TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Monster Secrets       9  TruthScape Monster Secrets - Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide

Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Access, Location and World Selection TruthScape Monster Secrets - Giant Mole Exterminator’s Handbook

Alright, ready for action? It’s time to get out our gear and some cannonballs and start blasting some ice trolls!

On this page I will tell you how to get yourself prepared to fight, then show you exactly where to place your cannon and how to start it up quickly as the trolls start attacking. Once the cannon is in place, you will have several “jobs” to do, and I’ll explain what they are and which are most important. I’ll give you some ideas for dealing with the many drops you’ll get, and how to handle your cannon. Finally, I’ll tell you how to finish up your trip, and provide you with a few extra tips that you may find handy.

As you read the rest of this discussion, you will want to refer frequently to Figure 364. It contains a detailed map of the island where you will be fighting the trolls, with annotations I reference in my explanations below.

If you aren’t already at the bank at Jatizso, then obviously go there; I have instructions for doing so on the previous page. Once at the bank, do the following:

1. Check your health; if you are not fully healed, then top up using any sort of cheap food. You can even just buy some cheap fish from the market a bit north of the bank if you want to save what’s in your bank.
   
   
2. Check your run energy. If it is below about 60% then take an energy pot or wait a minute or two before proceeding; you don’t want to run out of energy before getting to the right spot, and the cannon is heavy.
   
   
3. Put on all of your equipment.
   
   
4. Take out all of your inventory items.
   
   
5. Drink one dose of the combat or super attack potion.
   
   
6. Turn off auto-retaliate. You want to be able to concentrate on killing the ice troll female without your character switching to something else, and you want control of when and how your character attacks.

You are now ready to fight, except for your protection prayer, which you’ll put on just before entering combat.

Run north from the bank to the northeast doors of the town and open them. Run over the bridge and then put protection from melee on. Then run northwest to the center of the island.

The exact place on the island where you put the cannon is not essential, but through further trial and error, I have found that the best success is obtained by putting the cannon base four squares east and two squares south of the rock outcrop in the island’s center. This location gives the cannon reach over nearly the entire island, and also puts it in a good spot to help you quickly kill the ice troll female that responds near that outcrop. I recommend not putting the cannon any closer to the rocks than four squares; if you do, the ice troll female will usually be too close to the cannon to be hit by it. Figure 364 shows exactly where the cannon should be placed.

As soon as you get out among the ice trolls, most of them will attack you (some will remain preoccupied by the guards.) There are two ice troll females here: one that spawns west of the cannon spot, and one that spawns northeast of it. The second one should be ignored—it will in most cases not attack you, and it is also the only troll that only drops bones and nothing else, so it’s not worth killing.

The first ice troll female—the one near the rocks—will constantly attack you (Figure 365), and you have two choices at the start: either kill it immediately before setting up the cannon, or set the cannon up first so it helps you in killing it. I usually kill the female first because otherwise I take a fair bit of damage while setting up the cannon, which does take a while.

Setting up the cannon can be a bit annoying because of all the trolls everywhere, and RuneScape’s stupid engine issues with default selections. When you “use” each cannon part on the partially assembled cannon, I recommend right-clicking and selecting the cannon—this will save you trying to, for example, use the cannon furnace on a guard or whatnot.

Once the cannon is assembled, load it with cannonballs—again, right-clicking will save you trying to load cannonballs into a troll or a guard. J Then click the cannon to start it up and you are in business.

As most experienced cannoners know, combat with a cannon is rather different than typical monster killing, where the procedure is basically “attack monster, eat as necessary to stay alive, take the drops when it dies and reload for the next one”. The cannon does most of the hard work here, while you will instead be running around performing various tasks to keep things going, pick up loot, and stay alive.

One difference between most cannoning situations and ice troll cannoning is that there are so many ice trolls and they have such good drops that you’ll have a lot to compete for your attention. It will take some practice to get good at this, though it isn’t really hard as long as you keep your wits about you.

The following is a list of the activities you will need to do constantly while the cannon is going. It is listed roughly in order of the most to least important tasks you must perform, so it should help you make sure everything gets done properly. Be sure you understand all of this completely before you set out:

1. Monitor and Maintain Prayer Level: This is your #1 priority: with a bunch of ice trolls attacking, if you run out of Prayer points, you will die in seconds. Keep checking your Prayer level, and as soon as you are down enough that you won’t waste anything by drinking a prayer potion dose, drink one. Always stay above 50% prayer points!
   
