Something that has always been a bit tedious about RuneScape is looting.

Because of how RuneScape works off Java and game ticks, there is a delay after all your commands, and all these tiny delays threaded in between picking up items can really add up.

Jagex decided to address this problem by creating a new improved looting system, where you can pick up multiple items at the same time. It comes with a lot of different settings to customize your one-click pick-up.

Unfortunately, there seems to be two critical flaws in features in the new system.

The first is that the pick-up range is tiny, at three units. This basically means that you only get fast looting for monsters you kill from pretty much the same spot. Otherwise, the one-click function is only useful for picking up all the drops from one monster.

But, even in that situation, it’s not necessarily always effective. The one-click button only appears after you try and pick something up, so if a monster were to drop two items, you would need to click twice, which is the same number of clicks prior to improved looting. To make things worse, formerly, you could just spam click the pile of loot and get everything, but now you need to click on a piece of loot, move your mouse, and click the pick-up button.

This can easily be improved by just increasing the range of the pick-up. In my opinion, five is a bare minimum to even consider more than two monsters’ worth of drops to realistically be included in in the improved looting window. Simply increasing the range to five instead of three increases the surface area covered by over double.

The second problem is the fact that one seemingly very obvious setting was not included – stackable items. There are settings for gold value and different categories of items, but usually, if something is stackable, I would like to loot it, simply because it takes up only one space in my inventory, and picking them up little by little can eventually add up.

Unfortunately, the only way it will pick up stackable items with your custom looting settings is if that stackable item is already included as a part of a different setting (for example, stackable crafting items, or stackable items worth over 50,000 gold each). There is no setting to pick up an item simply because it is stackable.

Overall, I feel as if the intention for releasing this update is good, but it still needed a bit more work in terms of features. It seems like Jagex wanted to make looting less tedious, and encourage people to pick stuff up off the ground, but rather than releasing a satisfying change to the looting system, it feels like they only gave the players a small tool.