22,000 hours in, MMO player becomes the first person to get every single boss drop in one of the longest grinds ever
Old School Runescape's boss collection log has been completed for the first time
You can't really beat an MMO in the way you would a single-player game, but Old School Runescape gives players a few uniquely exhaustive challenges that get you as close as you can to saying you've done it all. You can max all your skills and complete the Inferno PvE gauntlet, for one, but the ultimate endgame for some diehards is the collection log, which essentially requires you to check off every major drop and reward in the game. This includes around 250 rare boss drops, and for the first time ever, someone's gotten them all, and with a mere 919 days played.
Bazilijus was recently crowned the first OSRS player to fully "green" the game's boss collection log – that is, get absolutely everything and update the in-game log text from orange to a highly sought-after green. A quick look at the collection log hiscores confirms that Bazilijus is not only the first to clear the boss log, but also rank one for total rewards collected at 1,386 out of 1,443. A scan of the top 10 shows that another player Kacy, currently ranked third for collecting overall, is extremely close to finishing the boss log with just one drop missing from the dragon boss Vorkath.
FIRST PERSON TO GREEN ENTIRE BOSS LOG pic.twitter.com/Vhr8c5qLnzJune 25, 2023
Bazilijus shed some light on their long grind in replies on Twitter. Their final summit was the boss Phosani's Nightmare, a sister boss to the normal Nightmare, which they had to kill 3,784 times in order to get one last drop: the coveted Inquisitor's Mace. Amazingly, they managed to get a rare jar item, not to mention several magic orbs worth billions on the market, to drop multiple times before the statistically more common mace. As a result, this boss alone took nearly 1,000 hours. That's RNG for you.
With the boss log done, Bazilijus said they'll be focusing on raid drops and clue scroll rewards next, joking that they aren't free to log out just yet. They also confirmed that they started seriously chasing the collection log, which was first released in December 2018 and has been updated many times since, about three years ago. Since they started playing OSRS, they say they've logged 919 days of play time – a whopping 22,000 hours – and while only a chunk of that went into the collection log, it's still been a massive undertaking.
The response from the OSRS community has been generally congratulatory toward Bazilijus, with a few customary jeers about the absolute state of the gaming chair subjected to this grind. This achievement has also reignited discussion over the feasibility of completing the entire collection log, and indeed whether it should be completable at all, as it notoriously requires obtaining dozens of moonshot 3rd Age and Gilded items from clue scrolls with staggeringly low drop rates in the tens of thousands.
The napkin math varies dramatically, with some players estimating that obtaining every 3rd Age and Gilded item would take upwards of 60 years of play, or as little as 10 or 15 years. This is why many enthusiasts reckon another player, Marni, is closest to clearing the entire log because they have far more 3rd Age and Gilded drops.
Update: The pain finally ended from r/2007scape
Even the most generous collection log estimates assume reasonable RNG, but bad luck is very much a thing. To put things into perspective, it just so happens that one player very recently completed the collection log for one boss after a staggering 19,000 kills, putting them well above the drop rate for an item that's incomparably more common than a single 3rd Age piece. For reference, Bazilijus completed the same boss log within 2,613 kills. If you apply that kind of bad luck to the drop rates for 3rd Age, planet Earth exploding becomes the real limiting factor for finishing the entire log.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Earlier this year, another OSRS player finished a 19,000 hour grind maxing out four extremely difficult characters.
Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with 12DOVE since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.