Proxies for Old School RuneScape: The Right Type, Setup, and Avoiding Bans

Proxies for Old School RuneScape put a different IP address between the game client and Jagex's world servers, so the login, the session, and every account you run appear to come from that address instead of your home connection. When proxy sellers talk about "gaming proxies", OSRS is usually the game they mean, for two reasons that this page spells out: the client runs over TCP, so a SOCKS5 proxy can carry the entire session, and Jagex treats a shared IP as a reason to group accounts, so the address you play from decides whether one flag stays one flag.

We run the network under a fair amount of this traffic, and the pattern in the support queue barely changes. People arrive with a batch of accounts on one address that all went down together, or with a datacenter proxy that got a fresh account flagged on Tutorial Island, or with a rotating pool that keeps disconnecting the client. All three are the same mistake wearing different clothes: the wrong kind of address, shared or moving, under a game that wants one stable home per account. The rest of this page is how to get it right, what Jagex actually detects, and where a proxy stops helping.

What proxies are best for OSRS?

Residential or ISP proxies, one static address per account, sitting in the same region as the worlds you play on. Residential reads as an ordinary home connection, which is what Jagex's checks are built to trust, and holding it sticky means the account logs in from the same place every day. ISP (static residential) is the cleanest version of that for an account you keep long term, because the address is yours and never changes. Datacenter ranges are what proxy sellers hand out in bulk and what Jagex has flagged in bulk, so they belong only on a blocked network where the goal is reaching the client at all.

Why OSRS is the game proxy sellers actually mean

Most games are a poor fit for proxies: the live traffic is UDP, which a plain proxy cannot carry, and the account systems are tied to phone numbers or hardware that an address cannot change. OSRS is the opposite on both counts.

The client talks to the game over TCP, on ports 43594 and 43595 according to Jagex's own firewall guidance, which means a SOCKS5 proxy relays the full session without any tunnelling trick. And the account system is old-fashioned in a way that makes the address matter: no phone gate, no kernel anti-cheat, an explicit rule that you may own as many accounts as you like, and a detection system that reads a shared IP as a reason to look at every account behind it. Put those together and you get a game where the IP you play from is a real decision, which is why the OSRS proxy market exists and why so much of it is sold badly.

Why people use proxies for OSRS

The reasons split between ones a proxy solves and ones it only appears to.

• Legitimate alts. Jagex permits multiple accounts, and a main, an ironman, a skiller, and a PvP account is an ordinary set to own. What the rules permit, the linking still punishes: several accounts from one home address are grouped, and a flag on one can reach the rest. One address per account is how you keep a permitted setup from being treated as a farm.
• Gold farming and botting. This is the loudest demand in the market and it breaks Jagex's rules outright. Macroing and real-world trading earn account bans, a permanent one for a major offence, and the detection is behavioral. A proxy hides an address, not a script. We sell to plenty of OSRS players and we will not tell you a clean IP makes a bot safe.
• Account creation at any scale. Whether the accounts are alts or a service's inventory, creating many from one address draws throttles and puts every new account into the same group from its first minute. Creation from a distinct residential address per account is the clean way to start.
• Playing on distant worlds. OSRS worlds are hosted in a handful of regions (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia), and players who want a specific world for its content or its community sometimes route through an exit in that region. A proxy cannot beat geography, and the section on latency below explains what it can and cannot do for ping.
• Reaching the client on a locked network. Dorms, schools, and offices block the launcher, the game ports, or both. A proxy tunnels the client around the block, and this is the one job where a free proxy is a fair first try.

OSRS runs over TCP, so the proxy carries the whole session

Every shooter guide has to explain that the live match is UDP and a proxy will not carry it. OSRS does not have that problem. The client opens a TCP connection to the world server and keeps it for the whole session: login, movement, combat, chat, the Grand Exchange, trading, all of it on that one stream. A SOCKS5 proxy relays TCP natively, so the world server sees the proxy's address for everything you do, for as long as you stay logged in.

Two consequences follow. The first is that the proxy has to stay up, because the session is one long connection and a proxy that dies takes the login with it. That rules out free lists for anything you care about, and it rules out rotating pools, where the address changes on a timer and drops the connection every time. The second is that the mobile client changes nothing about the protocol, only about where you set the proxy: on a phone the routing has to happen at the operating system level, which our Android and iPhone setup guides cover.

