Sometimes gamers make their own fun, and fun can be extremely subjective, so keep those two things in mind as you read about the challenge one Old School RuneScape player set for himself: Make an all-new character, limit it to one specific small portion of land (known in game parlance as a chunk), and earn all of the rewards and achievements possible within it. Now, after just over two years, that self-imposed hard mode playthrough has been successfully completed.
Meet Agile Tom, a streamer and YouTuber who created his new Ironman character and placed him within Chunk 4,919, which is inside of the Chambers of Xeric raid, all the way back in April 2023. Obviously this means an all-new low-level character had to live in a piece of land where a high-level raid happens, and since this is an Ironman character, Tom couldn’t accept item trades from other players. In the ruleset for the player-established Xtreme OneChunk mode, this is literally considered a “death chunk.”
The location of the so-called CoX Chunk did allow Tom’s character to level up multiple various skills, mercifully, which meant that the character was able to slowly grow to a point when it could take on the raid itself. That said, it still took hours of grinding to get to the right point when he could do so, and there were other major hurdle to clear, such as fighting RNG to get every possible loot drop and earning an achievement cape by clearing the raid 2,000 times.
By the end of it all, it took Tom over 10,000 hours to break out of his personal house arrest. “Setting a long-term goal and sticking to it is one of the most difficult things in life, but also one of the most rewarding,” says Tom in his victorious finale video. “Whether it’s in your real life or in RuneScape, these moments prove that we’re truly capable of anything we set our minds to.”
And he’s not resting, apparently: Agile Tom is already working on his next OneChunk challenge, which puts him in a lizardman settlement at Chunk 5,175. Remember, sometimes gamers make their own fun, and fun can be extremely subjective.
