TruthScape.com  9  TruthScape Skill Secrets       9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore            9  TruthScape Skill Secrets - Herblore - Techniques for Obtaining Vials, Secondary Ingredients and Special Items                 9  Acquiring Secondary Ingredients for Potions

How to Carry 35 Secondary Ingredients in 28 Inventory Slots - It’s Magic! Special Methods for Getting Essential Secondary Ingredients

At the end of the quest The Tower of Life, you gain access to a bonus feature that’s a bit hard to categorize: it’s not really a minigame, but it’s not really anything else either. J In fact, it’s not even really formally documented in the RuneScape knowledge base—the only reference to it is in the rewards list for the quest, which says that you gain “access to the Creature Creation room under the tower”. So, that’s what I call the feature: Creature Creation.

The goal behind this… whatever-it-is… was to provide a means for players to get certain items in larger quantities than is possible in other ways. By using items from two different monsters on an altar, you generate a new, weird monster combining the original monsters’ attributes. The monster attacks you, and when you kill it, you get as drops a bunch of one of the types of items you used. For example, put a feather and an eye of newt on one of the altars and it will create a newtroost, an odd combination of chicken and newt that drops a bunch of eyes of newt when it is killed.

Sounds good, but as we’ll see, it turns out not to be as practical as it could have been.

There are six different monsters that you can make through Creature Creation, which I have listed in Table 41. I’ve also shown the items used to make them, what they drop and other important information.

Of the six monsters, the only ones we care about are the first three, which drop Herblore seconds; I’m quite sure about the 2-4 horns and 3-6 red spiders’ eggs, but not that sure about the eyes of newt. I’ve listed the other monsters just for completeness, but don’t really know what quantities they drop of their main item, because to be honest I can’t be bothered to test them. J (Why did anyone at Jagex think players would care about getting a bunch of raw cave eels?! Anyway…)

Incidentally, the tea flasks hold cups of tea and the satchels can hold a banana, cake and triangle sandwich. They aren’t terribly useful and won’t stack in your bank, so don’t bother picking them up.

You will be engaging in combat here, so you’ll need a weapon and possibly some armor. The Herblore-related creatures are low in level but can still do some damage, especially if your combat level is below around 100. These are all simple melee NPCs, so just wear regular armor and bring your favorite weapon, and also take a bit of food if you think you’ll need it. High-level players can skip the armor and just heal up when necessary; in time you’ll figure out what works best for you. Also wear a ring of duelling for fast bank access.

You need one of each of the required items to make the monsters, but remember that it will drop more of one of the necessary materials. Thus, you only need multiples of the item it doesn’t drop. For example, to get red spiders’ eggs, you need to bring several raw sardines but only one red spiders’ eggs, because you can use one egg drop from the first spidine to make the next one.

The number of items you need to bring depends on how many items the creatures drop, and also on your luck. You need to kill more of them than you might initially think, because you have to use up one of the dropped items to make each creature. Thus, if you average 3 unicorn horns per unicow, you’re only going to really net 2, because each unicow consumes one unicorn horn. So you want to take enough supplies so that you can get a full inventory of the item you are after, but not so much that you have extras left over that go to waste.

Here are the quantities I recommend bringing for each of the monsters we’re interested in:

• Newtroost: One eye of newt and 7 feathers; they are cheap and you can drop any extras you don’t use.
  
  
• Unicow: One unicorn horn and 15 cowhides (see Figure 213).
  
  
• Spidine: One red spiders’ eggs and 8 raw sardines.
  

  Figure 213: Getting Unicorn Horns via Unicow

  Is a unicow like a unibrow? Not really, it’s a combination of a unicorn and a cow and drops 2 to 4 unicorn horns.

  
  

Get out your equipment and make sure you have at least 50% run energy (more if wearing armor). Then follow these steps:

1. Take out the materials you need to make the creatures you are interested in, along with two law runes and two water runes.
   
   
2. Teleport to Ardougne, then run south through the town. Turn to the southwest when you get to the water and then resume going south along the coast. You’ll see the tower due south of you.
   
   
3. Open the tower door and enter, then continue to the south of the tower’s main floor and go down the ladder.
   
   
4. Go to the altar of your choice. The spidine altar is just around the corner to the southeast of the ladder, while the newtroost and unicow altars are several clicks to the northeast and northwest of the ladder, respectively.
   
   
5. Click on one of the required items in your inventory and then click the altar to add it. Ignore the “Click here to continue” message”. Click the second item and then the altar to add it as well. Again, ignore the “continue” prompt. Right-click the altar and choose “Activate”, and the homunculus will say you have the items necessary to make the creature. This time do click when it tells you “Click here to continue”.
   
   
6. In a few seconds, the monster you selected will appear and attack you. Kill it and pick up its drops. Then return to step #5 as many times as necessary until you run out of supplies or your inventory is full.

Note that you can also access the tower using fairy ring code “D J P”, but just going to Ardougne is faster and simpler.

While the concept behind creature creation is sound, in practice the method turns out to be far less useful than you might imagine. For starters, it takes nearly a minute just to get to the spidine altar, and the others are even further. Then you have to do a lot of clicking for each monster you make, kill it and pick up the drops. To make matters worse, you “cannibalize” one of your drops for every monster, which slows things down even more. Add it all up and it takes a long time to get an inventory full of items.

In my tests, it took around 3:30 to get a load of eyes of newt, which makes it totally pointless: you can run to a store and buy an inventory full in a fraction of that time. Red spiders’ eggs took 4:40, which again takes longer than getting them in other ways, such as using the spirit spider Summoning familiar.

That leaves only one place where this method is of any use: unicorn horns. It took me 6:20 to get 26 unicorn horns, which is not fast, but all the other methods of getting them are even slower, so it wins on speed by default. Of course, even here, the news is not great: it costs you extra time to get the cowhides, or money to buy them. And when you add that up, it often isn’t worth the cost.

It’s unfortunate that this whole feature boils down to a barely better way of getting exactly one item, but that does seems to be the case. Even so, I guess one use is a lot better than no uses! J

How to Carry 35 Secondary Ingredients in 28 Inventory Slots - It’s Magic! Special Methods for Getting Essential Secondary Ingredients