OSRS Fractured Archive Ironman Guide: Raids 4 Requirements, Rooms, Rewards & HCIM Rules

The Fractured Archive is Old School RuneScape's fourth raid, released on 20 October 2026. It sits at the bottom of the Chasm of Tears beneath Lumbridge, needs While Guthix Sleeps to enter, and Jagex calls it its "toughest raid yet". It is almost all combat: five bosses per run, three of them picked from pairs, with very little skilling or puzzle filler.

For an ironman the reason to care is the reward list. Zeal upgrades Piety, the Ascension crossbows are what Jagex calls a raid-tier blowpipe upgrade, and the elemental fragments permanently raise your spell max hits. None of it can be bought. On the other side: deaths are not safe, a team wipe costs you a gravestone, and the raid never scales below two players.

Every requirement, mechanic and number below comes from the OSRS Wiki and Jagex's own posts as of 21 October 2026, the day after launch. One hotfix has already changed how Defence reduction works.

Requirements

Entering needs one thing: While Guthix Sleeps. The first time you try to enter the lobby, The Fractured Archive miniquest starts. Its kill list is a full run (the Archive Guardian, one boss from each pair, then Ocellus), and it recommends 110 Combat.

While Guthix Sleeps is a Grandmaster quest. Its own requirements:

It also needs ten quests and their chains: Defender of Varrock, The Path of Glouphrie, Fight Arena, Dream Mentor, The Hand in the Sand, Wanted!, Temple of the Eye, Tears of Guthix, Nature Spirit and A Tail of Two Cats. Those pull in Lunar Diplomacy, Eadgar's Ruse, The Fremennik Trials and Shilo Village behind Dream Mentor, The Grand Tree, Tree Gnome Village, Waterfall Quest and The Eyes of Glouphrie behind Glouphrie, and eight more behind Defender of Varrock, from Shield of Arrav to Garden of Tranquillity. The highest skill levels anywhere in that chain, all unboostable:

For the raid itself, the wiki's strategies page suggests:

One gap worth knowing: Jagex had planned changes to older quests on While Guthix Sleeps' unlock path so that restricted account builds could take part, but shelved them for launch. There is no way around the quest.

HCIM, UIM and GIM rules

Wipes. If you die and your team carries on, you can watch through any teammate's view by clicking their party orb, and even ping their inventory slots. If the whole team dies, everyone loses their unprotected items, is removed from the raid, and gets a gravestone outside the entrance. Reclaiming costs up to 500,000 coins, the normal fee, cut by 75% until you have cleared the raid 5 times. Jagex had floated a softer system that resupplied you after a death, but has since said it is keeping Theatre of Blood-style wipes.

Loot is per player. Eight chests line the reward room and you can only open your own; if you earned a unique, a separate chest appears on a raised platform at the north end. Leave before claiming and your loot waits in the Loot Wheelbarrow in the lobby.

Getting there

The entrance is on a cliff face near the entrance to the Ancient Guthixian Temple, at the bottom of the Chasm of Tears. On your first login after While Guthix Sleeps, a messenger hands you a note pointing you there. From the entrance, crawl through the opening to the south-west to reach the lobby.

• Guthixian temple teleport. The scroll drops you at the temple entrance, close to the archive. It only works after While Guthix Sleeps, drops from Tormented Demons, and fits in the master scroll book.
• Games necklace to Tears of Guthix, then use a lit sapphire lantern to call a light creature on the northern ledge. It floats you down to the archive and temple entrances.
• On foot through the Lumbridge Swamp Caves, with the same sapphire lantern for the light creatures.
• Archivist's folio, once you have one. It is an untradeable tertiary from the reward chest (about 1/20 on the drop log), teleports you to the lobby, and holds 5 charges per ascension shard.

The lobby has a bank chest, the Grouping Board and the Record Keeper (who keeps the raid's leaderboard) on the east side, the Strategy board on the west, and ascension rocks to the south-west. The official worlds are 404 (US east), 425 (Australia) and 566 (UK). Permanent Deadman (world 345) could not access the raid at release.

Group size and finding a team as an ironman

The raid scales from 2 to 8 players and Jagex recommends 3 to 5. You can enter alone, but the minimum scaling is two players (Theatre of Blood's is three), and Jagex expects solo clears to take a long time to get comfortable with, closer to soloing ToB than CoX. In their words, duo clears are "tough but manageable once you know what you're doing".

