OSRS Chambers of Xeric guide 2026: rooms, team roles and the August loot rebalance

What CoX is

Chambers of Xeric is a team raid sized for 3 to 5 players, and it is built differently from a normal boss. There is no single fight that scales with your group — instead the raid is a connected set of rooms, and the design forces the party to split up and run several of them at the same time. Everything the raid does rests on that split.

That is also why a CoX session is organised work. Room order, item loadouts and who goes where all have to be decided before you start, and a team that walks in without an order falls apart by the second room.

The rooms

You enter through the Great Hall and then the Entrance Hall. From there the raid opens into its main body: three team rooms — the Storage Room, the Fight Caves and the Boss Room — each designed to hold two players, plus the Maze, which one player takes on their own.

After the team rooms the raid leads to the Treasury and then the Vault. Those two are the payout side of the raid: the Treasury is the loot run that follows the team rooms, and the Vault sits behind it, holding Xeric's relics and the better items.

The rooms are ordered so that the team's work feeds the maze player's work. What the team rooms produce is what the maze player carries, and what the maze player brings back is what the Treasury and the Vault give you.

Team structure and roles

Each of the three team rooms takes two players at a time, so the raid's shape is three two-player rooms running in parallel with one maze player. A five-player team covers all three rooms comfortably; a three-player team has to choose which rooms to run and skip the rest, which is a real decision and not a minor one.

The split is the whole point of the design. Rooms are meant to be solved as two-player units — two sets of hands, two sets of items, one room — and a team that tries to stack everyone into one room is solving the raid slower than it should.

The maze — the role that carries the loot

One player takes the Maze alone, carrying a small backpack of items and navigating a sequence of teleporters. The job is to match each item to the teleporter that accepts it and get it through to the end of the maze intact — using the wrong item at the wrong teleporter can cost that item, and the maze is where a careless player can quietly sink the raid's loot.

This is why the maze is the highest-skill role in the raid. Everyone else is fighting or solving a puzzle with two people; the maze player is working alone with a limited set of items and no second pair of hands to catch a mistake. Pick the player for it deliberately, and let them run it consistently rather than rotating it every session.

The Treasury and the Vault

The Treasury is the loot run that follows the team rooms, and it is fed by whatever the maze player brought back. The Vault sits behind the Treasury and holds Xeric's relics along with the better items on the raid's table — it is the end of the payout line, and it is only reachable once the Treasury has been cleared.

The practical rule for both: the team's loot ceiling is set by the maze, not by the team rooms. A great team-room session followed by a failed maze is a worse outcome than an ordinary team session with a clean maze run.

The boss — Xeric

The raid ends with Xeric, a two-phase fight. Phase 1 is the familiar form: readable attack patterns, dodge windows, and the kind of fight that rewards a team that pays attention to what Xeric is about to do rather than one that guesses.

Phase 2 is where the raid changes character. Xeric's familiar form gives way to several different variants, and each one telegraphs a heavy incoming hit that the party has to dodge or reposition away from before it resolves. That is a different skill from phase 1 — reading a timer and moving, rather than reading an attack and blocking it.

What changed in August 2026

The Summer Sweep-Up in August 2026 included Chambers of Xeric changes, and they were loot changes. That means every GP-per-hour figure for CoX published before the update is stale, and any advice you are reading that quotes a pre-update profit number is describing a raid that no longer exists.

Read our CoX loot rebalance article for what the drop table actually became, and our CoX profit article for what the new numbers mean in practice. This article is the walkthrough — the room structure, the team split and the boss are unchanged by the update, and they are what you need before you can read the profit numbers at all.