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TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Using Non-Combat Familiar Abilities Using Familiar Skill Boost Abilities

Have you ever found yourself fed up with the 28-slot limitation of your inventory? If so, then you’ll have no trouble appreciating beasts of burden: these familiars will carry certain items for you, effectively expanding your backpack’s size. There are currently eight different beasts of burden, which differ in terms of capacity, as well as what they can carry. And while they are all slightly different, what they have in common is being incredibly useful! J

You can see how enthusiastic I am about this aspect of Summoning; I have a lot of experience with these beasts now, and have integrated their use into many aspects of my gameplay. Below I’ll tell you all about them, and give you lots of ideas on how to make best of use of them to enhance a variety of activities.

The idea behind beasts of burden is simple enough: these summons include the ability to store items and carry them for you wherever you are allowed to take a familiar. Each has a maximum capacity, ranging from one item for the level 13 thorny snail, all the way up to the 10 slots of the level 96 pack yak.

Beasts of burden are divided into two basic categories: general purpose and abyssal. General purpose beasts of burden will carry nearly any item other than unnoted rune essence or pure essence, as long as its value doesn’t exceed a certain limit (described later in this topic). In contrast, abyssal beasts are the opposite: they can only carry essence. In general, the abyssal beasts are more difficult to summon and have lower capacity, so Jagex obviously made this distinction out of a concern for maintaining balance when it comes to the Runecrafting skill.

Table 45 lists all of the currently available beasts of burden, along with essential information about each.

Note that the relative cost information is intended to give you an approximate idea of how difficult the pouch is to make or buy, but shouldn’t be taken as gospel. It is based on factors such as which charm is used to make the familiar, how hard the secondary ingredient is to come by, and how easy it is to find the pouch for sale on the Grand Exchange.

While very helpful, beasts of burden do have a few restrictions, most of which are a result of specific design choices Jagex made in creating the familiars.

First of all, there is the essence restriction on general purpose familiars that I mentioned earlier, which can be a source of frustration for those who are new to Summoning. I’ve seen complaints from players who assumed that when they got to level 67, they could use a war tortoise to carry six extra pure essence to an altar—when you try this, though, you get a message saying that only abyssal familiars can carry essence.

There’s also a rather annoying value restriction on general purpose familiars, which effectively limits them to only carrying inexpensive items. Jagex has provided no information whatsoever about these limits—they aren’t mentioned in the knowledge base, and the company hasn’t said anything definitive about them at all. They appear to be based on the market values of the items (from the Grand Exchange) and not high alchemy values. From what I’ve been able to determine through experimentation, the limit seems to be approximately 5k per item, but there also seems to be a total value limit that I’ve not yet been able to figure out.

If you try to store an item above the limit, you get a message like “This item is too valuable to trust to this familiar.” The phrase “this familiar” seems to imply that there might in the future be some familiars that can carry more valuable items, but all the ones I’ve tried have the same limit, up to and including the war tortoise. Maybe the pack yak is different, or perhaps some future familiar will be.

As to why this was done, there’s no valid in-game reason that I can see. I think Jagex just did it to make the beasts of burden less useful, perhaps as a balancing mechanism. And that it does, because for example, you can’t use them to carry prayer potions or super restore potions.

A final restriction is the inability to store any untradeable items in a beast of burden, as shown in Figure 243. Again here, unless I’ve missed something, this seems completely unnecessary—it’s just a nuisance to players.

To access the inventory of a beast of burden, just “Interact” with it and choose “Store”. You will then see the familiar’s inventory in the middle of the screen and can transfer items to and from it. This is similar to how you access your bank, though unfortunately, the coding here is much more poorly done—it’s quite inflexible.

For example, if you have four inventory spaces free and you try to take five items out of your bank, you’ll get a message saying you don’t have room, but at least the four spaces will be filled with items. Here, you just get the message! So you must only withdraw exactly what you have room for in your backpack, which unnecessarily slows things down.

A similar annoyance occurs when you try to store items. For example, sometimes for convenience I just select the “Store 10 items” option on a war tortoise, hoping that it will just store the six that the tortoise can carry. Instead I get an error because “that would be too great of value for the familiar to hold”—even though six of the items would not be too valuable. (I won’t get started on ranting about Jagex’s QA team here.. though it is certainly tempting!)

