admin Evergreen MMO Old School RuneScape recently released its first new skill, Sailing, which prompted a rare race to become the first player in the world to reach the maximum skill level of 99. Countless diehard grinders showed up for the race, and after a few days, a player named AsianGrinder took first place. In a post-mortem of the Sailing grind, AsianGrinder says it was anything but easy, complaining of physical pain from long gaming hours.
Sailing, as the name suggests, is about maintaining a boat, fishing, delivering supplies, exploring uncharted lands, battling sea creatures, navigating nautical routes, and other seaside adventures. OSRS players have already begun mathing out optimal training methods, but at launch, everyone was flying – rather, sailing – mostly blind, following their best guess, beta findings, and emerging anecdotal wisdom. For his part, AsianGrinder says he did “mainly Barracuda Trials” to train, but the grind started well before the skill was even released on November 19.
Given the closeness of the race, with AsianGrinder often neck-and-neck with runner-ups like FasT 07 according to community charts of Sailing XP gained, it would seem these preparations proved essential.
“After playing for several hours on day 1, I realized I was in the top 25 on the Overall Hiscores page,” he recalls. “This gave me a crazy drive to keep going.” A game update forced him offline, so he decided to get “3-4 hours of sleep.” This was apparently all the rest involved in this grind, which ended roughly four days after release on November 23, as Mod Hend of developer Jagex confirmed.
“This ended up being one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life,” AsianGrinder says. “I was completely drained of energy, sleep deprived and mentally exhausted having stayed awake for days.”
AsianGrinder’s girlfriend gets a special shoutout for “keeping up with my health, providing me food, and making sure I was generally okay. I can’t thank her enough for allowing me to do this despite me having noticeable issues in the end such as heavy chest pains and overall struggling to stay awake.”
As a reminder, sitting still and/or going too long without sleep can pose serious health risks, so get some sleep and some stretches in, gamers.
Now we wait to see who’ll be the first person to reach the maximum possible XP in Sailing. OSRS skills cap at 200 million experience, whereas reaching level 99 requires just over 13 million. In other words, someone has to pull off about 15 Sailing marathons – with better training methods, sure, but a taxing grind nonetheless. AsianGrinder, however, will not be competing for 200m XP. His watch has, at last, ended.
“I appreciate all the support you guys have given me along the way – the kind messages when I passed you by on my boat and everyone showing me love afterwards,” he concludes.
MMO players get a sailing skill, immediately become pirates channeling a famous 2006 disaster: “Piracy as emergent gameplay is honestly perfect.”
