This is a little silly to admit, but I’ve recently started paying attention to Old School RuneScape again. I first played it way, way, way back when it was just RuneScape, in like 2002, and picked it up again when Old School RuneScape came to mobile in 2018. Now, I occasionally pop it open in a second window on PC while doing paperwork or other mindless tasks, usually to fish. RuneScape fishing is a great second monitor game, because you can just click on the fishing hole and ignore it until your inventory is full. Is this an ideal way to play this game? No, but it helps me feel accomplished, and I love video game fishing.
Apparently, I’m not the only one. A player named Bosby_ likes doing exactly that so much that they just maxed out their fishing skill using only the Small Net, the first fishing item you get at the beginning of the game. It took them two whole years.
According to Bosby, this wasn’t really a waste of time. They were doing what I do: playing in a second monitor so it didn’t require much input, fishing in a convenient spot very near a bank (in Al Kharid, for those who know) so they could fish up an inventory of shrimp and anchovies, dump their stock as soon as it was full, and repeat. “My average xp/hr was something like 3000 given how AFK I was,” they said. “I relish having the screen real estate back but I will miss catching those lil water bugs.”
And it wasn’t a waste of money, either. Bosby stayed on a free-to-play account the whole time.
For context, shrimp and anchovies provide very little EXP. They’re very much beginner fish, and most people quickly move on to bigger catches that are worth more. That explains why it took Bosby two years and three months to reach level 99. Per their own breakdown, they began on May 11, 2024, and finished on August 7 of this year. They caught 275,196 raw shrimp and 257,064 raw anchovies and played 4,304 hours total.
Congrats on the only small net 99 Fishing, @Bosby_! 🎉
Our data team has verified your accomplishment. 🏆 https://t.co/m3SoJdzwOU pic.twitter.com/uN2Bf9xwGd
— Old School RuneScape (@OldSchoolRS) August 10, 2026
“This account was a joke idea in my friend group for years before I finally made it,” they wrote in their post on Reddit. “I started out thinking it would just be something funny to do and ended up having the dedication to see it through.”
In the comments of the post, Bosby had to fend off some detractors. In response to one person, they said their character would finish fishing “in 20 mins and then I’d be afk for 10-20 mins playing another game before clicking the other fishing spot or bank.”
In response to one user who said “congrats on something that does not matter,” Bosby replied, “Nothing matters.”