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Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Kalphite TruthScape Minigame Secrets

You can see the world of Gielinor in your game window, and hear it if you turn on sound effects, but you can’t smell it—and everything I know about the compost mound suggests that this is definitely a good thing. J But while this large, earthy Summoning familiar seems to create a stink wherever it goes, does that mean it also stinks in terms of its usefulness to RuneScape players? Let’s find out.

What you see is what you get with this one: the compost mound is, indeed, a large animated heap of compost. Jagex’s artists and animators really outdid themselves on this one, I think—the mound lumbers about as ungracefully as you might expect, and it comes complete with adornments such as mushrooms growing on top of its head and some sort of foul ooze dribbling out of its inhuman-looking face. And it even has flies circling about its head, which is a great touch (see Figure 280). J The mound has four dialog options, like most familiars seem to have, a strange accent I cannot discern (since I’m not British) and is surprisingly polite.

This familiar is a “one man show” of help for beginning farmers, which has made it one of the most popular of the low-level Summoning familiars. First of all, it can raise your Farming level, and this boost lets you plant seeds that you normally could not. In addition, it can create large amounts of regular compost on demand, and occasionally makes supercompost as well. In addition, you can use a bucket right on the familiar to get more compost (damaging it in the process), and it will even forage for compost and seeds. As we’ll see, the value of these abilities really depends on how much you use compost as opposed to supercompost.

The compost mound can also get down and dirty with monsters. Like nearly all low-level familiars it has only limited combat abilities, but its maximum hit of 6 is quite respectable given that it only requires level 28 Summoning—that’s 50% higher than the spirit kalphite, for example.

The essential data on the compost mound can be found in Table 63; for a description of the table’s entries, see the topic Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables.

The compost mound has four, count ‘em, four non-combat abilities, all of which are related to the Farming skill in some way. I’ll describe each of them individually.

You can use the compost mound to gain a temporary increase in your Farming skill level, by clicking on it to “Interact” with it, and then selecting “Farming boost”. This is a nice feature, since it allows you to plant seeds and harvest crops at the level you are boosted to.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to quite live up to its billing: the RuneScape knowledge base says that it raises Farming by “1 + 2% of your level”. I’m level 78 Farming, and 1 + 2% of 78 is 2.56, but despite this I only get a boost of 2 levels. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but if Jagex is rounding that figure down, it means that even at level 96 you couldn’t get a boost of +3 levels.

The compost mound’s scroll, Generate Compost, does exactly that. You click the special move button and then an empty compost bin, and you see an animation of the familiar tossing compost into the bin, the lid of which closes. When you open the bin it is full of either regular compost or supercompost. This is treated as ordinary compost/supercompost, which also means that when you use buckets on the bin to withdraw it, you get full Farming XP for this: 67.5 XP for 15 buckets of regular compost, or 127.5 XP for 15 of supercompost.

This seems like a great feature, and to some extent it is. Yet, when you really analyze things closely, you come to realize that the special is not entirely what it is cracked up to be. The main problem is that you mostly get regular compost and not supercompost—in my tests, out of 30 special moves I got 27 bins of regular compost and just 3 of supercompost.

I simply cannot recommend using regular compost for Farming, because it provides lower yields while carrying a much higher chance of crop disease. Considering how much time you wait for things to grow, and how expensive many seeds are, I don’t think this is a good way to economize. Even for lower-level farmers, I still recommend using supercompost, because this saves you time and money in the long run, and also means you get more Farming XP for the time you invest in the skill.

Now, if the percentage of supercompost were higher, and you could easily empty a bin of regular compost and try again with another scroll, that would be one thing. But there is in fact no easy way to empty a compost bin—you must watch your character very slowly and methodically dip 15 buckets into it one after the other. So if you are only getting supercompost on 10% of the scrolls, you are going to spend a lot of time running back and forth between the farming patch and the bank with empty buckets and buckets of regular compost. In my tests, it took a full 30 minutes to generate 19 loads of compost, get them out of the bin, bank them and load up with more buckets for the next scroll. Frankly, it’s faster to just buy the stuff in the Farming store, where they sell for just 20 gp.

Remember that not only is supercompost cheaper than it was a year ago—about 500 gp each instead of 1k—it is much easier to get items for making supercompost now than it has ever been before. I can remember people paying 500 to 1,000 gp each for watermelons to make supercompost out of—well, as of the time I write this, watermelons are now 90 gp a piece. I don’t see much reason to tinker with compost mounds and special moves to make loads of regular compost, when you can make 15 supercompost for a cost of around 1,350 gp (and falling.)

