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Swamp Tar TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning

Roe and caviar are fish eggs that you mix into regular potions to turn them into barbarian mix potions, which combine regular potion effects with a small amount of healing. These items come from three special fish that you catch as part of the barbarian fishing feature. You can also buy the eggs or the fish that they come from, though in many cases getting them yourself is more rewarding.

Catching your own fish for roe and caviar is slower than buying it, but it saves you money, and barbarian fishing is an excellent way to get Fishing XP, along with smaller amounts of experience in three other skills. To get started, you must meet certain skill level requirements, and then receive the appropriate training from Otto Godblessed.

Barbarian fishing yields three special types of fish: leaping trout, leaping salmon and leaping sturgeon. These fish cannot be cooked and eaten; rather, you use a knife on them to cut them open. Cutting a leaping trout gives you a chance of getting roe, while cutting a leaping salmon gives roe 100% of the time. You also always get a single caviar from cutting open a leaping sturgeon. In addition to the possible roe or caviar, there’s a chance you may get fish offcuts when you cut one of these fish open.

What’s nice about barbarian fishing is that it is about as fast as fishing for regular trout and salmon, so it gives lots of Fishing XP, but it also gives XP in two other skills as well: Agility and Strength. Table 44 shows a summary of the required levels and XP given from barbarian fishing. And as if that weren’t enough, you also get Cooking XP too, when you cut the fish: 10 XP for every roe you extract and 15 XP for every caviar!

Barbarian fishing can use any of five types of bait: fishing bait, feathers, fish offcuts, roe and caviar. If you have multiple types in your inventory, they are used in that order. Since fish offcuts, roe and caviar come from cutting open barbarian fish, in theory you can stay without banking for a very long time, reusing the products you get to continue fishing.

Most barbarian mix potions use caviar, and it’s much more valuable than roe, so you’ll always want to keep the caviar you get, either to use yourself or to sell. Whether you want to keep the roe as well or not is really up to you. The advantage of keeping it is that you can either use it yourself or sell it, making more Herblore XP or money than you will if you don’t keep it. The disadvantage is that this means more time spent banking, so your net XP gained per hour is lower.

For both methods, you need only four items: a games necklace, a ring of duelling, a barbarian fishing rod and a knife. (The rod can be found under Otto Godblessed’s bed in his hut.) You also need some starting supplies. If you are fishing for only caviar, you should start with 25 fishing bait, feathers or fish offcuts. If fishing for both caviar and roe, I recommend a stack of about 1,000 fish offcuts—you need more because you won’t be reusing the roe you catch as bait. (You can buy fish offcuts for 1 or 2 gp each on the Grand Exchange.)

When you have these items, teleport to Barbarian Outpost and run south towards Otto’s place, and you’ll find the fishing spots on the water nearby.

Once you get to the fishing spot, put your rod in the water and fish until you have used up your initial 25 items of bait. Then use your knife on all of the leaping trout and salmon in your inventory—don’t cut the sturgeons. (This is to prevent the game from wasting your caviar by using it as bait!)

You will now have a stack of fish offcuts, some roe and some uncut sturgeon, as well as some empty inventory slots. Resume fishing; the game will use up your fish offcuts first, but since they are stacked, you’ll quickly fill up your inventory again. Drop the remaining fish offcuts and continue fishing, and this time you’ll use up your roe (Figure 232). When you run out, again cut all the trout and salmon.

Continue to repeat this process; each time you do, you’ll add to the number of sturgeon in your inventory. When you are down to, oh, about three or four spaces that don’t have sturgeon in them, stop fishing. Cut upon all of your remaining fish, including the sturgeon this time.

Rub the games necklace to teleport to Barbarian Output, and run inside the Barbarian Assault building. Just east of the entrance you’ll find a bank deposit box: store all of the caviar and any roe you may have, but keep the fish offcuts. Then run back and fish some more.

Repeat the whole process as many times as you like. When you use up a games necklace, use your duelling ring to teleport to Castle Wars, bank your roe and caviar, take out a new necklace and teleport back.

With this method you should be able to get approximately 200 caviar per hour, along with a few roe, which in total is worth nearly 95k. Each hour you can also get almost 40k of Fishing XP, 3.6k each of Agility and Strength XP, and around 6k of Cooking XP. (These may be level-dependent; I was Fishing level 83/84 when I did my testing.)

The method here is pretty much the same as the one above, except that you won’t reuse the roe as bait.

Go to a fishing spot as before and fish until your inventory is full, then use your knife on all of the leaping trout and salmon in your inventory, but not the sturgeons. Resume fishing, catching more fish, and repeat the cutting and fishing process until your inventory is full of sturgeon and extracted roe, or at least close to full. Be sure to stop before the game starts using your roe as bait! Then cut upon all the sturgeon to get caviar and more fish offcuts.

Rub the games necklace to teleport to Barbarian Output, run inside the Barbarian Assault building, and use the deposit box as mentioned above (Figure 233). Then run back south and keep fishing, repeating the process as long as you like, or until you run out of bait. Again, as before, use a duelling ring to go to Castle Wars when you use up a games necklace, banking there and taking out another necklace.

The advantage of this method is that you obviously get to keep the roe; the drawback is that you get less caviar per hour and less XP per hour, because of the extra time spent banking. You should count on approximately 150 caviar and 325 roe per hour with this technique, with a value of about 130k or so. You can also earn around 35k of Fishing XP, 3.2k each of Agility and Strength XP, and around 5k of Cooking XP.

Since roe and caviar are tradeable, you can buy them from other players on the Grand Exchange. Most of the time, caviar is worth around 450 to 500 gp each, and roe around 200 to 225 gp. They are sometimes hard to buy, though, depending on their current price and market demand; not many people sell these items, so the market is thin.

Instead of buying the final product, you can buy fish others have caught and cut them open yourself. Not only do you get the roe and caviar this way, you also get the Cooking XP for cutting them and the fish offcuts to use as bait (although those aren’t worth much). You could also buy leaping trout, but these often yield nothing so I am not sure they’re worthwhile.

It gets better, though: leaping salmon and sturgeon generally sell for much less than roe or caviar—as in, often 80% less. Why do people sell the fish for so little when they could get XP and much more money cutting the fish open? I’m not sure, but it may be due to players who use barbarian fishing to powerlevel for Fishing XP; they may not want to bother taking the time to cut the fish.

Of course, this is such a good deal that many people want to buy these fish compared to how many want to sell them without cutting. As a result, you can’t generally get a lot of these, but once in a while, if you have an order sitting there, you’ll get some.

Barbarian fishing is an excellent method of training the multiple skills, getting raw materials for Herblore, and making money all at the same time. I do it myself, at least as much for the Agility XP as the Fishing XP: it’s the only way in the game you can reliably get Agility experience without spending time running in circles. J So I recommend catching your own roe and caviar, unless you are maxed out on Fishing XP for example. If you do not want to catch the fish yourself, you’ll obviously have to buy roe or caviar if you want it.

For maximum XP, fish to keep only caviar; if you want good XP and more money or materials, keep both caviar and roe. Whether you should keep the caviar and roe or sell it really depends on how worthwhile you feel it is to train using barbarian potions.

Whether you catch fish yourself or not, I recommend putting in an order on the Grand Exchange for leaping salmon and sturgeon, at the maximum price. Leave them in there and see if you get lucky with some sellers. Obviously, if the price of fish starts to rise too high then at some point this will no longer be worth doing, but right now it definitely is.

Swamp Tar TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning