In pursuit of a priceless raccoon, MMO player spends 149 hours stealing over 14,000 fruit while dodging XP gains like landmines

When Old School RuneScape player IcarusLives made a new character on the MMO, they had just one plan in mind: farming. Their new Ultimate Ironman account, locked out of trading with other players or even banking their own items, would be a Farming-only skiller account – already a catastrophic commitment in and of itself. Their new name? Is Farmer. Beautiful.

But they couldn't go it alone. They needed a companion, someone to join them in their farmhand journey. They needed Rocky, they decided, the pet raccoon obtained as a random drop. And they spent 149 hours stealing over 14,000 fruit to get 'em. 

0xp Rocky Pet acquired on my Farming-Only UIM, "Is Farmer" from r/2007scape

The problem is that Rocky can only be obtained through the Thieving skill, which presented a problem for Is Farmer, who can only train Farming. The other problem is that, like all skilling pets, Rocky is an incredibly rare drop – albeit nowhere near as rare as the 1-in-100 million gem recently obtained by another OSRS player for the second time in history – but we'll get to that later. 

So, how do you train Thieving while getting Farming experience instead? Well, just ask the thousands of OSRS players who piled into a 16-year old minigame back in October 2023 to farm XP and get addicted to fruit. That minigame, Sorceress' Garden, technically counts as Thieving but actually awards Farming XP when you first steal the coveted sq'irk fruits at the heart of the titular garden. You have to do this one sq'irk at a time, but to someone mentally capable of playing an Ultimate Ironman account, let alone a dedicated skiller, that kind of tedium is small potatoes. 

The good news is that the sq'irk tree is statistically one of the best ways to obtain Rocky. According to the OSRS wiki, it's among the highest base chances for a pet drop of all Thieving activities. The bad news is that this 'good drop rate' is still one in 10,339. Welcome to Old School RuneScape, folks. 

Lo and behold, Is Farmer ended up picking over 14,000 sq'irks before Rocky finally arrived, as IcarusLives explained in a Reddit reply. Naturally, they had to avoid gaining XP in any other skills, Thieving or otherwise, the entire game, lest they ruin their themed account. From the start of their account to Rocky's arrival, they'd logged 149 hours of game time. Their advice for anyone hoping to run the sq'irk garden that they did? "Suffer through." 

Terrifyingly, IcarusLives notes that there are other zero-XP pets out there including an Agility option, but they reckon that's "a much bigger grind than the Thieving pet." A video from OSRS creator Rendi notes that the technically feasible Agility method would require "a lot of fucking time," and if OSRS players are saying this, you know it's true. And of course, we can't talk about OSRS Agility pets without mentioning the squirrel-hunting penguin that indirectly forced another player to pour hot coffee on his butthole. 

So instead of that self-imposed penance (the Agility, not the butt coffee), with Rocky in tow, Is Farmer has headed to the Tithe Farming minigame to train their favorite skill, tilling the fields with some essential help from the tiny little paws of a 1-in-10,000 raccoon. 

OSRS players ended up sq'irkin' so hard that developer Jagex officially dedicated two themed worlds to the minigame.