• Grouping Board (east side). Create a party and accept applicants, as at ToA or ToB. An eye icon toggles whether others can spectate you.
• Strategy board (west side). Spectate a "recent party" (the most recently started raid) or a "specific party", which needs you on a participant's friends list. Up to 100 players can watch one raid, and spectating unlocks the music tracks. For an ironman deciding whether to spend supplies, watching a few clears costs nothing.
• Contribution. Every pairing awards the same total points towards loot, so the route you pick does not change your unique chance. Damage to adds counts towards your share, but each room has a fixed pool, so stalling a fight does not farm points.

While you wait, mine the ascension rocks at 80 Mining. Three rocks are active at a time and move every 295 ticks, and sprites appear for up to 2 bonus shards if you click them within 30 seconds. At 99 Mining with a dragon pickaxe the wiki estimates about 130 shards and upwards of 5,500 Mining XP per hour. Mining enhancers and tick manipulation do nothing here, and a crystal pickaxe uses charges. Jagex lists the infernal pickaxe "smelting" ascension shards as a known bug, so mine with something else until it is fixed.

Room by room

Ezekiel, Moia and the Dagon'hai are on the west side of the main chamber; Bork, Dreadnoth and Xarth are on the east. The choices are fixed, not random, so you never need to scout. Jagex balanced each pair to be similar in intensity and expects a meta route to form anyway.

Figures are from each boss's wiki infobox and the strategies page's Defence table. The mechanics below are the short version of what the wiki strategies page documents today; read it for the detail, and expect it to change.

1. Archive Guardian

It starts flying, so only ranged, magic and halberds can hit it. Depleting its shield bar grounds it, and then melee works too; its fire weakness drops from 80% to 40% once it is grounded, so swap to melee. It spawns poison mushrooms (3 to 10 damage, and they can slow your attacks and stop you running), and while grounded it sends tendrils that Protect from Melee caps at 11. Four inert guardians around the room can be charged to take a large chunk off the shield. Below 30% it flies again and starts a laser on a random player that is fatal with more than two players alive unless teammates stand in line with the target to reduce it, or the target tick-eats it. It is immune to Ancient Magicks, and Magic-level drains seem to raise its Magic instead.

2. Ezekiel or Bork and the Smorks

Ezekiel. The first player in becomes the tank. His melee cleaves almost all the way round, leaving a safe spot directly behind him, opposite the tank. After every two melee attacks he fires a cross-shaped lightning AoE and summons flying swords. Get him lined up in a sword's path and it stuns and damages him; miss and he heals a large amount. The swords are very weak to air spells and resistant to ranged, and hitting them makes them stronger against him and against you. At 33% he traps the team in a grid and fires three lightning patterns in a row that tell you where to dodge.

Bork and the Smorks. Bork chases the first player in with shockwave melee and has flat armour that cuts every melee and ranged hit (the wiki's pages disagree on whether it is 10 or 12). The Smorks sit in a cart in the middle, firing ranged and magic at everyone Bork is not targeting, plus incendiary and heavy cannonballs. Lure Bork into a heavy cannonball and he is dazed: no damage reduction, and your melee hits all land for a short window. Hide behind the cart from his stomps. The wiki recommends killing Bork first, because the Smorks' enraged attacks are easier to handle.

3. Moia or Dreadnoth the Jellied

Moia is the necromancer Jagex teased before release, the half-mahjarrat daughter of Lucien. She starts outside her arena, out of melee and halberd reach, so you need ranged or magic. She keeps summoning undead binders that melee anyone within two tiles; the wiki recommends a venator bow to clear them. Her cough projectile spreads to anyone standing next to you, and a serpentine helm greatly reduces it. At about 33% every binder has to be dead before her charge attack fills, or the whole team takes massive damage.

Dreadnoth moves one tile every two ticks and melees everything around him, so range or mage him from distance. He is 85% weak to fire and has 40% freeze resistance; the Scorching bow special roots him. At 85%, 65% and 45% he slams the whole arena (Protect from Melee) then fires ranged attacks (Protect from Missiles) and spawns jellies that drain prayer even through protection prayers. Burst them with Ice or Blood Barrage or the venator bow. On death he leaves about ten jellies that end the room when killed.

