By Punkmonkey25

So you've just about mastered many of the skills in the wide world of RuneScape. However, to continue honing your skills, you may need to better understand the system of that thing that everyone dreads; that keeps you from obtaining much-needed experience and items. Fatigue. Fatigue is when your character becomes "tired", and needs to rest. You can tell how fatigued you are by going into the skills tab on RuneScape. Your fatigue is listed as a percent (%). The lower the percent, the less fatigue you have. Fatigue can only be restored by doing one thing. You must sleep. Sleeping can fully restore your fatigue level to 0, thus allowing you to continue training. To sleep, simply click on a bed or use a sleeping bag. A screen such as the one shown below will appear. Once you are at the desired amount of fatigue (usually 0), type the word in the box to wake up! However, if you get attacked while sleeping, you'll wake up without having reduced your fatigue at all.

You're probably wondering right about now, "why the heck would they add fatigue when everybody hates it so much??". Well, grasshopper, this was done for many reasons. One of the reasons, and probably the top reason, is for cheaters. Some people use macroers, otherwise known as "AutoMiners", which are programs that can repeat an action over and over again depending on what you tell it to do. So somebody could just go to bed and have their computer training FOR them! Jagex decided to fix this problem by making it so that people couldn't use this system. These cheaters finally figured out ways to make stops at a bed to sleep while using these programs, and so on May 29th, 2003, a whole new fatigue system was added; as well as sleeping bags.

Before May 29th, there were only certain skills that caused fatigue. These included mining, fishing, and woodcutting. Now that the fatigue update has come through, EVERYTHING causes fatigue. Crafting, cooking, magic, fighting, and every other skill there is. Who would've known that mixing a potion could cause you to be so tired! Long ago, there was no fatigue system. Therefore, it was incredibly easy to level; since some of these RS veterans could just sit there for hours and keep clicking on the rocks. Now it is harder to perfect all of the skills, and now it is almost impossible for anybody to use an AutoMiner! For certain skills, when you reach 100% fatigue, you may continue working on them.
However, you won't gain any experience. These include magic, fighting, and more. You are allowed to use these skills even at 100% fatigue for survival purposes. For example, if you're being attacked by blue dragons and are at 100% fatigue, it won't say "you have lost the will to fight!" It will just hinder you from gaining any combat experience. For other skills, it won't let you continue them at all without sleeping. These include mining, fishing, woodchopping, and others.

To be more specific, here is a list of every skill that causes fatigue, and will let you continue training it; as well as a list of every skill that will not let you continue training once you reach 100% fatigue.

Fatigue Table

Certain activities involved in the different skills will give different amounts of fatigue. For example, fishing a shrimp will give you 0.5% fatigue. Whereas fishing a lobster will cause you to gain 1.5% fatigue. This may not seem like such a big difference, but it is when you're working with other skills such as mining.

Well I hope you've learned something about fatigue, and maybe now you won't lose experience by high-alching items while at 100% fatigue. Weird...I've been fishing all day, and I've gotten so tired...time to pull out that ol' sleeping bag and count the stars.