simshadows
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OSRS - Main Character Progress Diary

WARNING: This page will contain many quest spoilers.

Goals Of This Character

My main character: simshadows

My focus is on experiencing the game. Specifically:

My approach to questing is to take suggestions on optimal quest order, but proceed with each quest unguided. The only external hints on quests I get is anything written in OSRS Wiki’s Optimal quest guide (approximately this revision from 09:53, 24 November 2025). Everything outside of quests will usually involve looking up guides.

My approach to skill grind and moneymaking is to prefer the laziest methods possible (so-called “zero time” methods). I also prefer to rely on quest XP as much as possible, and only manually levelling up if necessary (e.g. melee combat is really nice to level because it makes the game comfy, and mining is nice early-game money).

I am also currently doing almost all quests alongside a friend who has never played Runescape before, so some aspects of this unguided quest progression will be accelerated by us bouncing ideas with each other as we play. I will also try to share any differences in our experiences with the game.

Ideally, I’d like to record video footage of me going through some of the more interesting quests and posting them on one of my YouTube channels, but since I’m playing most quests with a friend, I probably won’t.

I enjoy experiencing as many fail states as possible in videogames within reason, though for particularly frustrating fail states like those of the quest The Tourist Trap, I eventually leaned towards avoiding fail states when I was too far ahead if there is a high risk of time wastage.

Before 2026-01-06, I took the time to read through all the possible dialogue options. This really consumes a lot of time, and I eventually found out that the wiki has comprehensive dialogue transcripts (such as this one), so as of 2026-01-06, I would try to just solve the quest quickly and then read the transcript later (and probably check out the fail states on YouTube).

Diary

2025-12-25 Quest: Tutorial Island

I initially started as free-to-play with my friend when I found out that they’ve never played runescape before.

2025-12-25 to 2025-12-26

Right after Tutorial Island, we went straight to the cows east of Lumbridge to farm melee combat XP and cow hides. I became quickly disappointed when I found that my account can’t sell cow hides in the GE until I pass certain milestones (such as some 20 or so hours of gameplay). Oh well.

Me and my friend just randomly explored the map without quests for a while, and in my free time, I just multtasked farming cows (and later, giant frogs) while doing something else IRL. I knew from the start that this game would be extremely multitaskable since you can do a lot of low-intensity things that might only require a click every now and then, and you don’t even really need to spend too much effort to maximize combat uptime.

On 2025-12-26, I’d get so frustrated competing with the bots for the giant frogs that I started Membership, I immediately sold all my cow hides in the GE for a nice profit, and proceeded to farm the giant frogs in a member world’s Lumbridge Swamp that was fully devoid of players. I collected the Big Bones in the bank to sell at the GE.

2025-12-26 Quests

Since my friend still didn’t have membership, we started by following the wiki’s F2P optimal quest guide.

Quests completed:

X Marks The Spot had a cipher (“ESBZOPS QJH QFO”) that I found frustrating because I made mistakes with my attempts to decipher it, and wouldn’t realize it until my friend redone my work and got the right solution.

X Marks The Spot and Pirate’s Treasure was great introductions to show my friend the basics of how Runescape quest design works. Both quests had a lot of interesting ideas.

Romeo & Juliet’s ending confused us because it was a sudden random departure from the original Shakespeare story.

We “accidentally” started Doric’s Quest very early because we wanted to use the anvil, but we wouldn’t complete it that day.

2025-12-27 Quest: Misthalin Mystery

This quest was such a fun puzzle! It was fun to piece things together, and the storytelling and visual design was so cool!

The piano puzzle stumped us more for longer than we’d like to admit. My immediate first idea was “DEATH”, but it obviously wouldn’t fit, and I wouldn’t realize that I should try the variant “DEAD” until a lot later.

The HEARTH part of the puzzle took unnecessarily long. I realized that the left edge of the riddle spelt HEARTH the whole time, but when I tried all the fireplaces, none of them could be interacted with, so we proceeded to be extremely stuck for a while until we tried interacting with the empty fireplace again.

The final boss seems to require a lot more fast reaction time and fast clicking than it probably should require. But still, the final boss was quite quick and easy to do anyway.

2025-12-28 Quest: Children of the Sun

I finished this quest quickly solo because I wanted to just quickly get access to the Gemstone Crab for melee XP.

I found the “stealth follow” section extremely annoying. It required you to follow super-closely, making it really easy to fail. The NPC moves really, really slowly, so failure means you have to redo the entire thing all over again.

My friend would finish this much later. They absolutely hated the “stealth follow” section as well.

2025-12-28

I’d begin an intensive XP grind on the Gemstone Crab! I start the grind at 44 Attack, 45 Strength, and 40 Defense.

(Quests complete but without a diary entry, completed some time between the 29th and the 31st.)

2026-01-01 Quests

Quests completed:

2026-01-02

The optimal quest guide says to level up Fletching to level 10, we cut down a load of trees outside the south gate of the GE and turned them into arrowshafts and headless arrows, and got to level 10.

We also got Construction to level 10 by going to the free house we got in Rimmington and building the stuff that the wiki says to build.

While waiting for my friend, I also randomly run into the Draynor Village Rooftop Course and levelled Agility to level 5.

2026-01-02 Quests

Quests completed:

We also technically completed Prince Ali Rescue, but we don’t turn it in until much later (since it’s so out-of-the-way).

2026-01-03

I wanted the Gem Bag to use with the Gemstone Crab, so I spent 3 hours (on-and-off because I was multitasking) levelling up mining by repeatedly mining copper/tin and then iron south-east of Varrock, and depositing into my bank for a bit of GP when I sell at the GE. I eventually reach level 30 Mining, which unlocked Motherlode Mine. I’d proceed to multitask by doing Motherlode Mine while doing something else IRL.

