Old School RuneScape is so old and so big that the devs are about "to run out of" a key tech resource and have to do "a bunch of work to stop the game exploding soon"

Old School RuneScape developer Jagex is fast approaching the kind of technical obstacle that, in some ways, many MMO creators would kill for: the game's apparently been around for so long, and has added so much new content, that it's about to run out of an essential technical resource that risks, in one developer's words, "the game exploding."

This revelation began, as many interesting OSRS facts do, with a joke on the 2007scape subreddit. A fake social media post attributed to beloved developer Mod Ash reads, "I'm afraid the engine has finally reached its limit. We've decided the only way to fix the spaghetti code is to delete the game entirely. We're wiping the servers at midnight. It's been a pleasure, but it's time to go outside."

OSRS is notorious for two things. Well, at least two. Firstly, the game's aforementioned spaghetti code can cause inexplicable and occasionally devastating bugs even in seemingly unrelated updates. More than once, the entire economy has been destroyed out of nowhere. Secondly, "engine work" is semi-regularly used to explain why certain changes or features aren't possible or will take a long time to implement. This Mod Ash joke lampoons both, and it could've ended with that, but Jagex developer Mod Nin replied to the Reddit post with some interesting trivia.

"You joke, but we are imminently going to run out of IDs to assign to models and scenery so we need to do a bunch of work to stop the game exploding soon," Mod Nin says.

It gets better. Apparently this has happened before, and the last time it did, Jagex just sort of kicked it under the bed to deal with it later. And now, well, later has come.

"Yep, around May 2018," Nin adds in a reply. "Either the developer at the time was in a bit of a hurry (likely) or didn't have much faith in the longevity of the game (who knows), as they only doubled the available capacity."

Thousands upon thousands of object and model IDs are logged in resources like the sterling OSRS Wiki and OSRSBox, from lamps to statues to stones. Whenever Jagex adds new stuff to the game, new IDs get used up. And apparently, Jagex's pile of spare IDs is getting low.

The easiest way to check this is to look for newly added items – like objects related to the Sailing skill, the first all-new skill added to OSRS since its release (or resurrection) over a decade ago. Sailing items like the Camphor cargo hold have IDs in the 60000 range. Another new entry, November 2025's Grimstone cave entrance, is 60117. I'm blindly assuming, just going off standard number patterns in code and OSRS history, that 64000 is the brick wall here.

I don't know exactly how you would remedy this – maybe, as some players half-jokingly proposed, you double the ID stash again and kick it back under the bed – but I can see why it would be a problem. If Jagex can't assign IDs, the game and its orbiting tools presumably can't keep up with where and what things are, assuming they can be placed at all. Which sounds like a bad thing, especially for an MMO running so many checks between players and servers. It doesn't sound like it's a big or unexpected issue. Rather, it seems like an interesting side effect of a game this old going on for this long. Maybe it really is engine work sometimes.

RuneScape creators asked their mom to help design the MMO's first enemies: "Only much later did they even consider actually hiring people."