Shattered Heart

Shattered Heart is a Distraction and Diversion centred around collecting strange rocks. It was first mentioned on 12 February 2010 in the developer blog "A History of Non-violence". Shattered Heart is linked to all non-combat skills and was released on 3 March, 2010.

Introduction
(Copied verbatim from Jagex's Shattered Heart Knowledge Base entry.)

The Second Age was a chaotic time when magic was largely unharnessed by the mortal races. The supply of runestones was limited to those created by Guthix himself, so for scholars engaged in magical study they were a valuable commodity over which wars were often waged.

The detritus of such battles can be found to this day; farmers may be heard to curse as yet another plough breaks upon shards of masonry lodged in a field, miners may unearth artefacts resonating with ancient power or runecrafters may find that runestones form into anomalous shapes, arcane echoes moulding the essence independently of the craftsman’s will.

More often than not these articles are discarded or left to gather dust on a mantelpiece, but there is knowledge to be gained from these remnants of a lost age. Such artefacts are steeped in history and the memory of stone is long; anyone wishing to learn more should present their findings to the archaeological team at Varrock Museum. They will gladly recount the tale of the hapless mage Dahmaroc; a worldly scholar and craftsman who had the misfortune to be born into an era of strife.

Requirements
Only members can find the rocks. There are no minimum level requirements. Players must wait one week between completing statues.

Getting started


Players occasionally receive a strange rock while training non-combat skills. Initially, you get no more than two rocks, an identical pair, from each non-combat skill. Players can go to the Varrock Museum to add the pairs of rock to an incomplete statue plinth located south of the Museum entrance. Everytime you add a pair of rocks, you gain significant extra XP in the same non-combat skill. After adding 30 rocks (15 pairs for the 15 non-combat skills) the statue is complete, but it immediately explodes, and you start again.

Each time the statue explodes, you get a special rock (a Replica statue piece) for building a replica statue in your own player owned house (POH). This also needs 15 pairs of rocks to complete, meaning after 30 exploding statues, requiring 900 strange rocks in total, the games completes. This makes this Distraction and Diversion unique, in that it can apparently eventually be finished.

According to Jagex, after receiving the first rock for a particular skill, the drop chance for the second will be reduced "by half". It is actually possible to receive both rocks from a single action in special circumstances. Players do not have to bank the first rock to receive the second. Usually the rocks appear in the player's inventory, except for the Construction rock which appears on the floor of a player-owned house, next to the entrance portal. Having a rock in one skill does not change the odds of obtaining one in another skill. Players can have more than one type of rock at one time. Players get a message for receiving a strange rock with the exception of Construction rocks.

Rocks can potentially replace the item that the player was acquiring with the skill activity. A message such as "Something odd happens to the Yew longbow (u) and you are left with a strange rock." will appear. To prevent this, players can turn off the Shattered Heart feature entirely (by asking a museum archeologist) or players can make sure to simply have enough space for an extra Shattered Heart rock in their inventory.

The variation for receiving a Strange rock is high. For example, players have reported getting two strange rocks in less than five seconds, whilst others have reported skilling for five hours without getting one. (see the section about stuck rocks below for more information)

Rocks can be an excellent way of obtaining XP. If you only undertake an activity for the time required to obtain the two rocks, in many skills you will get more XP reward from the rocks than you have got from the time spent on the activity itself. This is especially useful on "slow" skills, e.g. Runecrafting, where (at approx Skill Level 70) it is possible to obtain 5000 XP from the rocks gained from the time taken to earn 500 XP actually runecrafting (death runes at 10 XP each). On the other hand, with skills that have a high XP per chance this situation can be reversed. For instance, at skill level 70 hunting it is quite possible to have to earn 25,000-50,000 XP (say hunting Carnivorous Chinchompas at 265 XP each) in order to get the 5000 XP rocks.

Starting and Stopping
If you do not wish to play the activity, simply dropping the strange rock will only cause it to appear again later. To prevent rocks appearing altogether, the distraction must be switched off. Talk to any one of the archaeologists in Varrock Museum (the six workers sitting at desks at the south on the ground floor). To switch on again talk again to the archaeologists at any time.

Hints and Tips
The reason this Distraction and Diversion was created was to add a little reward for players training their noncombat skills, so for those people who think of Shattered Heart in that way it is better to continue training their skills as normal rather than quickly making low experiences items. However, many activities that are valid training methods never have a chance of a rock (for instance fishing with any sort of rod or stringing bows). Also some "power training" techniques, while delivering large XP, actually give comparatively few chances at a rock (for instance, farming trees).

To maximise the chance of getting strange rocks when training a skill, it is recommended to try the method that performs actions the fastest: for example, big net fishing gains strange rocks faster than lobster caging because you fish more fish per hour. It is also worth mentioning that failing to catch something, get a rock, catch a fish, etc. may also yield you a strange rock. You can obtain strange rocks from Woodcutting, Fishing and Mining while gaining approval rating for the Managing Miscellania Minigame. However, these activities cannot be continued on Miscellania once you reach 100% approval.

For people who wish to complete the replica statue as quickly as possible, and for those who do not wish to spend time training a particular skill (for example, those who have level 99 in a skill and do not wish to devote time to further training) it may be more prudent to keep a store of cheap, low level items (willow logs, gold bars, uncooked shrimp, guam leaf and eye of newt, etc.) to quickly and efficiently obtain strange rocks without devoting undue time to the skill in question.

Some activities can be done together or sequentially linked. Possible combinations are fishing/cooking, farming (herbs)/herblore, smithing (gold ore)/crafting, and woodcutting/firemaking.

You can link more than two activities. Fishing, then cutting a log, lighting it, and then cooking your catch gives you chances at four different rocks.

