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Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Scorpion Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Kalphite

C’mon, admit it—you’ve always wanted a huge, ugly, off-white rat trailing behind you as you go from place to place in the lovely land of RuneScape. No? What if I told you that it would happily provide you with mountains of cheese? Still not tempted? Well, you should be.

The albino rat is one of the better examples of a familiar that on the surface seems pointless, but that once you apply a bit of creativity, turns out to be very useful indeed. In fact, this oversized rodent can be surprisingly beneficial in all three of the main areas Summoning was intended to help: combat, combat support, and non-combat skills. Read on to learn how.

With the albino rat, the Jagex art team clearly was going for a look that “only a mother could love”. This familiar is as large as a person, and sports dirty pale gray fur and the long tail typical of its species. The rat’s face has the same coloring, except for long yellow fangs and the red eyes that people have come to associate with albinism (though not all real world albinos have them). It also has brownish-gray stripes on its back, which a true albino would not have; seems this familiar’s designer went to the same biology class as the developer who thought bats could see well in the dark. J You can see a picture of the rat in Figure 275. It has some amusing chat dialogs, which I’ll leave to you to discover on your own.

The rat has only two abilities: it can fight as a level 36 combatant, and it has a special move that produces five pieces of cheese. This seems to be of little value at first blush, mainly because people tend to think of cheese as only an ingredient of other food items. The rat is indeed useful for that purpose, but it’s worth pointing out that cheese itself can be consumed. This means that with one albino rat pouch and a stack of scrolls, a player can generate large amounts of food at will in nearly any location—rather useful indeed.

Table 61 lists the essential information about albino rats. For a description of the table’s entries, see the topic Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables.

As already mentioned, the albino rat’s single non-combat ability is its Cheese Feast scroll, which generates five pieces of cheese that the rat holds in its inventory. The rat must have at least one free inventory space to use the scroll; otherwise, the game will refuse to let you cast it again. For maximum efficiency, you should obviously withdraw all the cheese before using another scroll; if you cast it when the rat is already holding three cheese, for example, you’ll only get two more.

Note that in the RuneScape knowledge base, the rat is listed as having the ability “Forager (5) - stores cheese after scroll use”. This is ambiguous, and seems to imply that the rat will forage for cheese even if you don’t use a scroll. In well over an hour of using an albino rat, though, it has never foraged any cheese for me, so I think the inventory is only for storing Cheese Feast output.

Cheese is most commonly used as an ingredient for making useful food products, including potatoes with cheese (which heal 16 HP like monkfish), and the whole range of pizza products (which heal up to 22 HP in two bites for the pineapple version.)

The non-combat value of being able to generate cheese could surprise you, especially if you are still used to thinking about the “old ways” of getting food ingredients in RuneScape. Before the anti-RWT changes of late 2007, you could easily buy lots of cheese at the Culinaromancer’s chest in Lumbridge for what, 8 gp each, and bank them in the same place. Well, shops now sell items for Grand Exchange prices, and the price of cheese has been going up every day for a long time.

At the time that I write this topic, the “average” price of cheese is 56 gp each on the G.E., and so that’s what the food shops now charge as well. In contrast, I can buy an albino rat pouch for around 1,200 gp, which I can make into 10 scrolls each producing 5 pieces of cheese. That’s around 24 gp each, less than half the cost, and the difference is only going to increase over time.

Of course, the main drawback of using the rat in this manner is that you have to wait for the special move bar to recharge after every 10 scrolls. However, you can easily do other things while you wait—like assembling and baking pizzas! J

Here’s the best way I’ve found to use the albino rat to generate cheese. First, make sure your Summoning points are recharged and you’re at an easily-used bank like the chest at Castle Wars. Withdraw a large number of Cheese Feast scrolls and summon the rat. Then do the following:

1. Click the Summoning special move button.
   
   
2. Immediately click the rat and choose “Withdraw”. You do not need to wait for the animation, or in fact, wait at all, in my experience, after activating the special move.
   
   
3. Withdraw the cheese, then immediately click the special move button again. Don’t waste time closing the rat’s inventory.
   
   
4. Repeat this process a total of five times; you’ll now have used half the special move bar and will have 25 cheese in your inventory.
   
   
5. Bank the 25 pieces of cheese, then repeat steps 1 through 3 until you’ve got another 25.
   
   
6. Bank the second set of 25 cheese, wait for the special move bar to recharge, and then repeat the whole process.

In my tests, I found that it took me about 1 minute 15 seconds to use 10 scrolls and withdraw all the cheese from the rat, and then 2 minutes for the special move bar to recharge. That works out to 900 pieces of cheese an hour. As an added bonus, you get 2.3 Summoning XP for every scroll you use, which comes to 414 XP per hour. Not a lot, to be sure, but hey, you can’t argue with free XP in a skill that most people consider expensive to level—it’s equivalent to making 19 granite crab pouches or 13 desert wyrms, without needing any charms, shards or secondary ingredients.

Of course, instead of using the cheese yourself, you could decide to sell it. You won’t get rich doing this, of course, but it could be an option for lower-level players to make some money. (The spirit spider is probably better for that, though!)

The albino rat has two combat-related uses: combat support and fighting. I’ll discuss each of them separately, starting with combat support since it is related to the cheese production we just discussed.