How Jagex bans, and where the IP fits

Jagex's enforcement is account-based and behavior-driven, and the address is a linking signal rather than a trigger. Knowing the difference is what stops you buying a proxy to fix something a proxy does not touch.

Bans follow the account. OSRS ban types include a temporary macroing minor ban and a permanent macroing major ban, and a major can be the first offence. Real-world trading bans are permanent as well. None of these attach to an IP, so a fresh address does nothing for an account that has already been banned, and a new account on the same behavior earns the same outcome.

Detection is behavioral. Jagex's anti-cheat reads what the client does: click patterns, timing, paths, reaction to random events, session length that no human keeps up. This is the part of the system a proxy never sees. A perfectly clean residential IP under a script is still a script.

The address links accounts. This is the layer a proxy genuinely changes. Accounts that log in from the same IP are grouped, and the community's name for the result, a chain ban, describes what happens when one account in the group is flagged and the rest go with it. It is the reason legitimate alts on one home connection are at risk from each other, and the reason the one-IP-per-account rule is the whole strategy.

Datacenter ranges are known. Proxy sellers push cheap datacenter addresses at OSRS players by the thousand, and those ranges become known for exactly that. A new account arriving from one starts life in a suspicious group before it has done anything. Residential and ISP addresses do not carry that history.

Which proxy type fits OSRS

Four types show up in OSRS work and only two of them belong under an account.

Datacenter proxies are the "private proxies" most OSRS-focused sellers advertise: cheap, fast, and sold in the bulk that got their ranges flagged. Fine for reaching the client on a blocked network, wrong for anything that touches an account.

Residential proxies are real home connections. Held sticky, one carries one account for the whole session and looks like the person at home that Jagex expects to see. They can be pinned to a country, so the exit sits in the region of your worlds. If the category is new, what is a residential proxy explains where the addresses come from and why they hold.

ISP proxies are static residential: registered under a consumer ISP, hosted on datacenter-grade hardware, and yours for as long as you keep them. This is the natural home for an account you play for months or years, because the address never changes and never needs re-warming. One ISP IP per long-term account is the setup we would choose ourselves.

Mobile proxies are carrier addresses shared by many real phones, the hardest to flag and the most expensive. Most OSRS setups never need them, and the shared nature of a carrier address is a poor fit for a game that wants one account per IP.

One IP per account: the sizing rule

Size an OSRS order by counting accounts, not by bandwidth and not by a round number. The game is light on data (position and combat updates, not video), so the cost is in addresses, and the rule for addresses is short: one clean, static IP per account, never shared, never rotated under a session.

One static IP per account, matched to the worlds it plays on:
  main         ->  198.51.100.20   ISP, UK, held for the life of the account
  ironman      ->  198.51.100.21   ISP, UK, held for the life of the account
  skiller alt  ->  203.0.113.44    residential sticky, UK, held
  PvP alt      ->  203.0.113.45    residential sticky, UK, held

Never:
  two accounts on one address   (they get linked)
  one account across addresses  (it reads as compromised)
  a rotating pool under a live session   (the TCP connection drops)

Rotation has one narrow place here, and it is not under an account: if you are creating accounts, each new one should start from a fresh residential address, and after creation that address (or a static one you move it to) stays with the account. Our rotating vs static residential explainer covers the difference in detail, and our pricing is pay-as-you-go with a balance that does not expire, so a set of static addresses costs what it costs and nothing when you are not playing.

How to set up a proxy for OSRS

There is no proxy field in the Jagex Launcher, in the official client, or in RuneLite, so the routing happens one layer down. Three approaches cover every setup.

RuneLite through JVM arguments. RuneLite is a Java program, and Java has system-wide SOCKS settings that the client's sockets follow. The RuneLite launcher configuration screen has a field for JVM arguments, one per line. Add -DsocksProxyHost= with your proxy's address, -DsocksProxyPort= with its port, and for an authenticated proxy -Djava.net.socks.username= and -Djava.net.socks.password=. Launch, log in, and check the session's exit with a world you know before you trust it.

Any client through Proxifier. Proxifier on Windows and macOS captures a process and forces every connection it opens through your SOCKS5 proxy, no client support needed. Add a rule for the client executable (RuneLite, the Jagex client, or the Java runtime the launcher spawns) pointing at your proxy with its credentials, leave everything else direct, and launch. This is the method that survives client updates and works for the Jagex Launcher itself. On Linux, proxychains does the same job.

