TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore - Techniques for Obtaining Vials, Secondary Ingredients and Special Items                 9  Special Methods for Getting Essential Secondary Ingredients

Bird’s Nests and Crushed Nests Eyes of Newt

Cockatrice eggs are one of the newest Herblore secondary ingredients; they were introduced with the new Summoning skill in January 2008 and are used to make Summoning potions. There are three ways you can get these items—in addition to buying them from players—all of which are rather different in how they work. Two of them, fittingly enough, involve the use of the Summoning skill itself.

The simplest method of getting cockatrice eggs is as drops from a particular RuneScape monster. Can you guess what it is? Let’s see, let’s see… Yep, you get them from cockatrices. J These are level 37 monsters that require a Slayer level of 25 to kill. You must wear a mirror shield to fight them—available for 5,000 gp at any slayer master—or they will zap your stats badly and do a lot of damage. Other than this requirement, they are pretty easy to kill, as long as you have a reasonably high combat level. Get to them quickly using code “A J R” on the fairy ring network and then walking past the cave crawlers and rockslugs.

In a 30-minute controlled test using standard melee gear (an abyssal whip and nothing fancy for armor), I killed 132 cockatrices and got 19 cockatrice eggs. Cockatrices are also a good source of limpwurt roots (18 in that same time period) and nature runes (46), and on occasion also drop iron boots and white mystic boots. See Figure 219 for a typical example of drops (in this case I got more limpwurt roots than eggs, it’s all random.)

Note that cockatrice eggs are actually “extra” items that appear in addition to whatever normal drop you get for a kill, so watch carefully for them; they may sometimes be hard to spot.

You may wish to use the 35-in-28 method to save inventory space when fighting cockatrices for eggs and/or limpwurt roots.

The spirit cobra is a level 63 Summoning familiar whose special move is designed to manufacture cockatrice eggs. After summoning the familiar, if you have Ophidian Incubation scrolls in your inventory, you can use the special move button to transform a chicken egg into a cockatrice egg. This move only requires 3 special move points (out of a total of 60), so you can do 20 at a time; you must then wait for the special move bar to recharge.

After some experimentation, I have found what I feel is an efficient method for making cockatrice eggs with a spirit cobra. Begin by summoning the cobra and taking out a stack of Ophidian Incubation scrolls and 20 chicken eggs from a single-click bank like the one at Castle Wars. Then do the following:

1. Click on the Summoning tab to open it, then click to activate the special move button. Your side window will change to your inventory; click on a chicken egg to begin the transformation process. The cobra will rear back and a fancy animation will start—see Figure 218—but don’t wait for it; click the Summoning tab again and you can start another special right away. As long as you don’t go too fast, you can do one right after the other. Repeat the special a total of 20 times, which will drain your special move bar.
   
   
2. Open your bank account and store the cockatrice eggs.
   
   
3. It will take about 2 minutes for your special bar to restore. This is a good time to do anything else that you might normally do at a bank: fletch, alch, or of course, make potions. Also keep an eye on your familiar’s timer to ensure that it doesn’t expire.
   
   
4. Take out 20 more chicken eggs, and once your special bar has fully recharged, go back to step #1 and make 20 more.
   

   Figure 218: Generating Cockatrice Eggs

   The spirit cobra’s Ophidian Incubation scroll is the only fast way of getting large numbers of cocktrice eggs.

   
   

When the cobra disappears, just summon another one. If your Summoning points are low, there’s a small obelisk right outside Castle Wars.

With this method it is possible to make about 375 to 400 cockatrice eggs an hour. The costs involved include the cobra pouch, the cost of a scroll for each egg, and the eggs themselves—chicken eggs have gone up in price due almost entirely to this use for them. Even with all that, though, you can still make very decent money while doing this; the biggest cost is the scrolls, which are around 300 gp each, while cockatrice eggs are worth around 600 a piece. As an added bonus, you also get 3.1 Summoning XP for every scroll you use.

The last way to get cockatrice eggs is from a spirit cockatrice familiar, which will periodically “forage” them. (Really, I think it is supposed to be laying them, but this is categorized as a foraging ability). This method can only be considered supplemental at best, because you will get very few of them this way; in a test I got 6 over a span of 45 minutes.

I don’t generally consider Summoning potions to be a good option for training, because the value of the potions is far below the cost of the spirit weed and cockatrice eggs needed to make them. If you do want to make them yourself, the best way to get eggs depends on your preferences, and also on how many potions you want to do.

For small numbers of eggs, you are best off just killing cockatrices and collecting their eggs. Lower-level players may even get cockatrices as Slayer assignments, which is really killing two birds with one stone. (Ha, I slay me! J) Otherwise, cockatrices are not a bad place to spend a half hour on once in a while, collecting both eggs and limpwurt roots, along with other drops.

If you want a lot of eggs, the spirit cobra and its special are the only way to go. To make the most of this technique, you should plan ahead so you have something productive you can do in the two minute intervals where you are waiting for the special move bar to recharge. One nice multitask I came up with, for example, is to make harralander tar while waiting for my special move bar to restore. Some players even use this as a moneymaking technique while getting a little bonus Summoning XP. At current prices you can make a profit of around 300 gp per cockatrice egg, so that’s over 100k per hour—while actually using over 30 of those 60 minutes for something else simultaneously. And, of course, if you already have the scrolls from training Summoning, they are effectively free (since they’re not easy to sell.)

The spirit cockatrice is a viable option only for those who really don’t care much about cockatrice eggs and just want to get a few as a “side bonus”. You could keep one out when engaging in some time-consuming activity like Fishing or Woodcutting, for example. On the other hand, you might want to consider using a more profitable or useful familiar instead, such as a macaw to get herbs or a beast of burden to carry more items you obtain.

Bird’s Nests and Crushed Nests Eyes of Newt