Somehow it took an MMO's entire community more than 2 years to find an impossibly rare, 1 in 500,000 fishing drop – and after all that, it's basically worthless

Exciting times in Old School RuneScape, folks. An MMO mystery spanning more than two years has finally been solved following hundreds of thousands of discarded fish and boots, and a proper community scavenger hunt.

I'm going to skip to the end a little bit. "The mystery drop from the Stranglewood fishing spot has been obtained, at a confirmed rate of 1/500,000!" the official OSRS Wiki announced earlier today, citing confirmation from Jagex developer Mod Lykos.

Now let's go back a little bit. In July 2023, OSRS added a new fishing spot to an area called The Stranglewood. There are tons of fishing spots in the game, and each one has an assigned loot pool. You can't catch saltwater sharks in a river in a forest, for instance.

This Stranglewood fishing spot's loot pool looked like nothing special at first, but as the OSRS wiki notes, Mod Lykos teased last month that players had yet to pull something from its depths. This sparked an invasion of fisherman flocking to the Stranglewood to join in the search, often in dedicated worlds.

Today, August 11, they found it. The 1 in 500,000 drop is a Chromium Ingot, used to craft ancient rings worn for stat boosts. It's worth about 40,000 gold on the in-game market at the time of writing. For context, good money makers in OSRS are generally in the realm of several million gold per hour. The bar is not worth very much, but the knowledge is priceless.

"Over 1 million items were fished from the spot between the initial reveal and the ingot's discovery; in under one month, roughly ten times as many items were gathered as there were over the previous two years," the OSRS wiki notes.

I was contacted by probably the best fisherman in World of Warcraft, if not any MMO ever, and I was not prepared for how deep the waters went: "It's literally been an almost 10-year battle."