This past weekend, popular Old School RuneScape content creator Settled posted the latest video in his long-running Swampletics series. The 20+ minute video is fairly standard – with the account finally maxing out both Attack and Strength – but takes an awful twist in the last two minutes. Our beloved hero dies, dropping all his high-level items and forcing a massive reboot of the account.
In case you're not familiar with the Swampletics series, there's a lot to catch up on. The video blog has been running for well over a year, and Settled has poured over 4000 hours into the account. He's playing as an Ultimate Ironman, which – among other things – means that he drops every single item in his inventory upon death. He won't lose any progress on his skills, but losing all his gear is a massive setback for the Swampletics account.
The death is pretty unremarkable – he died while going AFK during a routine trip through Morytania – but a lot of players simply don't believe it happened at all. Or, at least, they think there's a lot going on behind the scenes that we aren't privy to.
Settled doesn't provide footage of the death, but instead gives us a brief rundown of what happened. He said that he "got complacent" after spending so much time in the same region, leading to the untimely death. But that wasn't a good enough answer for many folks in the community.
Some players think that it's all fake and that Swampletics' gear is stashed away in storage somewhere. The episode also briefly talks about stunt doubles – alt accounts used by Settled to help scout areas for rare mobs – and some are wondering if he just dumped his gear off to his alt.
Another user ran the combat numbers for Swampletics against his Feral Vampyre oppenents. According to them, it's possible for the mob to have killed the player while AFK, but the odds of it actually happening are very, very slim.
Settled has also been going through a bit of a rough patch in his personal life, and several players think his account may have been sabotaged by his ex.
Regardless, this is not the turn of events anyone was expecting – especially Settled himself. According to a pinned comment on the latest video, an update should be happening within the next two days. Let's hope we get some clarification as to what happened and put the crazy conspiracies to bed.