Mobile through the operating system. The mobile client uses the same TCP protocol, and the proxy has to be set at the OS level. Our Android and iPhone guides cover what each platform supports and where SOCKS needs a helper app.

JVM arguments for RuneLite (one per line in the launcher configuration):
  -DsocksProxyHost=203.0.113.10
  -DsocksProxyPort=1080
  -Djava.net.socks.username=user
  -Djava.net.socks.password=pass

Proxifier rule (any client):
  application:  RuneLite.exe, JagexLauncher.exe, java.exe
  action:       proxy SOCKS5 203.0.113.10:1080 (with credentials)
  everything else: direct

Before the first login, paste the proxy into our proxy checker to confirm it is alive, exiting in the country you expect, and not leaking your real address in the headers. Then log into a world near that exit. Ping through a proxy is your path to the proxy plus the proxy's path to the world, so an exit in the same region as the world keeps the cost to a few milliseconds. An exit on another continent adds that continent to every tick, and OSRS ticks are 0.6 seconds, so the difference is playable but visible.

Free versus paid for OSRS

Two situations with opposite answers, and the dividing line is whether a session or an account is involved.

You only need to reach the client on a blocked network. A free proxy can do that, and a dead one costs you a ten-second swap. Our free proxy list is re-checked every few minutes across 100+ countries and lists SOCKS5 entries specifically. Test a candidate with the proxy checker first. That is the whole legitimate use of free here.

You are logging into an account you care about. Free proxies are almost all datacenter addresses on ranges Jagex already knows, most die within minutes, which drops your session mid-fight or mid-trade, and they are shared with everyone else who found the same list, so whatever those people did is now your account's history. The login itself is encrypted, so the risk is less about a stolen password than about a flag you did not earn and a disconnect you did not choose. Paid residential starts at $0.44/GB pay-as-you-go with no KYC, and because the game sips data, a session costs cents; ISP addresses at $2.70/IP are the long-term home for the accounts you keep.

Habits that keep OSRS accounts separate and alive

• One account per address, one address per account. The linking is by IP. Never share an exit between accounts, and never move an account between exits without a reason.
• Match the exit to the worlds. An account that plays UK worlds from a UK address every day looks like a person. The same account from a different country each week looks like a stolen one and draws security checks.
• Start new accounts on clean residential. A datacenter address on Tutorial Island puts the account in a flagged group before it has done anything.
• Hold the address, do not rotate it. The session is one TCP connection; a rotation is a disconnect, and a pattern of them is a flag.
• Keep the behavior human. Detection watches the client, not the address. No proxy hides a script, and botting and real-world trading break the rules on any IP.
• Never reuse a burned or public address. A free list entry has been used by everyone who found it, and Jagex remembers ranges.

Where a proxy stops and the rules start

For Old School RuneScape a proxy does more than it does in most games, because it carries the whole session, and it does one thing above all: it gives every account its own address, so that legitimate alts stay separate, new accounts start clean, and a login looks like the same person in the same place every day. That is the entire value, and it is real.

What it does not do is change what Jagex sees the client doing. Macroing detection and real-world trading enforcement are behavioral, bans follow the account, and a clean IP under a rule-breaking account only delays the outcome. Anyone selling OSRS proxies as ban protection for bots is selling a story.

For reaching the client on a blocked network, start free with the free proxy list and the proxy checker. For accounts you keep, one ISP address each, or residential held sticky at $0.44/GB pay-as-you-go, routed through RuneLite's JVM arguments or Proxifier and placed in the region of your worlds, is what holds. One account, one address, one region, and Jagex sees a player instead of a farm.

Sources

• Jagex Support, Firewall exceptions (TCP ports 43594 and 43595 for the game client, plus the executables and domains to allow): support.runescape.com
• Old School RuneScape Wiki, Ban (ban types, permanent bans for botting and real-world trading): oldschool.runescape.wiki
• Old School RuneScape Wiki, Code of Conduct (multiple accounts permitted, each used only by its creator): oldschool.runescape.wiki
• RuneLite, Launcher Configuration (JVM arguments, one per line): github.com/runelite
• Oracle, Java Networking and Proxies (socksProxyHost, socksProxyPort, java.net.socks.username): docs.oracle.com