I feel like a dedicated Old School RuneScape player conquers a new Everest every week. There’s the player who grinded 149 hours of a terrible minigame to get a raccoon, the player who beat one in a hundred million odds to obtain a not particularly noteworthy gem, the guy who caught a million sub-par fish, and now? Meet the player who robbed half a million fascists to get their hands on, well, very little of value. Unless you’re really hungry.

Spotted by GamesRadar, the player in question is a Reddit user named eat_my_yarmulke (whose Reddit flair is a choice), who posted a screenshot to the OSRS subreddit two days ago of their haul from pickpocketing 500,000 members of HAM, or Humans Against Monsters, a kind of fantasy fascist organisation that aims to establish human supremacy in OSRS’ setting of Gielinor via “large scale slaughters.” They’re pretty lame, in essence, but it wasn’t politics that led eat_my_yarmulke to target them specifically. 

Loot from 500,000 H.A.M. member pickpockets from r/2007scape

Our hero earned themself a mountain of loot from their half a million victims, including nearly 10,000 shrimp and around 5,000 dashing magenta hats, but their real reason for targeting HAM was because they’re an accessible source of easy clue scrolls, a random drop that can set you off on one of OSRS’ treasure trails, little easter egg hunts that lead you to some loot. Which loot in particular you get depends on the difficulty of your treasure trail: easy trails have 131 possible drops.

Eat_my_yarmulke is on a quest to complete the easy treasure trail collection log (OSRS lets players track the drops they get from the game’s various activities via logs, which turn green when completed), but they’re also operating under multiple self-imposed restrictions. For one thing, they’re playing on Ironman Mode, which means they can’t do things like trade with other players. Second, they’re skilling, meaning they’re deliberately keeping their combat level at its lowest possible rank.

So, that means they can’t get clue scrolls from other players or from fighting NPCs. They have to restrict themselves to pickpocketing roaming NPC fascists. Even worse, they can’t actually complete all the clue scrolls they pick up: some of them might have requirements like “Wear steel armour” that are beyond anyone deliberately keeping their defence stat low.

That means, according to eat_my_yarmulke, they can “only complete ~76% of the easies” they pickpocket. Combine that with some pretty rotten luck, and they’re still a ways off completing their quest despite having obtained nearly 10,000 scrolls from 500,000 pickpockets so far. “See ya at a million!” they told one fellow player on Reddit. There goes my hero.

The cynical among you might be tempted to accuse our poor player of automating some of this hard work, but it’s a claim they brush off on Reddit. In response to a player asking “how much the script cost,” eat_my_yarmulke responded “First of all, rude. Secondly my Razer Naga Trinity was like 60 bucks at best buy and has held up very well to all the clicking, would recommend,” and told another that “The pickpocketing itself would only take like a hundred hours but with completing the clues it’s around a thousand for me.”

I think OSRS may be the best game ever made. I hope to god I never get sucked into it.