   
2. Feed the Cannon When it Gets Hungry: The cannon only holds 30 cannonballs, which will last about a minute on average, but as little as 20 or 30 seconds at the start when there are lots of healthy trolls around. When the cannon runs out of ammo, load another 30 cannonballs into it and restart it. This only takes a couple of seconds.
   
   
3. Kill the Ice Troll Female as it Spawns: As soon as the ice troll female west of the cannon spawns, immediately attack and kill her. The longer she is around, the more points of damage you will take. Watch carefully for her, as she sometimes hides under the other trolls; you may need to right-click to attack her (she will occasionally call out “Urg!” so look for that too).
   
   If your cannon runs out of ammo while fighting the female, it’s up to you if you want to reload the cannon, which can help you kill her faster.
   
   The other ice troll female that spawns northeast of the cannon will usually not bother you. Sometimes she may start throwing rocks at you if you get too close; if this happens, just move south of where the cannon is and she should start pelting the NPC guards instead.
   
   
4. Monitor Hitpoints and Heal: After each time you kill the female, check your hitpoints level, and if necessary, heal up. In practice this isn’t something you’ll have much difficulty with, at least at the start, since you’ll be eating to free up inventory space for drops also.
   
   
5. Gather Drops: Run around picking up drops and manage your inventory space to best advantage, and definitely watch out for valuable drops that appear on the ground (Figure 366). See the section “Dealing with Drops” below for more.
   

   Figure 366: Always Nice to See...

   Gotta love seeing a rune kite lying on the ground. You can see that this is a bit of a lull in the action as there is only one live troll. This is a good time to pick up drops, check prayer levels and so forth. Note the red dot on the minimap well to the northwest, in one of the areas where trolls sometimes get stuck away from the cannon—I need to run over and check that for drops. There’s also a red drop well south to check out.

   
   

In addition to these constant activities, there are a few other things you need to check less frequently:

• Check Attack/Strength Level: Every few minutes, check to see how much of your combat or super attack potion has worn off. When it is mostly gone, take another dose.
  
  
• Disassembling and Reassembling the Cannon: About every 15 minutes or so you will get a message telling you that your cannon has nearly decayed, and you’ll have to pick it up and put it back down again. See the section “Cannon Management” below for more.
  
  
• Look for Drops Far from the Cannon: Most of the drops will be from trolls who get hit and then run towards you near the cannon to attack, but some will get stuck behind obstacles or just wander aimlessly as the cannon pelts them, and they will die in the corners of the island. It’s worth monitoring your minimap for red dots in these locations so you know when to go check them out—see Figure 366 for an example of red dots on the minimap. However, there are also areas you can’t see on your minimap that frequently have drops, especially the far northeast corner of the island (which you can see me checking out in Figure 367). There are also some less common drop spots well west and northwest that you should check periodically.
  
  Figure 364 shows the more common drop areas outside the main combat zone in green and the less common ones in red. I’ve found rune kites, ranarr seeds and so forth in these spots, so don’t ignore them!
  

  Figure 367: Check the Corners

  Trolls will die in the corners of the island fairly regularly; be sure to check them out or you’ll miss some good drops. (I’ve found ranarr seeds in this spot...)

  
  

If you are on top of all of that and still have some “spare time”, then just melee an ice troll runt or male until the next female spawns. You can also feed the cannon before it runs out of ammo so it will keep firing longer.

Ice trolls can drop a lot of valuable items quickly, many of which do not stack, which makes inventory space an issue—this is a “nice problem to have”, but still a problem. Especially at the start, you will not have much space for drops, and will have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind. Fortunately, you will have four spaces from the cannon parts to play with in the beginning.

Here are some specific suggestions on dealing with drops:

• Identify herbs and drop low-valued ones. I keep anything above harralander, and harralander if I have room.
  
  
• Alch armor and weapon items immediately, except rune kiteshields and granite shields.
  
  
• Drop empty potion vials.
  
  
• Devote a space for accumulating noted sharks, seaweed and earth runes, since you will get lots of each. Wool can go either way; it can be useful to you and worth quite a bit to some buyers, and you’ll get hundreds of them. I sometimes pick them up but sometimes don’t bother (since I have a lifetime supply in the bank already anyway. J)
  
  
• If you need some space temporarily, for example to alch a steel platebody, drop a piece of food, pick up the item, alch it and then pick the food up again.
  
  
• Eat food even a bit before it is “optimal” if it helps free up needed space. For example, if I need inventory space and I am down 10 points, I might just eat a lobster anyway.
  
  
• It’s common to have many items piled up in one spot from multiple kills, so regularly right-click drop piles to look for goodies that are under the bones. This is especially important since half keys like to hide under bone piles, as you can see in Figure 368.
  

