"There's always time to bone": Old School RuneScape players give a big vtuber so many dragon bones that she's nearly maxed one of the MMO's most expensive skills

The fascinating intersection of MMOs and vtubers continues as countless Old School RuneScape players crowd around hololive streamer Nerissa Ravencroft to quite literally throw her a bone.

Nerissa has been playing Old School RuneScape for a few months, and her most recent stream, titled "I'm sick but there's always time to bone," gave a particular subsection of her audience more of what they love: Prayer training. Yes, all this boning was ironically done in service of the lord.

There are other ways to gain Prayer experience, but the typical way to train Prayer in Old School RuneScape is to collect or purchase a whole bunch of bones, normally dragon bones of some kind, and then offer them at altars since it gets you more XP than just burying them. There's a popular altar in the Wilderness that gives you a chance to save on bones, but good old-fashioned gilded altars in player-owned houses work just fine. They're also easier and safer to access, especially when you have dozens of devoted fans following you around.

"I was gonna go straight to boning, but everybody told me not to do that because apparently there's a Christmas event," Nerissa said at the start of her stream. "So instead of boning we're going to do that." Not even an hour later, she declared "It's boning time. Now I just await the bone donations."

As of her latest stream, Nerissa has burned enough dragon bones – donated en masse by her posse of fans, dubbed "Jailbirds" – to reach 96 Prayer, putting her over halfway to the max level of 99. (The actual halfway point is 92.) Prayer is a notoriously expensive and time-consuming skill to train, and comes with pretty minimal benefits at higher levels once you've actually unlocked all of the buff-giving prayers, so it's usually a significant and late-game hurdle for players to clear.

It turns out, however, that this goes a lot faster when you never have to leave the altar because people are constantly giving you free dragon bones, not to mention the pricey superior dragon bones, and even lighting the altar incense burners for you. Behold the power of vtubing fandom.

Nerissa isn't the first vtuber to stream OSRS, but she may well be the highest-profile one. The game's community clocked her interest in OSRS almost immediately, and her streams have spawned piles of fan art, including impressive OSRS chiptune covers of her original songs, which Nerissa has naturally used as background music.

I've seen some people fret about donations ruining her experience with the game, but she's said she was familiar beforehand, and she does seem to be having a good time, so I don't see any reason to worry. Most OSRS skills are laid back enough that they're a good match for the "just chatting" culture of vtubing, plus she's got the patience to train Agility, so I reckon she'll fit right in.

We spoke to hololive boss "Yagoo" about getting vtubers into more games, building a Fortnite-style open-world game, recent graduations, the 10-year plan, and his famous "dream."