In pursuit of a priceless raccoon, MMO player spends 149 hours stealing over 14,000 fruit while dodging XP gains like landmines

gamesradar.com:

When Old School RuneScape player IcarusLives made a new character on the MMO, they had just one plan in mind: farming. Their new Ultimate Ironman account, locked out of trading with other players or even banking their own items, would be a Farming-only skiller account – already a catastrophic commitment in and of itself. Their new name? Is Farmer. Beautiful.

But they couldn't go it alone. They needed a companion, someone to join them in their farmhand journey. They needed Rocky, they decided, the pet raccoon obtained as a random drop. And they spent 149 hours stealing over 14,000 fruit to get 'em. 

The problem is that Rocky can only be obtained through the Thieving skill, which presented a problem for Is Farmer, who can only train Farming. The other problem is that, like all skilling pets, Rocky is an incredibly rare drop – albeit nowhere near as rare as the 1-in-100 million gem recently obtained by another OSRS player for the second time in history – but we'll get to that later. 

So, how do you train Thieving while getting Farming experience instead? Well, just ask the thousands of OSRS players who piled into a 16-year old minigame back in October 2023 to farm XP and get addicted to fruit. That minigame, Sorceress' Garden, technically counts as Thieving but actually awards Farming XP when you first steal the coveted sq'irk fruits at the heart of the titular garden. You have to do this one sq'irk at a time, but to someone mentally capable of playing an Ultimate Ironman account, let alone a dedicated skiller, that kind of tedium is small potatoes. 

The good news is that the sq'irk tree is statistically one of the best ways to obtain Rocky. According to the OSRS wiki, it's among the highest base chances for a pet drop of