MMO community kind of concerned for one player who spent "between 2,500 and 4,500 hours" catching 1 million of the same terrible fish by hand

Pushing the limits of stubbornness and inside jokes, one Old School RuneScape player has spent thousands of hours over several real-life years manually catching one million of the same fish, to the amazement (and concern) of the MMO's community.

Reddit user AvengedKalas, or Zoinks Bro in-game, shared their achievement last week. They estimate it took them "between 2,500 and 4,500 hours" to catch one million raw monkfish on their account. They say they began catching monkfish around the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which at this point would be a good three or so years ago depending on how you define the beginning of it. Frankly, the fact that they seemingly can't account for a 2,000 hour discrepancy is a little concerning, but I suppose MMOs do blend together after a while.

AvengedKalas explained in comments that they'd put two or three hours into AFK monkfish fishing a day, splitting their time with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, or just playing other games – notably Baten Kaitos, an excellent choice – as most OSRS players do during long grinds. OSRS is nothing if not primo second monitor material.

"Did you ever think about quitting early?" asked one no-doubt awestruck player.

"Nah. It wasn't a matter of if but a matter of when," AvengedKalas said.

"You ok?" asked another onlooker.

"No," AvengedKalas replied. Welp.

Don't get too concerned. Another viewer expressed that "I get that everyone needs an escape and some downtime doing things they enjoy but fuck me what a complete waste of your life." AvengedKalas calmly told them "I'm content with everything." Sometimes you just gotta zen out and catch a million monkfish, I guess.

Unbelievably, AvengedKalas says they now plan to cook all one million fish. It looks like they weren't kidding: the OSRS hiscores confirm that Zoinks Bro has already more than doubled the amount of XP needed to reach the max Cooking skill level of 99.

If you're wondering, Zoinks Bro also has over 11 times the amount of XP needed for 99 Fishing. At 145 million XP, they're 'just' 55 million XP away from the in-game limit. In a Reddit reply, they said they'll knock out the last 55 million after all the cooking is done.

Now hang on a minute. Monkfish give 150 Fishing XP apiece. How does Zoinks Bro only have 145 million Fishing XP despite having 1 million monkfish? These are the questions that keep me up at night, reader.

I suppose they could've bought a few (thousand) monkfish, but the more likely explanation is that they used one of the equippable blessings that gives you a small chance of landing two fish at once without doubling your actual XP gains. I'm not super familiar with this area of OSRS, but I do know their account has the stats to earn at least a medium-tier blessing, and the 4% bonus fish it would contribute basically evens out the XP math. I've reached out to AvengedKalas to ask about this important mystery.

As is always the case with the daunting grinds that OSRS players pull off with such frightening regularity, the big question here is simple: why? AvengedKalas' mind is an enigma, their reasoning at once confounding yet believable: "An inside joke that got out of control."

The other question that many people – myself included – have asked is: why monkfish? I realize that monkfish are easy to catch while AFK, but that's true of a lot of OSRS fish, including the karambwans that are much better for healing than monkfish. Not only that, karambwan are worth a lot more, though I suppose value isn't as much of a concern since Zoinks Bro is a hardcore ironman account, meaning they haven't died a single time and they can't trade with other players. That actually makes this grind more absurd, come to think of it, because it means they can't even convert these fish into gold via the in-game market.

So, why not karambwans? "I don't find karambwans as relaxing," AvengedKalas said in a Reddit reply. "To each their own. I enjoy monks," they said in another post. You've gotta respect that. I'm sure the monkfish do; they can't have many stans given that these fish look like a nightmare that was recently sat on by another, heavier nightmare. Well, maybe the million dead ones stashed away in Zoinks Bro's bank aren't thrilled, but you know what I mean.

"The real question: are you proud of it?" asks another OSRS player.

"Yeah," AvengedKalas affirmed. When it comes to self-imposed OSRS grinds, that's what matters. Godspeed, you monkfish amassing madman.

Last month, the OSRS devs watched in horror and awe as thousands of players dogpiled a 16-year-old minigame just to break it and farm XP by getting addicted to fruit.