Almost nowhere but in MMOs will you find speedruns measured in months, not minutes or hours. One Old School RuneScape diehard recently shattered one of the most time-consuming records around, racking up 6,572 hours played on a quest to collect every pet in the game as fast as possible.
Our champion is Coxie, an OSRS player who, three years after getting all of these pets the old-fashioned way, decided to do it again on a timer. The first chapter of the video series chronicling this was uploaded in April 2023.
OSRS pets are cute little companions that are generally dropped by bosses, tied to minigames, or awarded for completing skilling actions like chopping logs and catching fish. Exact pet drop rates can vary wildly, but even the most common pets are fairly rare among players. Most high-level players probably only have a few pets to their name at most, and the true chase rares among the pet collection can – demonstrably – demand months of RNG hell, not to mention substantial and wide-ranging game skill.
A lot of pets come from difficult bosses that are slow to kill, and with pet drop rates sitting in the 1/5,000 range a lot of the time, you’ll have to kill them a lot. It can also be scary when pets appear to have generous drop rates. For example, the little obsidian wyrm Jal-Nib-Rek has a drop rate of just 1/100. Sounds easy, right? However, that is one out of every 100 Inferno completions, and the Inferno is the kind of grueling PvE challenge that only a tiny percentage of OSRS players can beat at all, let alone many times.
Coxie managed to get all 71 pets in just over 273 days of playtime, or 6,572 real hours. His final pet was, amusingly, a little cow named Beef, which is among the easiest pets to acquire at a drop rate of 1/1,000 in trivial content.
In an October 10 Twitter post marking the finish line, Coxie explains that he made this pet hunting account “3 years, 9 months, 23 days ago.” Some quick math shows that, since creating this account, Coxie has spent approximately 30% of his waking hours (generously assuming eight hours of sleep) playing OSRS, and about 20% of all hours.
OSRS developer Jagex verified Coxie’s achievement and his playtime. The developer also shared just how far ahead Coxie is compared to his competition. As of now, the second-place all-pet speedrun sits at a staggering 572 days, or 13,728 hours. I’ve learned not to doubt the tenacity of RuneScape players, but I have to imagine this record will hold for a good while.