Carrying on with old habits, I started out my first few days doing some mining and smithing to unlock gold jewellery as a money maker. I completed Sheep Shearer to skip the early crafting levels and completed Doric's quest to unlock the anvil for some quick smithing loops to get to level 40.
... and then I got bit by the 4x exp multiplier bug and found myself stuck in the woods chopping logs for a week and a half. Coming from base early 2001 xp rates, having that boost really makes the game feel a lot more approachable.
So, with the now most unbalanced stat sheet in the world, I claimed 99 woodcutting and firemaking with Nerb there to congratulate me (thanks Nerb!) after a little over 18,000 logs. If you focus, it's around 570 logs/hr which ends up being 400k+ xp/hr around level 85, and steel hatchets stop failing at level 47. I re-watched The Fellowship of the Ring for the 98-99 grind which, as it turns out, was released in Dec 2001 - how fitting!
I also couldn't help but try to recreate a screenshot that I'm sure many of us have seen before
Coming up I plan to round out my stats more and take a stab at a low level dragon slayer run, but will probably get distracted with skilling again