When I was first shown RuneScape: Dragonwilds—Jagex's answer to survival crafting games like Valheim and Enshrouded with its own Gielinor flavour—the star pupil of the whole presentation were most certainly the spells.

They're shortcuts to make some of the more tedious parts of survival crafting a lot more palatable: Spectral axes that can chop down several trees at once, before another spell can zap them all into logs without me even having to whip out my real axe. Or making rocks explode into tiny stones with just a vaguely magic-looking wave of my hand. Even turning the bones of my enemies into tasty peaches to satiate my hunger. Yum!

When I first got to witness the Spectral Axe in action, I remember thinking "hm, yeah, pretty cool, to look at. But will it feel cool to play?" The answer to myself (and to you) is yes, it feels incredibly cool.

It's such a small tweak to the standard survival crafting gameplay loop, one which doesn't feel invasive enough that I forgo the manual method altogether—after all, I still have to make the effort to skill up my woodcutting for the privilege of speedrunning the process later down the line—but also isn't a total ballache to use.

Each spell is on a cooldown, all of which feel pretty reasonable, but also are distinctly RuneScape in that they need different runes to cast. Anyone who's levelled up magic in Jagex's MMOs will know that most spells require some sort of rune: Law runes, fire runes, earth runes. You name it, you'll probably need it to cast everything from combat magic to teleportation.

It's a kind of magic

You'd think an MMO mechanic like that wouldn't transfer too well over to survival crafting, but it really does. I think part of that is down to the fact the mechanic already feels kinda survival crafting-y within the confines of its MMO origins. Sure, you can buy runes from shops or find them as mob drops, but you can also mine rune essences and then craft them into what you need.

That works, well, almost exactly the same in Dragonwilds. There are floating rocks scattered around that can be mined for rune essences, and then crafted into specific runes via a specialist crafting table. The method is flexible enough to transcend genre, and I love that it's one of the fundamental RuneScape things that Jagex has kept in. And I don't even need to go seeking a rune pouch to put 'em all in, thank goodness.

It's such a simple way to jazz up Dragonwilds' basic resource collection, and I can't help but feel like it's something more survival crafting games should crib from. I thought we'd run out of ways to chop a tree or mine a rock, and yet here we are.

There are even more bespoke, battle-oriented spells like a shield that can block all incoming damage, or spells that refresh food buffs, and even one that makes basebuilding much easier by disconnecting the camera from my adventurer and letting me free roam in Dragonwilds' excellent build mode. I haven't had too much of a chance to tinker with these yet, though I should most definitely be busting that shield out against the ridiculous number of goblin raids I've been experiencing in my first few hours.

I've especially had fun with Windstep, a low-cost and low-cooldown traversal spell that lets me jump ridiculously high before floatingly descending. It's been key to leaping over large bodies of water that slow me down to a crawl if I try to wade through them, or leaping over gaps that otherwise would've seen me plummet to my death.

I'm only a handful of hours into my first Dragonwilds server right now, and I've barely scratched the surface of what spells can do. It's taking me a little while to remember to make good use of them—I'm constantly forgetting about that handy-dandy building spell, for instance—but I worry the next time I venture to a magicless survival crafting game, I won't be able to manage without 'em.