Nearly three years ago, Old School RuneScape player, Twitch streamer, and YouTube content creator Pen Sir decided to collect unopened reward caskets acquired by completing scavenger hunt-like minigames called clue scrolls. With over 10,000 clue caskets amassed, like a dragon savoring his pile of gold, he's finally decided to crack them open, distilling years of work down to one delicious shot of dopamine.
The announcement that Pen Sir is "finally going to be opening this up tomorrow [January 3]" immediately made waves in the OSRS Reddit community. This is a big deal; the screenshot, showing unthinkable piles of caskets, is a head-turner. The equivalent would be watching a man arrange lines of dominoes for years and threaten to finally knock the first one over.
2007scapefrom r/2007scape/comments/1q21kor/finally_going_to_be_opening_this_up_tomorrow
Speaking with GamesRadar+ ahead of the big uncorking, Pen Sir says that at this point, "When I click 'Time Played' the game just tells me to touch grass..."
Pen Sir began this casket haul years ago in the hopes of winning an event organized by his in-game clan. That event never panned out, he says, but the caskets kept a-stackin'. He says he's only ever accidentally opened a single one this entire time, though he did once lose a whopping 80 of them to PvP foolishness. "Don't afk in the Wilderness," he warns, tipping his hat to Old School RuneScape's unforgiving PvP zone.
"Really it's been years since I've opened any clues, I'm really excited for it," he says. "The past couple of nights I've gotten maybe 1-2 hours of sleep, I'm really excited to finally open them."
Completing clue scrolls, especially on an Iron Man account like Pen Sir's which can't trade other players, takes quite a bit of time and hard-to-find items, but it's a reliable way to rack up Collection Log points – the purest way to test your completion of an MMO that's not designed to be conventionally beaten. By his calculations, he's hoping for around 500 new items to add to the collection log – hopefully including a specific piece of highly valued 3rd Age armor.
"I know most people hate this item - but I would love to get 3rd Age vambraces," he says. "Just wearing a super rare item without people realizing it is the weirdest flex to me but it sounds fun. Besides the clue stuff though I'm hoping to get some cool dusk mystic pieces, dragonstone armor and the evil chicken outfit!"
Finally getting to open these things feels "surreal," he says. "The temptation has been crazy, weirdly enough running simulations helped me," Pen Sir says. "But I got a bit obsessive about it. I was making a new spreadsheet every week running updated numbers on how many items I could expect. Then there was a site (oldschool.gg) that had a simulator and I would try to compare my spreadsheets to the simulation."
It sounds like a monumental achievement, and it most certainly is, but as Pen Sir says, "I guess everything in OSRS is a long-term grind." That's just the game, and this is just how he chose to play it, which is the real beauty of it. These clue rewards were largely acquired passively through more typical achievement and loot grinding, but eventually it snowballed into a historic loot shower. Just another day in the OSRS subreddit.