One advantage to using the familiar is that you do get Farming XP when you withdraw the compost, though it’s not a lot. In fact, if you really wanted to get extra Farming XP you could just keep using the mound’s special move on a bin, fill 15 buckets, empty them and repeat. (Save any supercompost you get, of course!) This would probably net around 2,500 or so Farming XP per hour.

In addition to its compost generation scroll ability, the compost mound allows you to use an empty bucket on it—this fills the bucket with regular compost, and damages the familiar by 2 HP. Since it has 25 HP, you can do this at most 12 times without killing the familiar (Figure 281).

Strange at it may seem, this can actually be more useful than the special move described above, though perhaps not in the way you might think. Suppose you go to a farming plot to harvest your herbs and find that they are diseased. You don’t have a plant cure on you, nor do you have any money to buy one. No problem: withdraw four buckets from the tool leprechaun, dip them into the compost mound, then sell the buckets of compost to the Farming store. Now you have enough gold to buy a plant cure. J

As if the abilities above weren’t enough, the compost mound also forages buckets of compost, supercompost and even seeds. Like most foragers, this ability doesn’t work quickly, but it’s a nice little bonus when it happens. In about an hour of testing with my compost mound, I got five buckets of regular compost, one supercompost, and one sweetcorn seed.

Most people don’t think of the compost mound as being a combat familiar, and I can’t blame them—it certainly doesn’t seem like one. So it’s perhaps ironic that while its Farming abilities turned out to be below my expectations, its combat expertise was a pleasant surprise. For example, all of the familiars below level 30 Summoning have a maximum hit of 2 to 4, but with the compost mound that jumps all the way to 6—a significant improvement over familiars just a few levels below it.

In my combat experiments, I found that a compost mound was able to do quite a bit more damage than a spirit kalphite, for example. Even in combat against level 93 dust devils, the mound hit 5s and 6s pretty consistently (Figure 282). Now, at my combat level this isn’t that big of a deal, but for a level 50-70 player it could really speed things up. The only drawback is that like so many other familiars, it attacks very slowly.

The compost mound is even pretty decent in the defence department. High-level monster will still finish it off fast, but it was able to hold its own against some monsters even well above its combat level. I watched a dust devil hit a long sequence of zeroes against it, for example.

The compost mound turns out to be a paradox of sorts: its apparently useful non-combat abilities aren’t as great as they initially seem, while its combat abilities are better than you’d expect at first glance.

I could recommend it more enthusiastically if it created a higher percentage of supercompost, or if there were more situations in which using regular compost instead of supercompost made sense. But as things stand, with supercompost so cheap and materials to make it even cheaper, I can’t see much benefit in a familiar that makes an inferior product.

In terms of combat, the compost mound is as good as it gets among summons below level 30. It has a decent number of hitpoints and does much more damage than other low-level familiars. It won’t set the world on fire with its combat prowess, but will definitely help lower-level players.

If you do decide to use the compost mound for generating compost, here are a few tips that I’m sure you’ll find useful:

• You can make money using this familiar by generating compost and supercompost repeatedly, though you won’t get rich off it. Start at the bank in Catherby with the compost mound out and some gold and Generate Compost scrolls in your inventory. Run south to Arhein, the general store NPC on the docks, and buy 15 buckets from him. Then run north to the farming patch and use the scroll on the bin there. Fill your buckets, bank your compost/supercompost and repeat. Use energy or super energy potions as necessary.
  
  
• If you want to just buy lots of buckets at once and bank them to use with this familiar, your best bet is the new town of Oo'glog, unlocked as part of the As a First Resort… quest. There’s a general store that sells buckets right next to the bank, and you can take a dip in the salt-water pool to give yourself infinite run energy. (The Grand Exchange would be easier, if not for its stupid 100 item limitations…)
  
  
• One compost mound pouch costs less than 10 Generate Compost scrolls, so make the scrolls yourself to save money and get a bit of free Summoning XP.
  
  
• Be sure to check the familiar’s inventory for foraged goods once in a while, as it’s easy to miss the messages saying it has produced an item.

Summoning Familiar Details - Spirit Kalphite TruthScape Minigame Secrets