I almost slapped myself in the head when I realized that I had discounted the value of the Cheese Feast special move as only being useful for cooking. I had forgotten that cheese can also be eaten “straight”, healing 2 HP at a time! This means that every time you use a Cheese Feast scroll, your rat will generate 10 HP of healing for you out of thin air. How nice is that?

Of course, there are a few strings attached. First, you must use up an inventory slot for scrolls, which could itself have held food. Second, the 10 HP is in five bites, so it’s rather slow to get that healing. Third, you need to have additional free inventory slots to withdraw the cheese. Ideally, you want five slots so you can take it all out at once (Figure 276); if you only have one slot you have to click the rat, click “Withdraw”, click one cheese, click the cheese to eat it, and then do it all again four more times. Not fun at all.

The rat’s cheese ability can be very useful for lower-level players. Imagine someone who’s around level 40 and gets given a Slayer assignment to kill, say, moss giants. Well, those beasts can hit lower-level players pretty hard, and they don’t have luxuries like Guthans or monkfish fishing at their disposal. Bringing with an albino rat means that such a player could easily complete an entire Slayer assignment just using cheese as food, once his or her initial food load ran out.

The slowness of the process and the low healing of cheese means that it is less helpful for higher-level players. I once took an albino rat with me to fight waterfiends, and frankly, it was a nuisance to try to free up inventory space, deal with the rat while the fiends kept attacking me and so forth. It was easier for me to just use my usual complement of Sara brews and regular food.

But even for us more experienced players, don’t count the rat out just yet. Consider the following more creative uses; not all are combat, exactly, but all are situations where you need to heal:

• Dharoking: Sometimes being able to eat just a small amount of HP is just the ticket. For example, I occasionally use Dharoks on nechryaels; I put on Protection from Melee, but the death spawns use a magic attack. A small amount of healing is perfect here.
  
  
• Team Combat Trips: I got some funny looks on a recent God Wars trip when I summoned an albino rat, but my teammates changed their views on the ugly rodent when I was able to use it to help all of us heal up before tackling the Armadyl boss.
  
  
• Agility Training: You don’t need a lot of healing, but you usually need some; in fact, small amounts of healing are sometimes better in cases where you get hit for a percentage of your current hitpoints. The albino rat can tag along behind you carrying cheese for you to use when needed—and it doesn’t increase your weight!
  
  Note that familiars may not be usable in all Agility training areas, and I haven’t tested them all yet. I do know that you can’t bring them into the Brimhaven Agility Arena, but you can use them at the Agility Pyramid.
  
  
• Thieving: Like Agility training, Thieving often results in small amounts of damage, perfect for something like the albino rat. You can even take it into Pyramid Plunder (but be sure to keep it out of combat with those mummies!)
  
  
• Runecrafting: Well, this might be a bit of a stretch, but in theory you could use an albino rat at the ZMI Ourania altar, to negate damage received by the Zammy nuisances along the short path. The rat holds the cheese while your inventory is full of essence, and then you withdraw it after crafting and eat it. (This does cost you a slot for the scrolls, of course.) I haven’t tested this yet.

I’m sure clever players will find even more uses.

The albino rat is the first of the Summoning familiars that I consider to be at least reasonably helpful in combat for its level. No, it’s not going to help level 115 players destroy black demons, so don’t even bother. But for a lower-level player it could be useful in limited situations where familiars can be involved in combat.

For example, I tested it against a kalphite worker (level 28). Where lower-level familiars like the spirit spider could barely touch the overgrown insect, an albino rat landed hits of up to 4 HP on one over 50% of the time. For a low-level player, that’s not a bad help at all. The albino rat also has a respectable 28 HP for its level, and while its defence is not great, it’s at least not awful.

This is a nice little familiar. Its combat and combat support abilities are useful, especially for lower-level players, which likely is its intended audience. And anyone who wants to make potatoes with cheese or pizzas of any sort will appreciate a cheaper way to get cheese while simultaneously gaining some Summoning XP.

The only drawback to this familiar is its cost. It is the lowest-level familiar using a blue charm, by far the rarest of the four types, and it uses a lot of shards which leads to it being expensive to make. Fortunately the pouches are easy enough to buy, even if they aren’t super cheap, and you really should save the blue charms for higher-level pouches anyway.

Here’s a few extra things to keep in mind when using this familiar:

• You won’t be able to withdraw cheese from the familiar when in combat, so don’t count on it in any place where there are aggressive monsters and no safe spots to hide in.
  
  
• If relying on it for its ability to produce cheese and not its actual combat abilities, avoid multicombat areas, where it will probably get killed prematurely.
  
  
• For whatever reason, 10 Cheese Feast scrolls currently costs 50% more than a single albino rat pouch in the Grand Exchange. If you need scrolls, then buying 28 pouches and converting them to scrolls at a Summoning obelisk will save you over 17k in gold and give you 64.4 Summoning XP, making it a no-brainer.
  
  
• If you want to make cheese to sell, consider holding onto it for now, as the price is rising every day.
  
  
• Note that since the rat takes up four squares, you can’t access it at certain banks that are in cramped quarters, such as the ones at the Grand Tree.

Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Scorpion Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Kalphite