  Figure 368: Check for Hidden Drops

  Many items will hide under bones, trolls, guards or the cannon itself, so you need to right-click frequently to make sure you don’t miss them. Half keys are at the top of the list, since they are small and always go under bones in a stack.

  
  

Of course, another option always available to you for dealing with the inventory space problem is to run back to the bank to deposit your drops. This does cost you some time and hassle, but it can make life easier.

Finally, a warning: if you see a rune kiteshield or granite shield on the ground, pick it up immediately and don’t bury bones or do anything else first, or you could lose it to a random.

Jagex doesn’t want players to be able to just set up a cannon and feed it cannonballs for hours at a time without paying attention to what they are doing, so about every 20 minutes or so the game will cause the cannon to “degrade”. Before this happens, you get a message in your chat box saying “Your cannon has almost decayed!”. When you see that message, you must pick up your cannon and then put it back down. If you do not, a few minutes later you’ll see a message saying “Your cannon has decayed!” and it will disappear. See Figure 369 for an example of what the message looks like.

The first issue with the message is that it is easy to miss. You need to check the chat box regularly, and even so you may not see it due to all the other messages you get. (I even scroll up if I haven’t checked in several minutes, to make sure I didn’t miss it.) Another alternative is to just proactively pick up and replace the cannon every 15 minutes or so—then you don’t need to worry about the message at all.

Once you see the “almost decayed” message, wait until you have just killed the most recent spawn of the ice troll female. Then temporarily drop items to free up four inventory slots as needed, pick up the cannon, replace it, and retrieve the items you dropped.

If your cannon does decay, it’s a hassle but not the end of the world. You can get a free replacement from Nulodion the dwarf, who lives in a little house near the main entrance to the Dwarven mine north of Falador.

You should think about finishing a trip any time you notice that you are:

• Running out of prayer potions and points;
  
  
• Running out of food;
  
  
• Getting too full to carry more good drops; and/or
  
  
• Getting tired of cannoning ice trolls…

I normally do trips that last around 30 minutes or so, but sometimes I go longer, depending on my mood and luck.. I hate leaving without at least one rune kite or granite shield. J

If you want to keep going for a longer time, you don’t actually have to break the activity down into discrete trips. You can leave the cannon set up and run back to the bank to dump drops and get more food and prayer pots. Then just run back to the cannon. On the other hand, the bank being close also means reloading for a fresh trip is easy too.. and breaking it into trips gives you some time to breathe in between them. If you do keep the cannon up for a long time, remember to watch out for it “decaying”—it’s a long way to the Dwarven mine and back to Jatizso.

Additional Notes and Tips

Here are some extra thoughts that you may find useful:

• If you want to stretch your trip out a bit, remember that you don’t need to leave the second you run out of prayer pots or food—you can let your prayer points and hitpoints drop down slowly for a while. Just don’t push your luck! Definitely leave if you fall below about 30 prayer points or 30 hitpoints.
  
  
• To get a drop from an ice troll you only have to do one damage to it. If a guard has one nearly dead that your cannon isn’t reaching, finish it off for an easy drop.
  
  
• If at the end of a trip your inventory is too full to pick up the cannon, run to the bank, free up four spots for the cannon, and then run back to get it.
  
  
• If you are near the end of a trip and are sure you don’t want to do any more for a while, you can deliberately let the cannon degrade. I do this sometimes because it also means I have four extra bank spaces to play with until the next time I want to use the cannon. Then I just go and retrieve it.
  
  
• Killing time between trips? There are lots of other things to do on Jatizso! You can buy cheap raw fish and cook it, buy cheap coal from the store southwest of the bank and save it or superheat bars right in the shop, or fish on the docks. The island also has the best addy mine outside the Wild—just watch out for the trolls down there! (Figure 370)
  

  Figure 370: Try the Jatizso Mine

  The Jatizso mine has lots of great ores you can collect, including four adamantite rocks right near the entrance, which is itself quite close to the bank. There are more addy rocks, coal, mithril and more deeper in the mine, too—just watch out for the ice trolls in the northern half of the mine.

  
  
  
  
• The weapons shop in Jatizso will actually pay above alch value for mith warhammers, if you want to bother hauling them back.
  
  
• If at the end of a trip you are done cannoning for a while and want to leave Jatizso, just run back to the bridge, turn off protection from melee, and use Home Teleport.
  
  
• The bridge leading west from the island where you are cannoning leads to Neitiznot, if you want to go there for whatever reason.

Ice Trolls Cannon Training Guide - Access, Location and World Selection TruthScape Monster Secrets - Giant Mole Exterminator’s Handbook