This MMO is the only place you'd see a record-setting 771-hour "speedrun"

An Old School RuneScape player has won a marathon to get one of the MMO's most-respected items in record time, which would be... 771 hours.

He Box Jonge initially decided to take up the 'speedrun' challenge to get a Max Cape eight months ago, noting that they wanted to beat another player called JCW to the mantle of the fastest ever to do it. To give you a sense of just how long that takes, getting the cosmetic means fully levelling all 23 skills to 99. 

As a former Jagex employee revealed in 2020, the quickest the feat had been completed before this kind of race was established was 2,156 hours. Even by Runescape's standards, this 'speedrun' was always going to be more of a marathon and fairly grueling.

Both players used the same ruleset for the run: a standard, unrestricted account must be used, and play time must be measured in-game. The former was established because it allows for the use of alternative accounts, which means both players can borrow from their wealthier characters to train expensive skills. In-game time was followed, meanwhile, as it promotes a healthier run than encouraging people to grind through the night by following real-time.

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OSRS skills scale exponentially, you see, which means taking a skill to level two from one only requires 83 points, whereas levelling one to 99 from 98 demands over 1.2 million. By the time you've reached level 92, you're only halfway done XP-wise.  

As for the effort it takes to level a skill, one Reddit user has an informative and clear breakdown on a dedicated speedrunning subreddit. "'Maxing' an account means getting every single skill to level 99, which achieves a total level of 2277 and requires around 300 million total experience," this helpful post explains. 

This post also notes the outlier training methods used for the crafting and smithing skills. These skills would normally take much longer, but even the longest grinds can be expedited with enough money – in this case, billions of in-game gold burned in a matter of hours on extremely expensive armor.   

This speedrun category - if we can call it that - didn't really exist before the race, and we reckon few will try to top He Box Jonge's record. For what it's worth, JCW finished their race to get the Max Cape with a time of 791 hours, which creates a pretty thin margin for such a long run, suggesting it wouldn't be easy to improve on the new record even if someone was willing to put in the time. 

This Runescape community was recently stunned after one player cashed in eight years of grinding to set an untouchable record in just 60 seconds.