TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Understanding, Using and Benefiting From Familiars                 9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Detailed Familiar Descriptions

Summoning Familiar Details - Thorny Snail Summoning Familiar Details - Desert Wyrm

One of the ways in which Jagex built up interest in Summoning before it was released was by publishing an image of a “noticeboard” containing cryptic clues about the upcoming skill. Within this image appeared the phrase “Anger unseats bacteria”, which some players fed into anagram solving software; one of the results was “Use granite crab as a net”. And as it turns out, we do have the granite crab, and you can indeed use it as a net—and much more.

This is, in fact, one of the most versatile of the low-level Summoning familiars. It offers a particularly attractive set of features, given that the level needed for it can be reached using the free 275 gold charms you receive at the end of the Wolf Whistle quest. And as icing on the cake, it’s also one of the best low-level pouches to make for leveling the Summoning skill, so most players will have lots of them available for “free”.

The granite crab appears as a small, squat, gray crab with four greenish spots on its shell (Figure 268). It tends to rock back and forth from side to side when standing still, and walks normally as it trails behind you (it doesn’t move sideways like some crabs do.) The crab has only three dialog options, and none of them are particularly exciting—it seems the crab really wants to go catch some “rock fish”, but we don’t seem to have any of those yet in RuneScape…

The granite crab is a powerhouse of non-combat usefulness, with three different handy abilities: an invisible +1 boost to your Fishing level whenever it is out; an iron ore foraging capability; and the ability to big net fish, as mentioned above. As we’ll see, its fishing ability is much more powerful than the anagram solution implies, or even how the RuneScape knowledge base describes the familiar.

The crab can also fight. It has a combat level of 26, and while it doesn’t do a lot of damage, at least it has a high hitpoints total for its level (30 HP) so it doesn’t die as fast as other beginner-level familiars. The granite crab also can provide a small amount of combat support—its scroll, Stony Shell, provides an approximate 5% Defence bonus when used.

The key information for the granite crab can be found in Table 58; for a description of the table’s entries, see the topic Explanation of the Familiar Summary Tables.

As I mentioned in the summary above, the granite crab has three non-combat abilities. I’ll explain each of them in detail here.

The granite crab provides an automatic (“invisible”) +1 Fishing boost whenever it is active. Like all such skill bonuses, it will not allow you to access resources for which you do not have the right level, so you can’t use it to fish sharks at level 75 for example. It just slightly speeds up how fast you fish (in theory, anyway.)

The crab has the ability to forage for iron ore. This seems like a strange item to forage for a familiar made of granite that fishes, but iron ore is the secondary ingredient for its pouch, so I guess it makes sense. It has only one inventory slot, so whenever you see the message “Your familiar has produced an item”, you should immediately withdraw the ore; it won’t forage again until you do so.

Like most familiars, the granite crab’s foraging is quite random, but it seems to come up with an item more frequently than most others. While I have seen it go over 20 minutes between foragings, it is more common for it to take less than five minutes. Either way, of course, whatever it gets should just be viewed as a nice bonus.

This is the really big draw of the granite crab, and also the aspect of it that is most confusing, due largely to Jagex’s very poor explanation of what the crab does. The RuneScape knowledge base says the crab “Counts as a big net when Fishing”, which has led thousands of people to think that all it does is allow a player to big net fish without a net. This would be a rather ho-hum ability—all it would do is save you one inventory slot—and few people big net fish to begin with.

In reality, the crab doesn’t just “count as a big net”, it actually does the big net fishing itself. To start it going, click the fishing spot; you’ll get a message saying “You step aside to let your granite crab fish”, and that’s exactly what your character will do—while the crab fishes, you are then free to do something else! It is necessary to stay close to the crab or it will stop fishing—within two squares—but as long as you stay near it, you have a powerful multitasking tool on your hands.

Here’s the skinny on the crab’s fishing ability:

• The crab will catch the three types of fish that you can while big net fishing: mackerel, cod and bass. It will also catch seaweed for your Crafting convenience, an oyster once in a while, and may even snag the occasional casket.
  
  
• Unlike players, the crab never catches junk like leather gloves or boots, which is very handy!
  
  
• You get 10% of the Fishing XP value of the fish caught by the crab. For example, you’ll receive 2 XP for each mackerel, 4.5 XP per cod, and 10 XP for every bass the granite crab reels in. Not a lot, but hey, it’s free XP.

The crab’s fishing speed is quite slow; it will not catch fish nearly as quickly as most players can when big net fishing. But you have to remember that everything it is catching is basically free—it is happening in parallel with whatever else you are doing.

For example, you can go to a big net fishing spot with the granite crab, a fire/lava staff, and a stack of noted items and nature runes. Click the fishing spot, and while the granite crab catches fish for you, alch away. You get free Fishing XP, free fish you can cook for Cooking XP and to use for combat, and free seaweed to use for making molten glass. And it will forage iron ore at the same time, too! J

Of course, the most obvious use of the crab is to let it start fishing and then go for fish yourself. This is complicated by two small annoyances: the need to stay close to the crab, and the fact that the game will ignore any big net you are carrying when the crab is out. The first issue makes it hard to, for example, fish for lobster while the crab fishes; the lobster spot has to be right near the big net spot. And the second means you can’t big net fish yourself while the crab does, unless you drop your net, get the crab going, then pick the net back up again and start yourself.

