i've still been logging on most days just to do mainly farming and birdhouse runs. i have a big big collection of seed-shaped pixels i want to slowly turn into other thing-shaped pixels. a couple weeks ago i was seriously debating making an ultimate ironman i guess because of a weird notion i had that the less you enjoy a video game the better you are at it. i've truly come to believe that's all there is to it, i don't know how or why people play like that. i also enjoy collecting big stacks of things too much for something like that

i enjoy hoarding collecting things so much that i'll spend most of my money on increased bank capacity intead of cleaning out my tab of completely useless one-time quest items. i have a system in my life that if i say i'm going to do something i (within reason) absolutely have to do it, and i made the mistake of uttering to myself on the way to the bank "how much is more bank space, if it's like 2 mil i'll buy it", failing to consider that was about 75% of my cash

yes that screenshot's from almost three weeks ago, i've only just reached an "i guess i have enough to check in with" threshold. umm since then i also got 101 farming, completed the easy combat achievements tier, did some slayer uhhh. look i was honestly hoping to keep my game activities lowkey enough that i wouldn't have to come back here and remember what i've been up to anytime soon

but today i did some questing. decided to finally see what Varlamore is all about since a lot of guides now recommend activities that take place here. i have kind of an old-dog-new-tricks mentality with this game i don't know why, i'm constantly reminded of how little i know about post-OSRS content. i completed the quest Twilight's Promise for which i was mostly lost in terms of story because it directly followed a quest i did eight months ago for a clue scroll. but i got to feed a big bird

did its sequel the Heart of Darkness afterwards. quests are pretty cool nowadays i should check out more of them. now i'm all invested and looking forward to the final chapter coming in the summer, i'm sure i'll still remember what happened here. there's a bad murder cult and the prince and i went undercover to investigate. that's my note for future me

newer quest bosses are so hard dude, i have to move around sometimes. and sometimes, sometimes my prayers don't block absolutely 100% of damage at all times. i say this jokingly but then i took a nap after looking at a guide for the bosses of another quest and dreamed i died to them. hardcore death dreams are back on the menu baby page five zephie dot net i am locked in

more questing yesterday as i found myself planning out another long "do that so i can do this" agenda that i will not complete before burning out on the game. here's a new* (*from 2021) free-to-play quest where about a third of the whole thing was a Rocky parody cutscene. so awesome, i love when one thing reminds me of another thing. i did that so i could do Defender of Varrock, so i could access a dungeon that has zombies that drop a weapon i want

oops. basically that means as an ironman i will never get any loot from them ever forever because other players will be in there tagging every mob simultaneously. sometimes i wish this singleplayer version of runescape was singleplayer

to teach this dog the oldest new trick there is, i am finally trying out Nightmare Zone which was the first activity added to Old School ten years ago. it definitely comes off as a skeleton crew update when they likely didn't know how long OSRS would last. yeah just take a preexisting empty room throw a bunch of old bosses in there at the same time aaand now our playerbase wants us dead for messing with this preserved snapshot of the game

i know they generally make the game more AFK-friendly over time but i didn't realize how early on they'd made training combat so not even a video game. really i could allay many of my hardcore fears by camping out this or sand/ammonite crabs for a few weeks but i don't like training combat outside of slayer tasks if i don't have to. i'm only here to rack up points so that i can do something else so i can--you know what it'll just post this

i started Haunted Mine years ago then bailed shy of fighting the boss because i kept reading that it's weirdly difficult for its level. there's like, other things to look out for instead of just making sure my numbers are high enough, which is very strange for a boss from 2004. but anyway all the things on this list are in service of doing the next thing. but i'm going to say eff all dat noise because sailing is here today!!!

(in alpha)

it's kind of surreal. i remember the idea of sailing getting added as a skill being a running joke 15 years ago. for comparison RS3 has added four new skills in the time it took the OSRS community to lower the volume of their screaming long enough to allow Jagex to add one. there was still a lot of screaming here but i can drown it out with the sound of the ocean waves

considering my Tempoross plugin is active in the bottom left i'd say i'm somewhere around there. the world map feels much larger suddenly. what i expected was, i'd get aboard a boat, the screen would turn black and transition to a version of the world where "scale theory" (the devs' term for why the world is extremely small and compact) no longer applies, with hardly anything but ocean around me. but no everywhere there's ocean already in the world is sailable and it's crazy. what's also surprising is how not terrible the boat feels to control

the alpha lets me go up to level 30 and gives me a suggested list of tasks to try out, and already it's very funny that the sailing icon on the skills tab takes up the same amount of space as woodcutting or firemaking. there've been big progress updates on sailing for two years with a lot of different developers talking about their work on it, meanwhile i can go back to the early 2000s and see a news post that just says "hey guys Andrew here, i added a new skill 'thieving' to the game today tell me what you think, happy scaping"

i don't even know where i am bro, i am on an adventure. i found one little island with some trees and a single locked chest on it, so i wondered if i sailed back to the mainland and brought an axe back with me i would find the key inside a tree or something. that didn't work and i quickly stopped caring but damn when was the last time i had that actual RPG exploration feeling in this game, in a time when i am always only a single click away from learning what everything on my screen is and does, and the most calculatedly efficient way to deal with it. i think we should burn down all wikis i hate information

i also didn't think the new islands would be so. concrete? i expected instances with a procedurally-generated ocean but instead there's just a huge new "bunch of islands" section of the world map that i'm free to explore. there's a load of new islands scattered across the world but the alpha is limited to one area, and even after it opens up i'm sure it'll quickly all be figured out but for now i'm revelling in not knowing what da hell is going on. i was alone in the middle of nowhere and someone sailed by me saying "disappointment lies southwards" so naturally i kept going southwards. it was just a lighthouse with seemingly zero things to do in it for now. that's fine i guess

there's an unlockable activity at level 30 called Barracuda Trials which look cool, unfortunately the main way of actually leveling the skill is delivering cargo between ports which is very boring and not something i wanted to do for very long on a test server. but since it is a test server i thought it would be a good opportunity to practice bosses. no such luck, i am not permitted to exit the designated Boat Zone. so i started rummaging through my bank looking for a way to at least kill myself, so that maybe the dreams would stop. no such luck, i am not permitted to exit Boat Hell

i'm looking forward to sailing (full version). i will not be enticed by the allure of the hiscores on release, i will play it normally and at my own pace which is for eight hours across a single day every six months. i am already sick of Sea Shanty 2 though