OnlyShrimp99: The OSRS Player Who Caught 532,000 Shrimp and Anchovies for a 27-Month Level 99 Fishing Grind

There's a special kind of insanity reserved for MMO players, and Old School RuneScape has been cultivating it for over two decades. Every so often the game produces an achievement so gloriously pointless that it breaks containment and ends up on gaming news sites instead of staying in its natural habitat, the r/2007scape subreddit. This week, that achievement belongs to a player named Bosby, and his account OnlyShrimp99.

The Grind

Bosby hit level 99 Fishing — the max level in that skill — using nothing but the two worst, lowest-tier fish in the game: raw shrimp and raw anchovies. Not lobsters. Not sharks. Not anything remotely efficient. Shrimp and anchovies, the fish every OSRS player abandons within their first hour of the game because they're barely worth the inventory space.

The numbers are what make this genuinely absurd:

At that XP rate, against a 13,034,431 XP requirement for level 99, this is one of the slowest, most inefficient training methods physically possible in the game. Most players would consider a 4,300-hour grind on optimal methods a serious undertaking. Bosby did it on the method a bot wouldn't even bother running.

What started as an inside joke among friends — "wouldn't it be funny if someone actually did this" — turned into a multi-year commitment that outlasted a job change and a wedding. Bosby says the account was "a joke idea in my friend group for years" before he finally pulled the trigger, and that along the way he started a new job, got married, and made friends through the process.

There's something almost meditative about it. No boss strategies to learn, no gear progression, no min-maxing — just clicking a shrimp spot, over and over, for two and a quarter years.

Jagex Noticed

The clip made enough noise on social media that Jagex's own data team weighed in, publicly verifying the grind and congratulating Bosby on Twitter/X — a small, official nod to an achievement that exists entirely outside the game's intended progression paths. For context, at current OSRS market prices, all those shrimp and anchovies would fetch somewhere around 9.5 million gold. For 4,300+ hours of work. In a game where competent players can make more than that in a single afternoon of Grand Exchange flipping.

Why This Is Peak OSRS

If you've never played Old School RuneScape, this probably sounds unhinged. If you have, you understand completely. OSRS has always attracted players who treat the game less like a leaderboard to climb efficiently and more like a canvas for absurd personal challenges — pure ironman naked hardcore runs, 1-defence pures, "only fish caught with a net" accounts. The efficiency-scape crowd optimizes; the rest of the playerbase invents new ways to make the grind harder on purpose, because the suffering is the point.

OnlyShrimp99 isn't the fastest 99. It isn't the most profitable. It's not even a particularly interesting build. It's just proof that if you give people a skilling system with no real limits, someone, somewhere, will eventually use it to catch over half a million shrimp for absolutely no reason — and the internet will love him for it.

“Fish on, Bosby.”