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The Many Uses of Beasts of Burden Utilizing Foragers and Producers

Several familiars have the ability to provide temporary boosts to various combat and non-combat skills, which can obviously be very helpful in many situations. There are actually three different ways that these skill bonuses are provided: first, permanent boosts that are always active as long as the familiar is; second, temporary boosts that are enabled by interfacing with the familiar and selecting a menu item; and finally, skill bonuses that are activated by scrolls.

I’ll describe all of these skill boosting familiars in the three subsections below. As you’ll see, there are even a couple of familiars that provide more than one skill boost, sometimes even one that is boosted automatically and another manually…

The first category of skill boosts are ones that Jagex calls invisible, presumably because you won’t see any numbers change on your skills display. I prefer the name automatic, since you don’t have to do anything to activate the bonus—this is in contrast to the boosts we’ll see later on, which you must manually enable.

Automatic skill boosts tend to be mainly in skills where having a higher level makes you faster or more productive—supposedly, anyway! There are players who dispute that having a higher level in a skill like Fishing lets you get fish more quickly, but that does seem to be the point of the automatic skill boosts. Note that they do not allow you to access higher-level resources the way the manual boosts do, so they’d have no other purpose. For example, if you are level 75 Fishing, having a granite crab out won’t let you fish for sharks.

The familiars announced so far include invisible boosts to Fishing (three of them!), Mining, Woodcutting and Hunter; I’ve laid them out in Table 47.

These skill boosts are not automatic like the ones described above; rather, you must request them manually from the familiar by clicking it and choosing the appropriate menu item that appears. You’ll then get a temporary level boost that works in pretty much the same way as a potion would. It will also slowly wear off in the same manner.

While having to manually enable these boosts is less convenient, the benefit is that you do get to use resources based on your increased level. The only skill that has this type of boost right now is Farming, and you can use this type of Farming boost to plant seeds above your normal level. An example of using a stranger plant to boost Farming can be seen in Figure 245.

The manual skill boost familiars are shown in Table 48.

Finally, there are a few familiars that provide skill boosts using their special moves (scrolls). These generally take between 8 and 20 special move points, which is a lot, but remember that the bar recharges quickly, so you shouldn’t have a problem with using the scrolls pretty much as frequently as you like. Obviously, it still makes sense to wait to use the abilities until you actually need them.

These abilities, which are shown in Table 49, work in the same way as the manual skill boosts in the preceding subsection: they do allow you to access higher-level abilities and resources, where appropriate.

It will be a while before I can summon a wolpertinger, I’m afraid. J

The Many Uses of Beasts of Burden Utilizing Foragers and Producers