Note that if you let the timer of a beast of burden expire, it will drop all of its items on the floor. This can actually be useful in some situations, as we’ll see. The same applies if you dismiss it when it is carrying items, though in that case you’ll first get a warning message.

Another issue with using beasts of burden has to do with bringing them into combat. You know how much fun it is to try to deal with a random like the sandwich lady when you’re in combat and you can’t open the dialog screen? Well, the same thing happens when you try to interface with a beast of burden while in combat. This means that in most cases you have to find safe spots or carefully plan how you use beasts in combat situations.

You might think that selecting a beast of burden is just a matter of taking the one with the highest capacity that you have the Summoning level to access, and/or the pouch to use. The truth, though, is that lower-level beasts can still by very useful to higher-level summoners. The reason is the familiar timer; lower-level familiars require fewer Summoning points and last longer, and this can be a definite advantage in certain applications.

For example, I’m currently level 71 Summoning. The three beasts of burden I typically use are bull ants, spirit terrorbirds and war tortoises. (I don’t runecraft much and can’t be bothered with a beast of burden with a capacity of just one or two items.) The tortoise has the most capacity, but look at the differences in how long the familiar will stay around, as shown in Table 46.

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Due to these big differences in duration, the bull ant is more useful to me in situations such as using a familiar to allow me to juggle drops in combat.

And of course, one final benefit of the lower-level summons is that since they last longer per renewal, they require less “babysitting”. I accidentally lose war tortoises to the dreaded timer much more frequently than I do bull ants!

Alright… now that you know all about what beasts of burden are and what they can do, let’s look at how you can put them to use. And the first way that I definitely need to tell you about is what I call combat support—not actually engaging in combat with monsters, but helping you kill them yourself. Beasts of burden can be extremely helpful with this, because of their ability to expand your inventory. If you’ve ever found yourself in a dungeon thinking “gee, I wish I had brought with extra food” or “too bad there’s nowhere for me to store this drop”, then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

The three related ways that beasts of burden can help with combat support are as follows:

• Letting you take extra supplies, like food and potions, into combat (Figure 244).
  
  
• Giving you extra room to juggle drops and supplies at the start of a fight.
  
  
• Allowing you to take extra drops home after the battle.
  

  Figure 244: That’s 384 HP of Extra Healing for My Next Boss Trip

  This is the skill some people call “useless”, right? Right.

  
  

This aspect of Summoning really straddles the line between what could be considered a “combat ability” and a “non-combat ability”. Talking about how beasts of burden help in this way seemed to make more sense in the context of my larger discussion of combat support, so please refer there for a full discussion.

The combat support uses would be enough to sell most people on these familiars, but that’s not all they can do. Here are a few other good ideas for putting these to use:

• Gathering Materials: There are countless examples of special ingredients that are needed for certain skills—most notably Herblore and Summoning itself—that require you to go to places that can be far out of your way. A good example would be collecting potato cactus from the kalphite lair—it’s a long walk. With a beast of burden you can take several extra items back with you on every trip.
  
  
• Conserving Run Energy: Allowing your familiar to carry heavy items reduces your weight, and so conserves your run energy. Even better, the bull ant and spirit terrorbird both have special moves that will restore a substantial amount of run energy, making them even more perfect for lugging stuff around!
  
  
• Quests: Most RuneScape quests are very demanding on inventory space—you usually have special quest items you have to carry, and you may also need combat supplies. If possible, bring a beast of burden along to help out.
  
  
• Runecrafting: The abyssal beasts of burden are obviously designed to let you take extra essence with you when Runecrafting. The limit of only three essence for the level 62 abyssal lurker obviously makes it half as useful as the level 67 war tortoise’s six slots for other items, but it’s still better than nothing. Some players feel it’s not worth the bother, and they may be right; my hope is that we’ll see a higher-level abyssal beast in the next batch of familiars.
  
  
• Resource Gathering Skills: You can use a beast of burden to let you keep extra ores when Mining, or logs when Woodcutting. (Fishing is usually done close to the bank so using a different familiar makes more sense there.) You can use an abyssal lurker when mining pure essence, too.

I keep finding new uses for these helpful familiars, so I’m sure this list will continue to grow…

TruthScape Skill Secrets - Summoning - Using Non-Combat Familiar Abilities Using Familiar Skill Boost Abilities