Mod Mark's here to tell us all about what's coming up in August.

There's plenty of sandy shenanigans throughout August as the Beach returns to the Lumbridge Crater area. It's a great way to level up your skills with a tropical twist.

Take on the lobster-like boss monster Clawdia, try your hand at the coconut shy, or treasure hunts, sandcastle building, battleships, rockpools, beach ball rolling, hook a duck, weightlifting, or barbecues, with handy portals to your favourite distractions and a brand new Terrorbird racing course! If all that sounds far too hectic, it's also a great place to relax under a palm tree with a cocktail.

As well as lots of existing beach-based belongings, plenty of new, unique rewards have been added this year, like the new hammock rest animation or sandcastle companion pet.

Achievement system part 2

Part 2 of our new-look Achievements System also hits the game this month, bringing some new features and interface improvements based on your continued suggestions.

We have a Player Inspect feature, you can see other player's achievements and measure yourself against them in side by side comparisons, even comparing the new achievement score we've added, granting different points for every achievement you've earned, based on its difficulty.

We've also added a bunch of new ones too, about random fun stuff, minigames and several relating to PvM encounters.

Crystal Skillchompas

A new type of hunter foe has appeared north of the Tyras Camp: the elusive crystal skillchompa.

Just like the other skillchompas, it's a wieldable critter that massively increases your efficiency in XP training at those top levels for Divination, Fishing, Mining and Woodcutting. You'll need a whopping level 97 Hunter to try and catch them, but they function just like crystal tools and offer fantastic rates of Hunter XP when you do.

We've also added a new bonus to all skillchompa hunting, high levels of Agility now allow multiple skillchompas to be caught in the same trap.

In other news

There's plenty of other things going live in August too – such as improved ways of earning skilling outfits ingame and timed high scores - as the Ninja team double in size and take on your most wanted improvements. Live streams will be busy too, as we talk at length about our Unfinished Business. If you haven't already, check out the team dev blog published earlier today.

Finally, I thought I'd let you know about some planned changes to some of the ways you pay for RuneScape. The new payment page on the website is being updated to be a better, slicker system allowing you to spend less time paying, and more time playing, so don't be freaked out if you see some changes.

Enjoy!

Have fun in the sun. Wooters out.

Mod Mark

What is a Behind the Scenes article?

Behind the Scenes is a sneak peek at the planned game updates that we hope to launch in the coming month.

This, however, is only a plan - not a promise - that a particular update will be released in a particular way or at a particular time. To get you the highest quality updates as quickly as possible, we usually keep on tweaking and testing right up until the moment before release, so sometimes things change or take a bit longer than expected. We aren't afraid to change our plan if necessary, as we will never launch an update before it is ready.