damage that you will take from Plants (roughly by half). Attack should be second, Strength should be last. Since you have a low chance to hit, it’s more important to level Attack rather than Strength.
Weapons in this game have different attack speeds depending on their type. Daggers attack quickly, with an attack speed of 2.2 seconds, and Battleaxes attack slowly, with an attack speed of 3.1 seconds, for instance. Weapons that attack more slowly also deal more damage per hit and weapons that hit quickly usually do less damage per hit.
There are different styles in the game, depending on the weapon you’re wielding. Melee weapons, which will be our main focus initially, have Stab, Slash and Block. Each style gets a bonus to the accuracy rating depending on the specific weapon. Swords usually have a better stabbing accuracy, while scimitars are better at slashing, for instance.
The style you choose will also give you experience towards the combat skill in question: Stabbing gives Attack experience, Slashing gives Strength experience, while Blocking is used to train Defence. At the start, you’ll have to eat manually to ensure that you won’t die. Later on, you will unlock Auto Eat, so eating will be less of a worry.
Chapters
Chapter I: Gearing Up
To start, you should have: Nothing! At the end, you should have: 4 Steel Armour pieces
To start, you should have: Full Steel Armour, 20 / 20 / 20, Steel Scimitar At the end, you should have:Auto Eat - Tier I, 4-5 pieces of Mithril Armour, 40 / 40 / 40, Ice Sword, Adamant Dagger
To start, you should have:1 and 1 At the end, you should have:85 with Full (U) Ancient D-hide, Ancient Crossbow and Scaled Shield and 85 with Mystic Air Staff and Ancient Wizard Robes or Black Wizard Robes