2026-01-04 Quest: Gertrude’s Cat

This quest was so supremely frustrating. I kept thinking the cat in question was on the ground level where “meow” speech text would keep appearing above various crates. I tried all sorts of things like camping a crate until a meow appears, and luring the cat out with fish.

My friend didn’t even realize I was having trouble. They already saw the actual cat up the ladder!

My friend figured out for me that the cat needed a bucket of milk.

For the part where we had to feed the cat, we were so hard-stuck here for the longest time. I had a chat with Gertrude and the other NPCs in and around her house, and I tried exploring everything that can be seen in the house, but got zero clues. We literally tried every fish that can be obtained with a fishing level under Lobster (and we also tried Lobster), we tried both raw and cooked variants, and we tried all sorts of meats both raw and cooked. We tried all sorts of other random stuff like herb leaves. We were absolutely hard-stuck.

But then my friend went back to Gertrude and got useful dialogue that led us straight to the food the cat wants. I must’ve talked to Gertrude before I interacted with the cat?

2026-01-04 Quests

Quests completed:

For Witch’s House, my friend went through the basement door perfectly fine, but I kept getting electrocuted. Then we had the lightbulb moment of having my friend trade their leather gloves to me so that I can also pass through.

We duplicated the sword from The Knight’s Sword lol. It’s such a cool-looking sword. I wish the game would still allow you to have it made.

2026-01-05 Quest: The Tourist Trap

This quest was a really interesting puzzle! The fail states made things very tense, the quest design was very immersive, there was a lot to explore and try to piece together, and the dialogue was really entertaining. It took me about 4 hours to complete, though a lot of that was because I was going through all the dialogue options and intentionally exploring the fail states.

Getting to this quest was the first time I’ve ever visited the Kharidian Desert (since 2010). I went through the gate with full heavy melee armour, a single waterskin, and some random water-filled containers I bought from Shantay. I walked through the gate, talked to the quest start NPC, then realized that I only had about a minute of water in total, then went back through Shantay pass. All water containers were empty when I checked.

I guessed correctly that the desert clothing sold by Shantay would improve the situation. I looked up the wiki on the water mechanic to confirm. I bought the available desert armour pieces from Shantay and a full inventory load of waterskin 4’s. I got a bit worried that I’m not familiar with the desert mechanics, so I removed all valuables except for what I can keep on death, and about 5k gp worth of stuff that I’d lose (mostly in gp actually lol).

I beelined straight to the mercenaries, proceeded to try to fight one, then the quest script put me straight into a fail state where I teleported to some random location with all waterskins taken off me except for one empty waterskin.

It took a while to figure out how to get through that first gate. I kept making the assumption that you can’t fight or talk to the mercenaries, but after realizing that there’s no other option, I went ahead and talked to the Mercenary Captain, and to my surprise, I got “safe” dialogue. For fun, I explored all dialogue options, including fail states (where I only carry one waterskin so that I don’t have much to lose. I assumed the whole time that the “mining” dialogue option would be correct, but it wasn’t. I don’t actually remember how the dialogue led to me fighting the Mercenary Captain, but I remember being very surprised that I wasn’t put into a fail state. I kill the Mercenary Captain and take the key.

My friend went straight into the gate with the weapon drawn. They immediately went into a fail state where they were trapped in the prison cell and the key was taken. I took the time to read the extra dialogue options at the gate where I found the hint that you’re not meant to have a weapon drawn. I proceed through the gate perfectly fine. I think I intentionally put myself into a similar fail state as my friend and got locked in the cell with them. We were genuinely lost trying to figure out how to get out, until my friend randomly found that you can click somewhere on the ground to escape by climbing out of the ditch. I probably wouldn’t have found that if my friend didn’t find it.

(Now that I think about it, I think I ran into the same situation some time before 2010, except I think I did find the solution to climb out of the ditch. I don’t remember anymore.)

The rest of the quest pretty much followed this pattern. I found it to be really fun!

Unfortunately, my friend rage-quit this quest near the very end after getting caught by a guard and having the keys taken from their inventory. In general, the fail states of this quest have been brutally frustrating to the point where they were just constantly verbally upset and frustrated throughout the quest from the very beginning when they entered the very first gate after killing the Mercenary Captain. In my opinion, their frustration towards the quest is very valid. This quest seems to like to reset very significant amounts of progress, which is especially frustrating if the fail state happens too long after a “checkpoint”. Such resets were especially frustrating for my friend since they were low-level and had a hard time killing the Mercenary Captain, whereas I was vastly overlevelled with Saradomin Sword thanks to Gemstone Crab.

Some other random thoughts about the rest of the quest:

I looked up the guide on the wiki after completing this quest fully unguided because I wanted to see if all the dialogue options are available. I really enjoy reading all the dialogue options in the games I play. It turns out that they are available, so I will probably avoid manually going through all the dialogue in-game now, and just referring to the guide once I’m done.

Quest In Progress: Tree Gnome Village

Oh my god the Khazard Warlord was so frustrating to find. We were so hard-stuck searching all over the place for hours. We’d log off for the day before finding the warlord. The next day, my friend finds the warlord, gives me a clue (which I didn’t understand the meaning of until after I found the warlord myself), and then later that day, I log on and pretty much immediately find the warlord by chance. The reason I didn’t find the warlord was that I did go west along the wall, but I think that due to draw distance, I saw nothing around the corner where the warlord is, so I assumed there was nothing there and I never came back to check. So frustrating!

Other Quests In Progress

Stuff I want to try in the future