Useless Skills
Today I learned a spectacularly useless skill, but I'm quite excited about it.Old School Runescape is an MMORPG originally released in 2002, then known as Runescape 2. "Old School" comes from the fact that in 2012 the developers decided to allow players to play on servers running the 2007 version of the game. Many people, myself included, think Old School, or OSRS, is significantly more enjoyable than Runescape 3.
Anybody who has ever tried to get really good at a game - be it in the form of speedrunning, esports, or efficient MMO grinding - knows you have to understand how the game works on a deep level. So, I had to learn a bit more about how OSRS works.
In OSRS, minutes are not split into 60 seconds - they are split under 100 "ticks", each of which are (obviously) 0.6 seconds. One tick is the shortest amount of time it takes for anything to happen in the game. Ticks are very important for anyone trying to play Runescape efficiently, because they allow players to maximise the reward for the time put in. Each player character has 23 unique skills which they can train, gain experience in, and level up from the starting level of 1, to the maximum level of 99. A player who has all all 23 skills leveled to 99 is said to be "maxed", and is one of the biggest achievements in the game. When I player first creates his character, he has 0 experience (xp) in all skills, apart from hitpoints, with level 2 requiring 83xp to reach. Level 99 requires a little over 13 million xp.
Different skills require different methods of gaining xp, some of which are faster or slower than others. When players talk about ways of training, they often refer simply to the xp/hour of that method of training in its respective skill. So for woodcutting, the skill in question (and my favourite skill as a child), one method of training is to chop yew logs. This yields roughly 50kxp/hour, depending on your current level. The higher your level, the more proficient you are in the skill, and so the higher xp rates are possible. There are several different types of fellable trees in Runescape, and each of them offer different experience per log, with the higher-tier trees taking significantly longer to chop on average. The best balance between speed and xp was known for a long time to be teak trees, where roughly 65kxp/hour was possible - meaning to reach 99 in that skill alone would require 200 hours of gameplay.
But, this is where people figured out how the game actually worked, and how to manipulate it. Woodcutting, like everything else, is based on the tick system. When the player gives the command to cut the tree, they have a chance to obtain a log on the first tick of the action, and every subsequent 5 ticks afterwards, they have another chance. Given that 5 ticks is 3 seconds, you could theoretically cut 1200 teak logs an hour (ignoring the fact your inventory gets full and you have to dispose of the logs, which takes time). You can't simply click on the tree, get your 1 tick log, perform another action on the next tick, and then click the tree again on tick 3, because the game "remembers" that cutting that first log was a 5-tick action, so you cannot cut another until tick 6. For several years in the game, people just accepted that the game "remembered" like that and got on with trying to grind out their 200 hours.
Until one day, someone discovered that actually you can trick the game, but it was in a very niche way. There is a particular spot on a tropical island where there are two teak trees three squares apart, allowing the player to stand on the square in the middle. This was perfect, as you could fell one tree, turn around and fell the other, wait for the first to respawn, etc. There are birds, spiders and snakes flying around, although they are fairly low level and not capable of doing any real damage to the player. The birds are especially low level.
It turns out, that you can get two of these birds to help you. First you have to wait in the area for 15 minutes disguised as a monkey (it's a long story) until the creatures in the area will no longer attack you on site. Take off your monkey disguise and get some fresh air, it was far too stuffy in that thing. We want to get two of the birds to attack us, but they have 5 hitpoints, and we can deal a lot more than 5 hitpoints and we don't want to kill them, so cast the lowest level spell in the game, wind strike, which has a max hit of 2, on two birds so they both attack you.
Every monster in the game has a set attack cycle, so just look woodcutting, their attacks happen once every x ticks. Birds attack once every 4 ticks. You can imagine their 4 tick attack cycle like beats in a bar of 4/4 (we'll come back to this later). They can both attack on the same beat of the bar, or any combination of two different ones. Through a bit of luck and repositioning, you can engineer yourself to be standing in between the two teak trees, with the two birds attacking you exactly 2 teaks apart - in other words, on beats 1 and 3 of our bar.
Fortunately the birds do so little damage they will never be able to kill us, so we can let them wail away on us. But we can abuse some more mechanics in the game for our advantage. The game has an "auto-retaliate" feature, which is fairly self explanatory. If your character gets attacked, on the next tick he will turn towards his assailant and launch an attack. But we don't want to damage our avian friends, because they're fragile. Fortunately it is possible to equip a bow, but with no arrows, and the way the game calculates damage, it will register the player as attacking before calculating 0 damage every time, and giving the player a helpful message in the chat box that there is no more ammo in their quiver. But your character will not retaliate if he is already performing a memorable action, such as cutting a tree, so we have to tell him to stop. Combat just so happens to be one of very few actions in the game that will overwrite the engines memory, and so our "bar" looks like this:
Anacrusis: Player attempts to cut tree by clicking on it
Tick 1 : Bird 1 attacks player, player clicks off tree to stop cutting
Tick 2: Player turns to face bird 1 with auto-retaliate, does 0 damage, player clicks on tree
Tick 3: Bird 2 attacks player, player clicks off tree to stop cutting
Tick 4: Player turns to face bird 2 with auto-retaliate, does 0 damage, player clicks on tree.
And so, when a player would've normally only been able to get 1 log, suddenly he can get 3, meaning the maximum number of logs he can get skyrockets from 1200 to 3600, and the number of ours required to 99 goes from 200 to just 67.
With all this being said, I am not a robot. Clicking every 0.6 seconds exactly is tough, and I first off started trying to do this with my Spotify favourites playing in the background - trying to keep rhythm while listening to a different one was impossible. But fortunately it turns out plenty of runners have created 100bpm playlists which conveniently have beats every 0.6 seconds - just like the OSRS engine. I found one and admittedly it is far too poppy for my tastes, but it gets the job turn, I simply make my next action on every beat, and happily click along to the songs.
It's a satisfying feeling to understand something on a deeper level, and the technique itself is actually incredibly relaxing for me, weirdly entrancing. I have no idea who first had the idea, but it happened several years after the creation of the game which I think is pretty impressive.
And of course, it shows some people have far too much time on their hands, and that I am one of them. So, why do I do it... Like I have said before, for exactly the same reason I do anything else. Because I can. :-)