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