MMO community celebrates beloved player's release from hell after a truly filthy 2,500-hour Old School RuneScape grind: "I'm astounded at the sheer willpower"

28.02.2024 - 22:45 / gamesradar.com / Austin Wood

Old School RuneScape – and also regular RuneScape – developer Jagex has a new corporate owner, but it's business as usual for the MMO's community, which is still hard at work finishing grinds that nobody, not one soul on this Earth, asked or expected them to actually do. The latest landmark achievement comes from well-liked content creator Limpwurt, who's finally emerged from a self-imposed grind that started some 2,500 hours of game time ago in August 2023, but at least he's got a really cool cape and a baby mole to show for it. 

Limpwurt is best known for a series of videos about his "Xtreme Onechunk Ironman" account. Now, Ironman accounts are part of OSRS proper; the kicker is that they can't trade with other players, meaning they have to acquire all of their items the old fashioned way. The "chunk" bit, however, is player-made, with Limpwurt basing his series on the efforts of a previous chunker. Basically, a tool divides the OSRS world into a grid of chunks, and from the MMO's starting point, players randomly roll to unlock adjacent chunks and all the content within, with the caveat that they have to make the most of each chunk before moving on. 

In Limpwurt's case, those rules have been ratcheted to an even rarer extreme. He's added some heavy rules to the already punishing gauntlet, namely:

For context, this video series started in January 2021, and Limpwurt has still only explored a fraction of the OSRS map. That's how long a single chunk's to-do list can take, and a recent unlock – a dreaded "death chunk" – proved to be an especially herculean grind. 

After some 2,500 hours, Limpwurt has finally obtained level 99 Construction and its attached skill cape – a grind he reckons, in his latest video, may be "the longest anyone's ever taken getting a Construction cape." Construction, used to install utilities in your player-owned house, is a famously expensive skill that's tedious to train on Ironman accounts on account of the materials involved, and thanks to chunk 44, Limpwurt had to max it out with very limited access to resources. This pushed him to an unconventional training method: several hundred thousand bagged plants, which required a sizable fortune that came with its own lengthy grind. 

On top of that Construction nonsense, he had another massive grind weighing him down: obtaining a pet drop from the area's unique giant mole boss, which has a 1-in-3,000 drop rate. It ended up taking him over 7,000 kills to get the "godforsaken pet." Welcome to OSRS, folks. 

Sharing their accomplishment with the OSRS subreddit, Limpwurt was welcomed with open arms by players who know full well how long a grind can be. 

"I remember when he laid out the concept of bagged plants to 99 Con and needing like