So what’s the best way of using the granite crab? It may seem ironic, given that it is the lowest level of the fishing-related familiars, but it works best when used in conjunction with shark fishing (Fishing level 76 required.) Big net fishing and shark harpooning use the same fishing spots, so you can get the crab going and then start harpooning, and never need worry about being too far away from it. Figure 269 shows an example of me doing this in the Fishing Guild.

To see just what the granite crab can do, I conducted an hour long test of the granite crab big net fishing while I harpooned sharks in the fishing guild. During that hour I caught 97 sharks, while the crab caught the following:

• 35 mackerel
  
  
• 32 cod
  
  
• 12 bass
  
  
• 2 oysters
  
  
• 1 casket
  
  
• 35 seaweed

It also foraged six iron ore (which is below average, by the way).

The sharks I caught were worth 10,670 Fishing XP, while the fish caught by the granite crab added a bonus of 341 XP, or around 3%. Not a big deal, of course, because you only get 10% of what the XP would be… but consider that when cooking those fish you get full XP. The Cooking XP for those 97 sharks is 20,370, while the XP for the 79 bonus fish is 6,060—that’s a full 30% bonus.

After cooking, the sharks are worth 1,940 HP of healing, while the crab’s fish add 590 HP, again a 30% bonus. Sure, those fish aren’t as valuable as sharks, but there are many situations where you only need low-HP fish, such as healing up in a bank after a dungeon trip, Dharoking, training Thieving or Agility and so forth. Also remember that bass actually heal more than lobsters!

Of course, there is a slight downside to using the crab: it takes a bit of extra time to get it fishing, and the fish it catches means you bank more often. But frankly, the amount of time needed for this is rather insignificant; it takes just 20 seconds to bank in the Fishing Guild and then get back to work.

I’ve had people ask me to test my shark catching speed both with and without the crab, but there’s too much random variation to be able to draw any conclusions. For example, in the test above I caught 97 sharks and in a one-hour test without the crab I got 98; but other times I’ve caught over 100 or less than 95. Clearly the random variations in fishing speed are much greater than any impact of needing to deal with the crab.

Still not convinced? Here’s a bonus feature! Have you ever been fishing and the spot moved, but you didn’t notice for 30 to 60 seconds because you were distracted or on another window? Well, when the crab is active, if the spot moves you’ll have a message pop up on your screen saying something like “Your crab can’t get to the fishing spot”. This immediately will catch your eye so you can move to a new spot; heck, this alone could compensate for the time spent dealing with the crab.

The granite crab complements its non-combat abilities with some basic combat prowess. Like most low-level familiars, it does not do a lot of damage in combat; it also has no special combat abilities. Its strength, though, is in the area of defence: whereas all other familiars below Summoning level 20 have between 12 and 25 HP, the granite crab has 30. So even though it won’t help that much in combat, at least it won’t die as quickly as a thorny snail or desert wyrm will (Figure 270).

The granite crab’s special move is a basic level defensive enhancement that temporarily raises your Defence level by about 5%. Frankly, this is the weak spot in this familiar’s arsenal; with super defence potions that provide a 20% bonus selling for under 500 gp each, there’s not much point in bothering with this scroll, in my opinion.

This is one of the best of the lower-level familiars, and vastly underrated by the majority of RuneScape players, who simply don’t understand what it can do. If you fish for sharks, you owe it to yourself to try using a granite crab while you wield that barb-tailed harpoon. The fish and seaweed you get will be a boon to your Cooking and Crafting training, and you get some free iron ore to boot. Alternately, you can just sell the extra items; in the example test hour I described earlier, the value of the items generated by the crab was over 12k at current market prices, increasing the profitability of shark fishing by a full 15%.

If you can’t fish for sharks, then the value of the granite crab diminishes somewhat. However, as long as you can get into the Fishing Guild, you can probably use it while fishing for lobsters or tuna/swordfish, since the fishing spots there are quite close together.

Another nice aspect of the granite crab is that since it is so low level and takes only 2 Summoning points to renew, when you get your Summoning up to a higher level, you can keep it around fishing with you for a long time. For example, at level 80 Summoning, a single granite crab would last up to six hours—without using any Summoning potions! You also don’t have to spend so much time “babysitting” it.

Here are some extra tips about making good use of the granite crab:

• The granite crab is the best pouch for training Summoning using the common gold charm from level 16 all the way up to level 52. As you might imagine, there are millions of them in the game, so you can get them dirt cheap if you don’t have ones you made yourself.
  
  
• Since the pouches are cheap, never waste Summoning potions trying to keep a granite crab alive. Recharge your points and use a new pouch.
  
  
• If the crab is fishing, you can still withdraw foraged iron ore from it without interrupting it. Renewing the familiar also will not cause it to stop fishing.
  
  
• Avoid using a granite crab at Catherby unless you want to answer the same questions about it over and over again. J

Summoning Familiar Details - Thorny Snail Summoning Familiar Details - Desert Wyrm