With the determination that makes MMOs special, Old School RuneScape player kills 16,000 chickens by hand for a week because "I like my feathers covered in blood"

After more than 10 years of game journalism, one of my favorite parts of this job is seeing all the ridiculous challenges that gamers think up and pursue for no particular reason, from 1,700-hour speedruns to absurd game-breaking corner cases in Baldur's Gate 3. Timeless MMO Old School RuneScape remains a premier source of this sort of behavior, as evidenced by one player who recently spent a week needlessly killing 16,000 chickens by hand just to prove a point. 

I've reported on and spoken to a lot of standout OSRS players over the years, and I'll admit that the chicken slaying from MordorMordorMordor, as they're called on Reddit, didn't move the needle for me at first. But then I started to unpack the work that went into it, the math that came out of it, and the community response to it all, and ultimately I knew I had to talk to them. And yes, partly to ask why.

Earlier this month, our hero crafted up 100,000 arrow shafts now in need of feathers for training Fletching. As many commenters on the post above have pointed out, OSRS players can easily buy feathers cheaply from shops. They even sell feathers in bulk now, presumably because nobody – sorry, that's almost nobody – wants to gather them all by hand. But store-bought feathers wouldn't cut it for ol' Mordor. "They are too expensive and I don't get to train combat," they said of the feather packs. And besides, they added in another Reddit reply, "I like my feathers covered in blood." 

This week, they shared their completed grind with the community: 100,000 feathers from just over 16,000 chickens. The completed loot tracker, which may well be a first for the game, is absolutely pristine. But what really stood out to me is the attention to detail that went into this grind. 

For example, Mordor logged "probably the luckiest/unluckiest RS event I've ever experienced" in a duel with one ironclad chicken that soaked up three consecutive zero-damage hits. Another fighter, dubbed Clucky Balboa, took five hits to kill.