OSRS Chat Effects

How to type chat effects

Start a public message with a colour word and a colon, an effect word and a colon, or both, and players around you see the rest of the line in that colour or moving that way. red:Hello is red, wave:Hello waves in yellow, and red:wave:Hello is red and waves. The game takes the words off before anyone sees the message.

The order matters. The game looks for a colour at the very start, then for an effect straight after it. Type wave:red:Hello and you get yellow waving text that reads Red:Hello, since the colour word is no longer at the start. Case does not matter (RED: works), but nothing may come before the first word: one space in front and the whole line is sent as typed. Only one colour and one effect count; a second colour word stays in the message.

Every character you type counts towards the 80-character limit, the colour and effect words included, so glow1:wave: leaves 69 for the message. A group ironman typing to their group gets 79. The chat line stops taking letters at the limit, and the star at the end of the line goes when you reach it.

Players see the message in sentence case, whatever you typed: the first letter and the first letter after a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark become capitals, a capital that follows another letter becomes small, and a capital after a space or a digit stays. So HELLO THERE shows as Hello There and hi. bye as Hi. Bye.

Every colour

Every effect

Pattern colours

Each pattern colour is one letter or digit. The game shares the message out between them in the order you give, so patternrb: on a ten-letter message makes the first five letters one colour and the last five the other. A pattern needs at least one and at most eight; with none, more than eight or any other character before the colon, the game sends the whole line as typed, pattern and all.

How long each effect lasts

A message stays over your head for 150 client cycles of 20 ms, which is 3 seconds, unless you say something else first. Glow, scroll and slide follow that clock, so they look the same on every computer: each glow spends one second on each of its three fades, scroll crosses its window once in the 3 seconds, and slide takes half a second to drop in and half a second to drop out.

Flash, wave, wave2 and shake follow the frames your screen draws instead. The Java client draws at most one frame a cycle, 50 a second, so a flash colour holds for 0.2 seconds and a wave takes about 0.63 seconds to pass. A client drawing more frames moves them faster: at 60 frames a second a flash colour holds for ~0.17 seconds. Shake is the one that mixes both: its letters jump every frame, but how far they can jump shrinks with the clock, from 6 pixels to nothing after 0.96 seconds.

Where chat effects show

Colours and effects only ever show over a player's head, and only public chat and autochat go there. The chatbox shows every message in its own chat colour, without the prefixes and without any movement. Where the line goes decides what happens to the words in front of it:

A line for a channel you are not in is not sent, and the game tells you so. The same goes for a clan line when your rank in the clan is too low to talk, and for a guest line when that clan does not let guests talk.

A line starting with :: is a command and is not sent, apart from ::bank, which makes you say Hey, everyone, I just tried to do something very silly! in plain yellow. A line starting with ! or :: followed by an emote's name plays the emote instead of sending, and the game only checks how the line starts: !yesterday plays Yes and !nothing plays No. Adding @ after the slashes (/@c, //@) also sets your chatbox mode to that channel until you type /@p.

Settings that hide them

Each player decides what they see. With Show chat effects turned off in the Settings, every message over a head is plain yellow and still, patterns and rainbow included. Their public chat setting on the Public tab works like this:

A word of up to 10 characters set with Filter public chat hides every other player's message that does not contain it, over heads as well as in the chatbox, and a player on their ignore list is never shown at all. Your own messages always reach your own chatbox, but your own head follows your setting like anyone else's: on Show none or Show friends you do not see your own text. Turning on autochat switches your own setting to Show autochat.

After a pattern message, the same colours stay on lines the game puts over your head for you, such as a special attack's shout, until you send a message without a pattern.

Worlds and game modes

Chat effects look and work the same on every world and in every game mode: members and free worlds, Deadman, Hardcore Worlds, Leagues, Grid Master, speedrunning and Fresh Start worlds, and every kind of ironman. Group ironmen have the one difference, the group channel: //// and /g send to the group, where the words stay as typed, and a line for the group stops at 79 characters. Since 30 September 2026 players see public chat from up to 15 tiles away, up from 8. The rainbow and pattern colours arrived on 1 June 2023.

The game's fonts

Text over heads is Bold 12 with a one-pixel black shadow, and the chatbox uses Plain 12. To write your own text in them, or in any of the other fonts the game holds, with these colours and effects moving as they do here, use the OSRS font generator; it saves a PNG or an animated GIF. The OSRS fonts page shows where in the game each font appears and has every one to download as a TrueType font.