Outside of a brief internet cafe dalliance back in the early 2000s, I haven’t played much RuneScape, either in its modern or old-school forms. But maybe I should, because Old School RuneScape continues to generate tales of triumph, tragedy, fantasy cop-befuddlement, and jaw-dropping luck.
Take, for example, the player who just became the second confirmed person ever (after someone named enneUni) to obtain the game’s rarest drop. As confirmed by GamesRadar, a player named Coti managed to get their hands on an uncut onyx from one of OSRS’ bags full of gems, essentially grab-bags of 40 assorted gems that players can purchase from certain in-game vendors.
Uncut Onyx from Bag Full of Gems! from r/2007scape
They work pretty simply: open the bag and get one of six possible rare stones, with some being more likely than others. But there’s the rub: per the OSRS Wiki, five of the gems you can get from the bag—uncut sapphires, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and dragonstones—all have reasonable likelihoods of dropping.
The final type, uncut onyxes, have a one in one hundred million shot of dropping, making Coti’s find more than twice as unlikely as winning the UK lottery jackpot (though I should caveat that: with 40 chances at finding one per bag, the practical rate evens out to one in two and a half million). Even better? The uncut onyx itself isn’t actually all that special.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, you can turn it into some powerful jewellery or sell it for a chunk of change, but it’s not special in the mind-boggling, world-altering way you might expect a one in one hundred million drop in any other game to be special. That’s because (as GamesRadar points out) there are plenty of other ways to get your hands on uncut onyx in OSRS that don’t rely on 8-leaf clover style luck. The odds of getting one from a boss named Skotizo, for instance, are a mere one in one thousand.
So it’s the drop itself, rather than its contents, that’s really stunning here, and the OSRS community on Reddit has reacted accordingly. “1/100,000,000 odds?” wrote a commenter named DewDropDreamer3, “You should play the lottery! But then again, who needs irl riches when you’ve got a shiny black gem in a 2001 medieval clicking simulator.”
They have a point. Other players simply feared what Coti using up all their luck at once would do to them. A Reddit user named BoulderFalcon prophesied that “This man is about to have a heart attack on his drive to work tomorrow followed by a plane crashing on top of him followed by a meteorite striking him in the head to finish the job.” On the other hand: shiny virtual stone, so it was probably still worth it.
www.pcgamer.com