Christmas cracker


 * "Cracker" redirects here. For other uses, see Barbarian Assault.



A Christmas cracker is a holiday item that was dropped during the 2001 Christmas event on 25 December 2001, the first RuneScape Christmas event.

Price
Christmas crackers are currently the single most expensive item in the game in terms of Grand Exchange price. They also are probably the most expensive item in terms of unofficial "street price".

Christmas crackers hardly ever update in price in the Grand Exchange. Since the release of the Grand Exchange, the price has only updated twice. Furthermore, the maximum and minimum prices are 1% from the median as opposed to the 5% used for every other item in RuneScape except partyhats.

From the release of the Grand Exchange to the summer of 2009, Christmas crackers were considered junk, and could not be sold in the Grand Exchange (and could be bought instantly for the minimum price). Then, sometime during the summer of 2009, Christmas crackers were bought out of the Grand Exchange (probably due to the rising prices of partyhats) and have been nearly impossible to obtain since then.

Pulling
Inside a Christmas cracker is a party hat and one other item or a stack of items, such as some coins, runes, or runite armour. To open it, it must be used with another player. Upon opening, the player who had the cracker gets a random coloured party hat, and the other player gets the other item. It used to be random which player would get the partyhat, but Mod Ash has confirmed that this was changed to the player with the cracker always gets the hat to prevent a possible method of real world trading.

When these crackers were dropped, the original colour was red, and has since changed to white.

Rarity
Few Christmas crackers remain due to the fact that many were pulled immediately after the drop. The vast majority of players opened them for the rune items that could be obtained from doing so. Note that at the time of the drop, party hats were virtually worthless, while certain rune items such as the rune kiteshield were worth millions. It was not expected that Christmas crackers would one day be worth so much.



Over time, many Christmas crackers been lost as players with older accounts have quit, have been permanently banned, or have opened their Christmas crackers for fun. Their importance to the RuneScape economy (which was so crucial for years starting a few years after their release) has long diminished. Other discontinued items such as party hats, Halloween masks, and Santa hats are far more commonly traded.

It is unknown how many Christmas crackers remain in the game (and of those, how many are actually available to the market).