Beaver-collecting mastermind behind 13,000-hour MMO account suggests things got a bit out of hand: "I sort of realized it would be possible to do something unique and stupid and get the most beavers"

Update: I was able to get in touch with Old School RuneScape and beaver enthusiast West Stairs, and the story behind this legendary account – which has run up 552 days (that's 13,248 hours) of total (heavily AFK) play time according to a screenshot shared with GamesRadar+ – is a doozy.

"Well it started as just a Woodcutting alt account," West Stairs tells me. "I'd AFK Woodcut Magic Trees while doing schoolwork and stuff, then stake them at the Duel Arena with friends once they stacked up. Then I made [the account] a Pure for Edgeville Bounty Hunter, which got removed when I was almost done training my account.

"So I decided to just get 200m Woodcutting at Redwood [trees] and hope they make another Bounty Hunter. I sort of stopped actually playing the game on my main account, but Woodcutting was a fun goal while working from home, as you only need to click once every five mins or so."

West Stairs did get his 200 million Woodcutting XP, and with the realization that beaver pets were now 15x more common, says "I sort of realized it would be possible to do something unique and stupid and get the most beavers in the game."

At one point, another player, Osu, raced West Stairs to collect 100 beaver pets. West Stairs won, it goes without saying, and then they just kept going, hoping to one day max out the in-game beaver collection log.

Original story: Old School RuneScape, like many MMOs, is filled with rare and coveted pets that will follow you around once obtained, cutely showing off your accomplishments. The Woodcutting skill in OSRS has a fitting beaver pet tied to it, and even as one of the more easily attained pets, it's still exceedingly rare, with the highest base chance being 1 in 72,321 logs chopped, or 0.00143%, according to the game's wiki. Yet this has not stopped one determined player from collecting nearly 200 pet beavers for no discernible benefit.

The hero of our story is West Stairs, one of the top 500 Woodcutting skillers in all of OSRS. They hit 200 million Woodcutting experience, the maximum in-game XP cap, some time ago, earning a permanent 447 ranking on the high scores. But they have continued cutting wood and gathering beavers.

By their estimate, they would have exceeded 500 million Woodcutting XP had it been tracked. As a reminder, hitting max level in a skill, 99, only requires a little over 13 million XP.

You can still get pet drops even after maxing out your XP, and you actually get a whopping 15x drop rate boost for pets of skills you have totally maxed out. This boosts West Stair's beaver odds all the way up to 0.02147%. Okay, still not great, but better.

The thing is, you can only have one of each pet. So while West Stairs might have received 193 beavers since starting this grind in early 2023 (according to their #8 beaver post, though they obviously started Woodcutting much earlier), all those duplicates have just gone into the ether. Tragically, this means West Stairs can't stroll through the world with an army of 193 beavers trailing behind them.

Their in-game Collection Log shows that West Stairs has obtained exactly one pet: the beaver. They've also only obtained 106 unique items in the entire log, meaning they have more beavers than they do items. Bear in mind, plenty of people have played OSRS for hundreds of thousands of hours without obtaining a single pet, and most people have probably only seen a couple at most.

West Stairs is best described as a known but obscure oddity in the OSRS community. I've seen them mentioned in plenty of scattered posts, so their beaver collection has clearly earned them some notoriety. "Love west stairs, my little unhinged woodcutter," as one user put it.

Asked about their goal in all of this, West Stairs recently said to one Twitter user: "More beavers". They say they have no idea how much time they've spent cutting this specific tree, redwoods. "At least I don't pay for Twitter," they told a Twitter Blue subscriber in a separate post who was rudely wondering what could drive somebody to these extremes.

I've seen reports that West Stairs is looking to max the beaver collection log, said to cap out at 250. I haven't been able to get in touch with West Stairs to confirm this, but I like to assume there is some sort of light at the end of this tunnel.

At 14,354 hours played and 944,143 fish caught, I think this World of Warcraft player might be the best fisherman in MMO history: "We're all just pressing buttons... I just choose to press mine to fish."