The Quartermaster

After the third boss the Quartermaster arrives and sells supplies for credits earned in the raid, and your performance up to that point matters. The stock: 6 Saradomin brew(4), 4 super restore(4), 4 prayer potion(4), 1 prayer potion(2), 1 ranging potion(2), 1 super combat potion(2), 10 manta rays, 5 halibut, 10 giant krill, an Alliance log and leftovers. There are no overloads in this raid and no way to bank mid-run.

4. Dagon'hai trio or Xarth

The Dagon'hai are an elder and two monks with a shared health pool, racing to finish a ritual. Each successful charge fills the cauldron's bar by 25%; if it fills, they empower themselves and the team wipes. When one shouts a channel line, interrupt it with the matching elemental spell: fire for "I'll feed the flames!", water for "I'll guide the flow!", air for "I'll focus the winds!", earth for "I'll strengthen the bond!". Monks also fire Bandos, Zamorak and Saradomin tome effects that players intercept by standing on the marked tiles. After the fifth shield break the cauldron explodes and the survivors drop to 7 hitpoints. This room needs all four elemental spells, so pack standard-spellbook runes.

Xarth is a Tormented Demon, so demonbane works. Phase 1 is fast magic with stacking burns; at about 80%, 65% and 50% he binds everyone and charges a blast that you hide from behind a pillar, all of you behind the same one. From 50% he switches to ranged and melee and raises corpses that walk in and heal him. Freeze them or douse them with water spells, and avoid fire spells, which make him summon more. If corpses heal him 200, he blasts the whole arena. Jagex intended this final phase to be meleed.

5. Ocellus

The hooded figure is Ocellus, a Guardian of Guthix who decides to take Guthix's place using the Blade. The fight has four stages. Phase 1 moves him between corners, summoning tendrils that channel energy into him; stand on them. At 66% and 25% he charges an attack from the energy he collected, and if too many tendrils got through, "Embrace... annihilation..." fires projectiles for 80+. Phase 2 is the Blade, a portal-dodging phase in four quadrants. Phase 3 shatters the arena into four quadrants. He tanks one player in melee, sends wave attacks, and opens a spinning blade attack that you answer by turning your overhead off and then putting Protect from Melee up. At "Obliteration..." you jump to another quadrant or die. Phase 4, on the last quadrant, uses Ancient Curses: Deflect prayers, Soul Split, and void explosions under each player every two ticks, during which he takes 50% less damage.

The 21 October Defence-reduction hotfix

A day after launch, Jagex said a number of bosses could be drained below their intended Defence caps, and that this was "the main reason the likes of the Twisted Bow stand far taller than they should do", especially in larger groups. The fix went in as a hotfix the same day:

• No cap (Defence can reach 0): Dreadnoth, the Smorks, the Dagon'hai trio, and the Blade (Ocellus phase 2).
• 60% cap (an NPC with 100 Defence stops at 60): the Archive Guardian, Bork, Ezekiel, Moia, Xarth and Ocellus.
• To compensate, Ocellus no longer restores his Defence when he moves to a new quadrant in phase 3. Drain him to the cap once in the first quadrant, then use damage specials for the rest of the fight.

The same day's hotfixes fixed Ocellus sometimes disappearing between phases 1 and 2, made his phase 3 Protect from Melee overhead visible, and fixed him starting his final-phase attack patterns in the wrong place. Global times were not reset.

What it changes, in Jagex's words:

• Xarth vs the Dagon'hai. At 0 Defence, Xarth's ranged and melee Defence bonuses stopped mattering, so teams always took him over the harder trio. Using a twisted bow on him is fine, but it should not beat the intended melee.
• Void. The free, untradeable set was "punching well above its weight in a way that we don't think is healthy". If your raid setup is elite void, expect it to do less than it did on day one.
• Tonalztics of Ralos should still be "a must-have for efficient groups". Its Division special lowers Defence by 1/8 of the target's Magic level per successful hit, which is why high-Magic raid bosses drained so fast. It comes from the Fortis Colosseum, so it is an ironman-obtainable drain.
• Jagex noted that lower-tier and casual groups mostly were not draining past the caps anyway, because it takes coordination and a team carrying a lot of Tonalztics.