Kaitnieks - The History of RuneScape Cheating

 
 
 
Feb 17, 2010
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This thread is for anyone interested in the early history of RuneScape cheating.

Version 5 of Evil Cowgods Black Book of RuneScape cheating https://web.archive.org/web/20050409001042/http://www.hot.ee/filestore2/BOOK5.CHM
Early downloads of SCAR (still working!) (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040607065103/http://www.poonscape.com/downloads.htm
Kaitnieks site: https://web.archive.org/web/20040701000000*/http://kaitnieks.com/
Snapshot of RsCheatNet (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040612043523/http://rscheatnet.com/
Later versions of SCAR https://web.archive.org/web/20061201051327/http://www.dylock.net/scar/
Old SCAR scripts (titles and sizes only) (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20041023083659/http://dump.scriptdump.net/dump.php?dir=/SCAR/RS2
Kaitnieks forums: https://web.archive.org/web/20040801000000*/http://kaitnieks.com/scr/
Hundreds of working threads: https://web.archive.org/web/20050816100707/http://www.kaitnieks.com/scr/archive/index.php/f-7.html
Early thread by Saev: https://web.archive.org/web/20050430033326/http://www.kaitnieks.com/scr/showthread.php?t=1003

Of particular notice is the prominence of Borland Delphi in the early community (a possible explanation as to why it was chosen to write Datmaker)

Please use the wayback machine to research anything of interest.

For example below is a history of early RS cheating written by Evil Cowgod and later posted on the Kaitnieks website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040805162030/http://www.kaitnieks.com/index/rscnhistory/

Spoiler for evil cowgod story:

About this article

It was written by Evil Cowgod, the same one who started all this together with some other people. You might remember him for his Visual Basic cheats such as coin collector and others and of course the most significant of his works - The Little Black Book of RuneScape Cheating.

A Brief Glimpse at our Past - by Cow

Hello, I'm Evil Cowgod, now at the ripe old age of four. Here is a mercilessly brief, and undetailed run down on the RS cheating community I grew up with. Nothing more than a list of some key events which shaped this monster. Unfortunately there's no way I can really capture what its been like, but if you stay with us, you will experience it in from your own unique perspective. Well enough of that here's the run down.

This story starts at the beginning of the year 2001. Apart from the rare bug abuse the only real cheating was going on at a small, spammed out, crappy forum named RBcheats. Here a large group of clueless but closely nit group of people made countless posts mainly concerned with cheating. There were no real admins or moderators, and the forum wasn't even meant for poonscape. Fortunately there was one person amongst us, Nick Sherlock, who had the technical know how to make something happen. He created the generically named "Autominer", which can still be seen around the place today. This was what set this forum apart from the countless other ones. Although at the time we had no idea of the amazing path to glory our small community would take.

The community eventually moved to a new forum I made. It was a slow add infested free forum, but at least it was ours. RBcheats eventually died, leaving my crappy forum as our main location. It was modestly named Evilcowgod Technologies, although there was nothing really technological about it.

While Nick Sherlock's Autominer teetered on the brink of destruction, several much less competent programmers started to make cheats. They were mostly useless and crappy, although they were at least honest attempts, and were a lot of fun. (we still didn't have very high standards)

While all this was going on, a moderately sized thread was started by an unknown user called 'Kaitnieks'. It was something about his new cheat he was making, which wasn't that unusual. However a couple of replies later it became obvious this was no ordinary thread. People started using capital letters (and other methods of expressing wow online) ranting about how amazing the beta release was. AutoRune was born, launching us into a level of RS cheating never seen before. Never before had such power been placed into he hands of ordinary poonscapers, never before had our dreams of fantastic cheats become real.

Cheating had crawled out of the river, and began growing its wings, its arms and spreading into a rich variety of forms, although for now we had just two cheats in our folder. The battered but venerable Autominer, and the young new AutoRune. The community was tied together by writing scripts for this cheat, and then posting them into a password protected board on the crappy free forum.

fagex weren't impressed. They updated RS hoping to end AutoRune, but it only started the never ending cycle of AR coming and going, hopes being raised, and dashed. Each time everyone would declare its all over and its the end, and each time we would be proved wrong. We started to toughen up and realize that cheating never dies, it merely goes to sleep (which much later became a popular saying). We also learnt that cheating does not have pleasant dreams - keylogging, scamming, petty rebellions against nothing in particular. Every time we woke we were just a bit more tired, until eventually, we fell into a deep sleep with no dreams and almost no hope.

One day, I felt it was time for cheating to rise from its sleep. The free forum's bulk emailing feature roared to life, summoning back our heroes, to gather at a slightly improved add free forum hosted on my going bankrupt webhost. By this age more modesty and wisdom had set in, and so the community was renamed Bovine Labs. (Its been a while since I last typed that name. It felt good)

Realizing we could do better than this forum, using donation money, Bovine Labs was moved to a webhost that appeared to be hosting some fairly dodgy websites. Here we set up a much more powerful forum, run with the help of Frostie (went his own direction over a money related issue) and Kamu. All our cheats were dead but chattered on the new forum anyway.

