Crystal chest

The RuneScape Wiki also has an article on: rsw:Crystal chestThe Old School RuneScape Wiki also has an article on: osrsw:Crystal chest

ClosedOpen

Chest
Released		27 February 2002 (Update)
Members		Yes
Quest		No
Location		Taverley
Options		Open
Examine		I wonder what is inside...
Advanced data
Object ID		248

Chest? (edit)? (edit)File:Chest (closed).pngFile:Chest (open).png27 February 2002 (Update)? (edit)? (edit)? (edit)? (edit)YesNoTaverley? (edit)OpenNone? (edit)I wonder what is inside...Perhaps I should search it? (edit)Scenery? (edit)248247? (edit)248247

The Crystal chest is located in a house north of Jatix's Herblaw Shop in Taverley. To open the chest, you need a Crystal key, which is created by using a rare key half on its opposite half. These key halves are dropped by any monster with access to the gem drop table or rare drop table.

Loot

A player opening the crystal chest

A player with loot from the chest

Note: The player will always receive one uncut dragonstone from opening the chest, and never more than one at a time. These drop rates are estimated based on a mix of drop logs, videos, and at times, comparison to later code. See the talk page for more details.

100% drop

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Uncut dragonstone	1	1.000000Always

Possibility 1 - Spinach roll

There is a ~34/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Spinach roll	1	0.265625Common (~34/128)
	Coins	2000	0.265625Common (~34/128)

Possibility 2 - Runes

There is a ~12/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Air-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Water-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Earth-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Fire-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Body-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Mind-Rune	50	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Chaos-Rune	10	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Death-Rune	10	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Cosmic-Rune	10	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Nature-Rune	10	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Law-Rune	10	0.093750Common (~12/128)

Possibility 3 - Gems

There is a ~12/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Ruby	2	0.093750Common (~12/128)
	Diamond	2	0.093750Common (~12/128)

Possibility 4 - Runite bars

There is a ~12/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Runite bar	3	0.093750Common (~12/128)

Possibility 5 - Crystal key halves

There is a ~10/128 chance of rolling this table, then an equal chance of either crystal key half.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Coins	750	0.078125Common (~10/128)
	Half of a key (tooth)	1	0.039062Uncommon (~5/128)
	Half of a key (loop)	1	0.039062Uncommon (~5/128)

Possibility 6 - Iron ore certificates

There is a ~10/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Iron ore certificate	30	0.078125Common (~10/128)

Possibility 7 - Coal certificates

There is a ~10/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Coal certificate	20	0.078125Common (~10/128)

Possibility 8 - Raw swordfish certificate

There is a ~8/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Raw swordfish certificate	1	0.062500Common (~8/128)
	Coins	1000	0.062500Common (~8/128)

Possibility 9 - Adamantite Square Shield

There is a ~2/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Adamantite Square Shield	1	0.015625Uncommon (~2/128)

Possibility 10 - Rune Plate Mail Legs

There is a 1/128 chance of rolling this table.

Item		Quantity	Rarity
	Rune Plate Mail Legs	1	0.007812Rare (~1/128)

Major glitch

The permanently open chest

The Crystal Chest was unusable for significant periods of time on all official RuneScape Classic servers due to a glitch that causes the chest to remain permanently opened, which prevents a player from using a crystal key to receive loot. This caused a distinct increase in the rarity of dragonstone and its related products.

Causes

The glitch was performed by logging out while opening the chest. The runescript code responsible for the chest would pause before it successfully finished and re-closed the chest as expected. Due to the open chest lacking an option to use a key on it, the chest was rendered unusable.

It was possible that the glitch was originally performed accidentally due to the instability of a player's internet connection. However, it was intentionally performed repeatedly on every world.

Economic consequences

• This glitch caused uncut dragonstones to effectively become a discontinued item, with the only source of cut dragonstones being "Very Rare" drops received from killing Fire Giants, Black Dragons, Black Demons, and the King Black Dragon. However, due to the small size of the player base and widespread use of bots, there would have still been enough dragonstones circulating for every player to have at least one Dragonstone Amulet.

• It also removed one of the most common sources of other items, such as rune bars, diamonds, and spinach rolls.

• The chest becoming disabled also caused the crystal key and key halves to become mostly worthless items, although they were still traded and sold for many coins.

Official Jagex response

Jagex did not fix the issue prior to taking RuneScape Classic offline. A J-Mod stated in a post on the Official Runescape forums that Jagex is unlikely to spend time fixing the glitch, and that if it were ever to be solved, it would have to be on the personal free time of an employee. Players who understood how the glitch occurred contacted Jagex with details, but as stated by Jagex, the problem was further compounded by the fact that few remaining staff members had working knowledge of the RuneScape Classic code.

History

The April 2018 system update countdown

• Wednesday 18 April 2018 - A system update which refreshed the RuneScape Classic, RuneScape 2, and RuneScape 3 servers temporarily fixed the infamous crystal chest glitch.
  • The servers came back online at approximately 6:47 PM BST and every chest on every world was glitched again by 8:21 BST.
    • Despite the relatively small window of time, the server refresh allowed players to use their crystal keys, resulting in several thousand new dragonstones being brought into the market immediately.

How to fix the bug

The following two lines of Runescript code would have fixed the bug:

=oploc1,opencrystalchest
*changeloc(shutcrystalchest);

This implements a "close" option for the open variant of the crystal chest, which all other chests in the game have. Technically, these two lines are all that would have been needed, but an additional nicety would be to update locations.txt in the cache to add the "close" option required for an unmodified client to actually trigger this code.