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 statue for one's player-owned house if the whole statue is completed.

The statue one adds rocks to 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 explode, having the player building a new one.

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. 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. Everytime you add a pair of rocks, you gain 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 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 xp being given for placing pairs in the museum, even after the POH replica has been completed.]

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. 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 when finding one.

If you obtain a rock from one skill, and then a rock from a different skill, your chance of receiving a rock from the first skill is reset to normal. For this reason, it is advisable not to try for both rocks from the same skill at one time, especially with the skills which give rocks relatively slowly. It can be a good idea to pair skills which are trained at a similar location; get the first rock from the first skill, then the first rock from the second skill, which resets the chance of receiving the second rock from the first skill to normal. Once you have the second rock from the first skill, the chance of receiving the second rock from the second skill will also reset to normal. This method ends up being much faster than trying for both rocks back-to-back in each skill.

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 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 recently released statue collection bag also prevents this by adding the rocks straight into the bag.

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 up to eleven hours without getting one.

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 may 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.

With the update on 19 August 2010, Barnabus Hurma will give you a statue collection bag to store your Strange rocks thus freeing up space in your Bank or inventory

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 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. 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, and woodcutting/firemaking.

When a player receives their first strange rock in a skill, the chance of receiving the second rock is half that of the first. However, the Shattered Heart activity only remembers the most recent skill a rock was gained in. By alternating between skills, and ensuring that the skill you are trying to gain a rock in is not the same skill as the last rock was obtained from, a player may maximise their chances of getting all rocks quickly. If a player is stuck in a situation where only one pair of rocks remains to be collected, it may be faster to collect one rock, destroy and reobtain a rock in a different skill, and then get the second rock (If this is attempted, it is best to destroy a rock in a skill that is fast to reobtain, e.g. Fishing, rather than a slow or expensive one e.g. Hunter or Herblore).

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.

Here is also a scedule for getting all the rocks on the fastest and cheapest way.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.
 * The XP given as rewards does count toward reducing the XP needed to make another trip to perform Tears of Guthix collection.
 * When the first two stones are added, the statue piece stands on one foot, which is unbalanced. In the real world it would tilt over if not attached to the plinth.
 * Players who completed the POH 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.
 * Jagex in some news items circa 2009-2010 had indicated they wanted to encourage players to train many non-combat skills more, as apparently many players were either training combat skills to high levels but not other skills or were training one or a few non-combat skills to get the skillcape but not others. Shattered hearts, like Ancient effigies, appear to be part of their effort to encourage non-combat skill training. Shattered hearts require players to train multiple non-combat skills many times to be able to build the statue in their house.

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 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.


 * 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.