Old School RuneScape icon emerges into the light after 8-month, 2,500-hour grind of killing a mole to acquire a mole

You know, there comes a time when you wonder if the Old School RuneScape community isn't just making fun of you. Like maybe they have a wheel of fortune somewhere they spin that spits out a collection of nouns, adjectives, and spurious reasons: "Player pickpockets half a million NPCs to get nothing much of value," or "Player spends 149 hours obtaining a raccoon," or even "Player catches a million terrible fish for reasons of inner peace." Then they all agree to act like these acts of lunacy actually happened to intimidate newcomers who might ruin their favourite game.

Anyway, meet Limpwurt. Limpwurt just emerged from a 2,500-hour gardening scheme with a maxed construction skill and an abducted baby mole, having waged a near-ceaseless, Groundhog Day-style war against its parent while simultaneously becoming the world's greatest landscaper. You still with me? Great.

Spotted by GamesRadar, Limpwurt is a well-known and well-liked OSRS YouTuber who's set himself a gargantuan, Herculean, Brobdingnagian task (it's a real word; look it up). He's chunking, a kind of challenge run wherein OSRS players use a tool to divide the game's entire world into Minesweeper-esque chunks. 

You begin in one chunk and then roll to unlock adjacent ones. You can check the current state of Limpwurt's chunk map here, and the picture below is where it stood at time of writing. 

The kicker is that Limpwurt—like all great OSRS heroes—is playing under some mighty stringent, self-imposed rules. Before he can migrate out of a chunk, he has to suck up pretty much every last drop of content in it. 

That means getting every unique item, all unique minigame rewards, all achievement diary tasks, and—most importantly for Limpwurt's most recent travails—get all unique monster drops and skillcapes (rewards given out by area-specific NPCs for maxing out particular skills). He was also playing Ironman, which meant no trading with other players.

That was all fine and dandy for a while, until poor Limpwurt happened to roll into chunk #44: Falador. Acing Falador meant getting a 1-in-3000 drop (a baby mole pet) from the area's giant mole boss, and obtaining a skillcape for construction. Doing that took 2,500 hours of playtime over eight months.

The baby mole conundrum is easy enough to understand: the blasted boss just refused to drop the pet even after Limpwurt murdered it 7,000 times in a row. Ideally, going by the 1/3000 drop rate for the baby mole, Limpwurt should have gotten it twice over by that point—and indeed did get every other possible rare drop from the boss—but he'd clearly offended the gods somehow. 

When he finally does get the drop—timestamped in this video here—I'm pretty sure our hero leaps out of his skin: there's a crashing noise followed by a pained "Aw, fuck!" before exclaiming "Yes!" in a tone usually reserved for people being told their diagnosis is no longer terminal.

But that was probably the easier of the two challenges, all told. Maxing the construction skill is hard work even when you're not trapped in a "death chunk," and requires resources that Limpwurt's Ironman restrictions meant he could not trade for. 

He settled on a plan: to acquire enough bagged plants from Falador's park to strike fear into the heart of god and then to plant them all, accruing smidgen by smidgen of construction XP until he finally hit 99. It was a hell of a grind, but not to worry: it probably wasn't as bad as the grind to acquire the millions of GP he needed to buy the plants in the first place.

But he did it. The legend actually did it. In a video uploaded to YouTube this week, Limpwurt announced that his 2,500-hour, eight-month death chunk grind was at an end. "Over the last eight months I've killed 6,000 giant moles, opened over 20,000 bird's nests, planted over 200,000 bagged plants in my [player-owned house], and did a lot of Tempoross construction. This video is the result of eight months of grinding and 2,500 hours spent in-game to complete this chunk." 

Baby mole in his arms and skillcape on his back, Limpwurt finally emerged, blinking, into the day. Time for chunk #45.