Adding another feather to his already worryingly feathered cap, Old School RuneScape YouTuber Settled recently capped off an MMO challenge run, which began all the way back in late 2023, with a downright cinematic 68-minute video finale that's hit the OSRS community like a hurricane. With the video sitting at over 510k views after one day, the OSRS community attach rate on Settled content continues to embarrass even console pack-in games.
Settled is known for concocting custom rule sets that dramatically limit his options while playing new OSRS accounts and totally warp the way he plays the game. His breakthrough video series was arguably Swampletics, which locked his account to the swampy region of Morytania and forced him to get creative with limited resources, but he's also done fringe speedruns and a "Tileman" run where his ability to walk around the tile-based game was tied to how much skill experience he earned.
The rules themselves are absurd and eye-catching, but it's Settled's ability to collate and narrate these stories, while teaching viewers weird facts about OSRS and sneaking in increasingly elaborate animations and edits, that's built his 731k YouTube subscriber base.
Settled's latest series, "Nightmare Mode," required a custom-built plugin (by fellow OSRS sicko Gudi, who is no stranger to absurd OSRS nooks and crannies) that permanently deletes your account password if you take any damage whatsoever. If you're unfamiliar with OSRS combat mechanics and environmental systems, just know that it's alarmingly easy to take damage from all kinds of sources, from traps to random critters to hard-hitting bosses. Eating food (often seafood, funnily enough) to recover from damage is a core part of the game.
Playing OSRS without taking any damage, effectively setting your hitpoints to one, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack without popping the balloons covering you head to toe. This account is also an Ironman, meaning Settled can't trade with players and has to source all items himself. Naturally, this has required extensive planning and, the mother of all innovations, a lot of failure, to say nothing of the mechanical skill needed to use protection prayers to prevent unavoidable hits from actually dealing damage.
For some time, Settled has been playing his 109th Nightmare Mode account, and compared to some early setbacks and resets (the fence arc is a must-watch, and I'm not kidding), it's come impressively far.
Without taking damage, Settled has cleared the iconic Fire Cape Fight Caves challenge, to all and sundry a critical OSRS milestone, and built a solid collection of armor sourced from a dangerous minigame that's filled with chip damage.
With his final challenge, Settled set his eyes on the Colosseum, a relatively new combat gauntlet which puts players through multiple waves of enemies featuring myriad combat styles and special modifiers. The Colosseum was added to OSRS in early 2024 and is still generally regarded as one of the most difficult encounters in the entire MMO, on or near the level of the exhausting multi-wave Inferno which awards the coveted Inferno Cape.
Most players enter the Colosseum seeking money or the untradeable Dizana's Quiver, which boosts your ranged attacks significantly, but Settled was in it for the glory. The whole point of this series was to see how far a Nightmare account could go, and without wishing to spoil the 68-minute finale – packed with close calls and yet more cinematics for the OSRS YouTube hall of fame – he's certainly pushed it to a rare extreme.
