Shattered Heart

Shattered Heart is a Distraction and Diversion centred on 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
The Shattered Heart distraction and diversion is focused upon obtaining two Strange rocks for each of the non combat related skills. These are acquired simply by training those skills and will randomly appear in your inventory. When both rocks of any particular skill have been obtained they can be used on the statue plinth in the Varrock Museum for a reward of experience in that skill and a part of a statue for one's player-owned house if the whole statue is completed.

The statue to which one adds rocks in the Museum is that of Dahmaroc. He was a mage in the Second Age, when runes were quite rare. Runecrafting wasn't yet discovered, so mages had to use what Guthix supplied Gielinor with. Battles were fought about everywhere, and some remaining artefacts can be found while skilling, in the form of Strange rocks. Dahmaroc was a scholar and a skilled crafter and was cursed and killed while seeking runestones.

When his statue is rebuilt, Dahmaroc becomes alive for a moment, after which the curse makes the statue fragile and crumble, allowing the player to build a new one.

Requirements
Only members can find the rocks. There are no minimum level requirements. Players must wait one week after finishing the statue before they can finish the statue again.

Getting started
Since a total of 30 Strange rocks are required to complete a statue once, it is advisable to go to Barnabus Hurma, who gives you a statue collection bag to store your strange rocks thus freeing up space in your Bank or inventory.

Players occasionally receive a strange rock while training non-combat skills. You get 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 on the ground floor. Every time you add a pair of rocks, you gain experience in the same non-combat skill. After adding 30 rocks, the statue is complete, but it immediately explodes in a cut scene 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 game is complete. That makes this Distraction and Diversion unique, in that it can be finished. A statue may be completed once per week, meaning it takes a minimum of 30 weeks to complete the POH replica. [Note: technically it is only the POH replica statue that is completed after 30 weeks; the activity continues with strange rocks being acquired and experience being given for placing pairs in the museum, even after the POH replica has been completed.] A Varrock Museum archaeologist can stop you from receiving strange rocks, if you choose to do so, as you have no need to do this once you have your POH statue. It's ill advised to do this, however; You'll be missing out on free experience for completing any more statues. You can also start receiving the rocks again if you stopped them, simply by speaking to an archaeologist in the museum.

After receiving a rock, the chance of receiving the next rock for that skill is halved. However, all skills except the one that they just got the rock from are normal. This means switching skills after getting the first rock can be faster in many cases. Players do not have to bank the first rock to receive the second. The rocks appear in the player's inventory. Players can have more than one type of rock at one time and having a rock in one skill does not change the odds of obtaining one in another skill. Players get a "You find a strange rock." message in their chat box and hear a "clunk" sound when finding one. 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 over ten hours without getting one.

Some examples of pairing skills include: using a furnace for both smithing and crafting, "bank skills" such as herblore and fletching, or hunter and fishing at Piscatoris (however, because monkfish give such a high chance of rocks, it can be easier to just get both fishing rocks back-to-back as a break in between getting the hunter rocks.) Each player will find that different methods work for them, so it's a good idea to find out what activities you like to do to gather your rocks, then pair up skills which are trained in similar locations.

Rocks can potentially replace the item that the player was acquiring with the skill activity. A message such as "Something odd happens to the (insert item name here) 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 archaeologist) or players can make sure to simply have enough space for an extra Shattered Heart rock in their inventory. The statue collection bag also prevents this by adding the rocks straight into the bag (giving the message "You find a strange rock and add it to your bag.").

Rocks can be an excellent way of obtaining experience. If you only undertake an activity for the time required to obtain the two rocks, in many skills you may get more experience 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 experience from the rocks gained from the time taken to earn 500 experience actually runecrafting (death runes at 10 experience each). On the other hand, with skills that have a high experience 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 experience (say hunting Carnivorous Chinchompas at 265 experience each) in order to get the 5000 experience rocks.

Starting and stopping
If you do not wish to play the activity, simply destroying 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 non-combat 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 experience 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 yield more fish per hour. Failing to catch something 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 activity. 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, mining/smithing (gold ore)/crafting, woodcutting/firemaking, and woodcutting/fletching.

When a player receives their first strange rock in a skill, the chance of receiving the second rock is halved until a rock has been gotten from another skill.

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 Tasks rewards (double ore smithing with Varrock Armour or double pickpocketing with high Agility, etc.) give you two chances at a rock and this appears to be how people have reported getting two rocks with a single action.

Best methods
Here is a schedule for getting all the rocks the fastest and cheapest way.

Other methods available for each skill are as follows.

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 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. An alternate formula, showing the same answer, is $$Experience = 99 + (x-1)^2$$.

Think of the cumulative reward as this: Total Exp Gain After 30 Complete Replicas with Level 80 Non-combat Skills=2,853,000/15=190,200 exp per skill  template = Template:Shattered heart calc form = shf result = shr param = 1|Skill's Level||int|1-99

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 percentage of current level.

Detailed information

 * 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 two 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 unless you use the bag.


 * 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 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'); the statue in the Varrock museum has to be fully built 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, Barnabus Hurma 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 took 30 weeks from 3 March 2010 to get all the replica stone pieces. This means that the earliest someone could have completed the statue was on the 22 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. After an update on 3 May 2011, the Completionist cape received a trim when players completed a shattered heart statue in their house, along with other requirements, making it an extended reward of the Shattered Heart Distraction and Diversion

Trivia



 * If you examine the statue during the cut-scene you get the 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.
 * When completing the replica statue, your adventurer's log will read: "Each time I rebuilt the statue of Dahmaroc in Varrock Museum, the archaeologists granted me a replica piece. It was a lot of work, but today I completed my own statue at home."
 * 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 experience given as rewards does count toward reducing the experience needed to make another trip to perform Tears of Guthix collection.
 * The advent of Shattered Heart meant that many players started gaining levels in little used skills, making the overall rankings table considerably more competitive.
 * Players who completed the player-owned-house Statue of Dahmaroc early were sent messages of congratulations from Mod Maz and Mod Emilee.
 * When adding multiple pairs of rocks at once, if you level up in a skill, you won't receive the message until all pairs of rocks have been added from your inventory.

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, the chance of receiving a runecrafting rock 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 two weeks the fastest way of getting agility rocks was to repeat an obstacle, notably "climb low wall". This wasn't how Shattered Heart was intended to be played; Jagex changed this so that only completing whole courses has a chance of getting rocks.
 * There was a glitch that made it possible to receive a strange rock on non-members' worlds, resulting in the creation of a members object (although players would still receive the message "You find a strange rock."). This glitch has been fixed.
 * 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.

Gallery
Shattered Heart Shattered Heart