It wasn't long before Kaitnieks once again lifted AutoRune, and cheating burned as brightly as before. Despite the new powerful forum, the greater collection of scripts, and the kick ass webhost, we had lost something. It just wasn't the same. Maybe it was because we no longer saw cheating as unbelievable, but it cant only be just that. Its hard to pinpoint exactly, maybe its just human nature to embrace the past and future but dislike the present. Meh, oh well.

Bovine Labs was roaring forward and reaching new levels of cheating. Even Vee, the past original creator of RuneBot, brought his creation back to life. Although fagex quickly broke it and Vee stopped working on it, RuneBot never stayed down for so long again. Thanks to the many dedicated cheaters someone always bothers to fix that dam thing. Some even made their own modified RS clients. For instance, Subanark's IT.

Kaitnieks created another great cheat, which he unfairly named SCAR (Shiite Compared to AutoRune!). The exact functioning of this cheat is outside the scope of this brief story, however one thing I will say is that SCAR proved itself to be an extremely powerful and hard to kill cheat that changed the face of RS cheating.

fagex make small modifications to RS in their never successful attempts to stop us however from time to time they do really dumbfounding crazy things. Towards the end of Bovine Lab's life, one of these things happened. We sat there, staring at our screens in disbelief at the screen asking us to type in some random word. Fuck! The cheating giant grinded to a stop, countless ideas were posted on the forums, all of which were dropped. Eventually the best idea (by Kaitnieks and Nick Sherlock), was a system much like the present days Sleep Walker. There was one problem. No one was willing to make it.

Bovine Labs soon took another kidney punch. fagex had been desperately trying to have the website taken down. They bugged its awesome webhost so much that he eventually answered one of their phone calls by screaming in a nonsense language and hanging up. The people who provided the DSN services emailed to tell me that I had to correct my phoney contact/address details which fagex wanted (fagex has never contacted me, just those providing services). They finally killed the website when they had a lawyer threaten to sue the people collocating my webhost's server if my site wasn't down in 24 hours. Bovine Labs died and the community was thrown onto IRC.

That was the last cheating website I ever made. The (now smaller) cheating community was now completely based on IRC. There were several reasons for this. Firstly I had no money, and no time. Secondly IRC communities are very hard to take down. Thirdly I saw it as a good way to let the community spread over the net.

Cheating was still broken. No one had made a way around the security words. I decided to have a go at making one, with the help of some of Kait's program's source code. I made a much simpler version of the idea proposed on BL, and ran it over IRC. Although of course it sucked at first, eventually Kait got interested and make it tolerable. Sleep Walker was alive, and it lifted cheating to its feet. Talking about feet, the reason why SW is commonly called Cold Feet is because that was the name of the zip file I first put it in without more than a seconds thought.

Cheating started to flourish again. Scar was still working. A small group of tightly nit users had a working AR, and a programmer named Subanark made an edited RS client even better than RB. fagex did make a few attempts to stop us, however didn't show too much interest this time round. That was, until, we found the greatest bug, ever. Sixfeetunder found a way to use AutoRune to create any non stackable item (i.e. no coins, runes, certs). Suddenly the poonscape economy overflowed with pink party hats, and all the tough guys of RS started crying that their pink hats no longer supported their ego.

Until now our IRC was served by lucidpc. Mediator bought his own IRC server and started RuneScape Cheating Network (RSCN). It was an unusual operation, partly because no one knew who really held all the power. Mediator had control of the servers, Dylock was apparently the "community leader", I was mostly absent, and Kait like always decided to keep some distance from the gritty day to day running of the community. RSCN wasn't even announced official new center for the community, although it wasn't long before it became the new undisputed center of our community.

RSCN wasn't received perfectly. Many people didn't like the new arrangement, and some even tried to fight it. Although to be realistic, this has always been happening. It always seemed like the woods were burning. Its probably just human nature, or maybe that growth is slow but steady and widespread while problems are generally less subtle.

RSCN certainly was growing. The community was reaching greater and greater heights. Back in the ancient times there was usually only 1-3 cheats. Now there are huge numbers of powerful edited clients, made by many skilled programmers. No longer will cheating fall when one programmer takes a break. We look almost unbeatable. They have all kinds of powerful features such as autocatchers, tradespammers, e.t.c, there's even a scriptable edited client! There are over 7000 registered users, and right while I type this there are over 300 people sleepwalking! One of the biggest differences between now and the earlier days of cheating is that there is RSC and RS2. RS2 is vigorously guarded by the terrified fagex staff, whilst RSC couldn't be more owned if we added an 'N' to it.

Obviously I don't have to spend much time on the present, so I will get to the obvious conclusion you should draw from all this. This community is totally unbeatable. In the matrix of poonscape, we are the ones that have awoken. We play around with the game's fabric; stretching it and poking holes where we wish. Its no longer possible to say where our influence in the game begins and ends. Common players like Zezima cannot even imagine what us cheaters have committed over the past three years. Join us. Stay. Make that stay productive. poonscape is just the board of a much greater game. Cheating.



Other interesting links

https://web.archive.org/web/20050409012043/http://kaitnieks.com/news/?news_id=4 (ScarScape was an early modification to the RS2 client done in 2005)

Credits to @Luke132 for the idea to use the Archive for the Kaitnieks website.

If you find anything of interest I will upload it to this post.

* The intent is for this post to be broad enough to encompass RSC and early RS2
 

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