Minimise your trips to bank items. It may be quicker to eat your (low value!) cooked fish than run to the bank.

Activity doubling effects from Achievement Diary rewards (double ore smithing with Varrock Armour or double pickpocketing with Ardougne Cloak, etc.) give you two chances at a rock and this appears to be how people have reported getting two rocks with a single action.

"Stuck" Rocks
Some players become convinced that the rock giving become stuck sometimes. It is certainly true that while all activities normally give a rock within a few hundred "chances", sometimes you can go thousands of chances without even the first, more probable, rock. In these cases, resetting the chances is said to be possible by changing the activity and earning at least one rock in a different way. The other suggested technique is to switch off rock collection by talking to an archeologist in Varrock Museum and then switching it on again immediately afterwards. You do not lose any progress or rocks doing this therefore there is no disadvantage to trying this if you are convinced you have a problem. Note: there is no evidence that this condition really exists, or if it is simply extreme bad luck.

Summary

 * Experience in a skill for each pair of stones added to the statue. The experience depends on the skill level and which skill you got the rocks from.
 * 10 Kudos when the statue is completed for the first time.
 * A Statue plinth for in a player's Study when completing the statue for the first time.
 * Replica statue piece for each time you complete the statue, which can be added in pairs to the plinth in your POH Study. This yields no extra bonus.

Experience reward formula
The formula is $$Experience = x^2 - 2x + 100$$, where x is the skill level.

Think of the cumulative reward as this: Total Exp Gain After 30 Complete Replicas with Lvl 80 Non-combat Skills=2,853,000/15=190,200 exp per Skill


 * {| class="wikitable"

!Level !Experience gained !% of level


 * }

There is no advantage to using the skill-cape boost to level 100.

Since the curve of the exponential experience curve is different from the parabolic curve of the reward formula, there are differing (decreasing) rewards measured in terms of current level.

Explained

 * By acquiring a pair of stones from a particular skill you may add a piece to the statue, which will grant additional experience in that skill. The higher your current level in the relevant skill, the more experience you will receive as a reward.


 * There is a piece of the statue for each of the non-combat skills mentioned above. Each one is made up of 2 strange rocks found while training. Once you have obtained a pair, you will receive no further strange rocks from that skill until you have collected the pieces from all other non-combat skills. It is not possible to add one rock to the statue, the rocks MUST be added in pairs. They can be stored in your bank, but do not stack.


 * After getting all of the pieces and assembling the statue, a cut-scene plays where the statue tries to come alive, but turns back to stone and explodes, as the curse is still active. You are then given a Statue plinth (only for the first time) and a Replica statue piece. The statue plinth can be placed in the study of your Player owned house, though the replica statue piece apparently needs its twin in order to be put onto the plinth in your house. There are 30 replica statue pieces required to fully build the statue in your study (15 'twins'); this indicates that the statue in the Varrock museum will need to be fully rebuilt 30 times (a total of 900 overall statue pieces found) in order to obtain all 30 replica statue pieces.


 * After the statue in the museum has exploded, you can immediately begin collecting strange rocks again in the same manner as before, and add pairs of stones to the now empty plinth. However if you try to add the last pair of rocks within a week of completing the previous statue, the archaeologist will get annoyed at you causing explosions and will stop you, saying one explosion a week is enough. The message 'You may complete the statue in another "x"days.' will show on chat log (in which X is the amount of days until the week is over). This means getting all 30 replica pieces and building a full statue in your house will take a minimum of 30 weeks.


 * You can finish the statue at 0:00 GMT one week from the day you built the statue. Meaning that if you built the statue at 5 PM on Sunday, you could rebuild it at 00:00:01 the next Sunday morning (if you live in the GMT zone), so you do not have to wait until 5 PM that Sunday.


 * It will take 30 weeks from 3 March 2010 to get all the replica stone pieces. This means that the fastest someone can complete this would be the 29 September 2010.


 * If the study is removed while the statue still stands in it, then when a new study is built and a new plinth is obtained and set up, the new statue should be as complete as the previous one. However, if the statue is removed from the study, all replica pieces added so far will be lost.


 * On 19 March 2010 in a recent updates thread, Mod Maz confirmed that the fully assembled statue in your POH will be a cosmetic reward only and thus won't serve any extra purposes.


 * On 25 March 2010, players with multiple statues in their house found the statues removed. When finishing their next statue, however, they could retrieve the plinth and all replica pieces they had added before the removal.

Trivia



 * If you examine the statue during the cut-scene you get he message "A completed statue of a cursed Second Age mage".
 * The final reward for this Distraction and Diversion is by far the longest elapsed time get, as it takes a minimum of approximately 7.5 months (30 weeks) to complete.
 * You can get stones while performing tasks for the Managing Miscellania activity.Petrock.png
 * When you get a strange rock while having a pet rock in your inventory a message appears saying: "Your pet rock is so happy to have stone-based company that it jiggles about a little in your pack."
 * The advent of Shattered Heart meant that many players started gaining levels in little used skills, making the overall rankings table considerably more competitive.

Glitches and changed features

 * A bug on the release date allowed players to get multiple stones while fishing. This has now been fixed.
 * Smelting gold ore did not yield stones on the day of release.
 * In the early days of Shattered Heart, runecrafting was counted per use of altar, and not per essence. For the highest chance of getting a rock, you had to drop your essence and bind one piece at a time. Mod Maz confirmed this has been fixed.
 * In the first 2 weeks the fastest way of getting agility rocks was to repeat an obstacle. This wasn't how Shattered Heart was intended to be played; Mod Maz changed this so that only completing whole courses has a chance of getting rocks.