Tangle Vine was removed after an update.

The contents of this page no longer exist in RuneScape, and this article is kept for historical purposes.

The Tangle Vine is one of the former Random events, added to the game on 6 April 2004. When the Tangle Vine sprouted, players on the Tangle Vine had to stand still in order to avoid being damaged, however, the minute it started to appear many players tried to run away from the vine out of panic. If a player ran while on the vines, they would slowly sap the player's Hitpoints.

The Tangle Vine's appearance is the same as the marshy plant from the Jungle Potion quest, where you search it and obtain Snake Weed. It is located South-West of the Tai Bwo Wannai. It is also similar in appearance to a stage of growing watermelons, when you grow them in any allotment patch.

In some jungle-like areas (such as Karamja), it was hard to tell if the Tangle Vine appeared, and some players would walk while standing on it without noticing it. Many people died and lost their items due to the Tangle Vine. Some players would tell others to run, and if they did, they would slowly die, and the person would take their items. The Tangle Vine was the only random event to spread out and affect more than one person.

Some players suggested ways for the Tangle Vine to become less dangerous. For example, one suggestion was that an NPC should appear along with the Tangle Vine to warn players from moving, while some suggested that the Tangle Vine should only attack players when stationary instead of when moving, along with many other concepts that could render the Tangle Vine safer and easier to endure. However, these update ideas were ignored and instead the vine was simply removed altogether.

Removal of the Tangle Vine

Following massive amounts of criticism and feedback from players, Jagex removed the Tangle Vine. A multitude of players were relieved, knowing that there was no longer a chance of being killed out of random. Later in the game's timeline, many other random events that involved damage towards the player were removed.

“ The [tangle vine] was a random event that made it into the game for about three hours. If you moved, you would take damage. If you clicked on the screen, you would take damage. If you did nothing for ten seconds, it would go away, because we knew that bots were preprogrammed to move around and do certain things, and therefore they would kill themselves ... unfortunately, as a gamer, if something happens to you that you don't understand, your instant reaction is to move the hell away from it. We were keeping an eye on the forums on our phones and we were like, "This is a bit dangerous, isn't it." And [Andrew Gower] was like, "Right, I'm going back to the office, I'm fixing it, I'm taking it out of the game." So that's what he did. ” — Mark Ogilvie [1]

“ It spawned locations out along the ground but it didn't particularly check to see if anything else was there. So it would replace whatever loc[notes 1] was there, then when it despawned it would just delete it. So if it appeared on the piers around Port Sarim, it spread across the piers, and it vanished again, and then you had no more pier. And it was just deleting whole chunks of map. ” — Ian Gower [1]

^ 3D objects in the scenery were called "locs" in the RuneScape game engine. This was short for "locations", because they were fixed to specific tiles, in contrast to items and NPCs.

Trivia

There is a similar plant called the "Devil's Snare" that has a similar effect in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".