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 - Using Non-Combat Familiar Abilities

Using Familiar Skill Boost Abilities Light Enhancement, Remote View and Other Abilities

Many Summoning familiars have the ability to give you various items, either upon request or slowly over time, which can be handy in many situations. Obviously the types of items you can get are limited, for game balance reasons—I doubt Jagex will make a familiar that showers you with runite bars—but you can still make great use of these features, especially if you’re creative.

Familiars differ in the ways they go about obtaining items for you; there are generally two types. First, there are familiars that, when you have them active, will randomly create items for you over time without you having to do anything; Jagex calls these foragers. Second, some familiars have an option where you can ask them to get or produce one or more items; this option has no formal name, so I call those creatures simply producers. Many familiars actually have both of these capabilities.

I explain both of these features in the subsections below.

To “forage” means to search out food, provisions or other items; fittingly enough, that’s what these familiars do. When you have a forager out as an active follower, it will periodically generate an item appropriate to its creature type. So, for example, the macaw will forage for herbs, while the beaver forages logs.

The foraging feature is entirely random, which makes it as confusing as the weird variations in monster drops can be. The ability can also be very slow to operate, taking many minutes to get an item from some familiar. I’ve had cases where I had a spirit cockatrice around for 30 minutes and got nothing from it, and other times where I got three eggs in under five minutes. The key to getting the most from these beasts is, thus, just to keep them around as long as possible, and hope for the best.

Foragers will store the items they create in an internal inventory; you access this inventory to get the items in the same way as you do with beasts of burden, but you can only withdraw items, not store them.

Some familiars are restricted in where their foraging feature will work. For example, the beaver only forages logs when you are near trees, and the fruit bat will only forage for fruit when you are on Karamja.

Each time an item is foraged, you’ll get a message saying “Your familiar has produced an item.” When this happens, you should withdraw the item immediately if the familiar has reached its storage capacity (which is automatically the case if its capacity is just one). No more items will be foraged when the familiar’s inventory is full.

Note that some familiars use their inventory slots for both items they forage, and those they produce via skills. The ibis, for example, will forage raw tuna and swordfish when in a fishing area, but will also actively fish for tuna and swordfish and store them in the same area. On the other hand, the albino rat is said to be a forager in the knowledge base, but doesn’t actually seem to do this; it only uses its inventory to hold the proceeds of the Cheese Feast scroll special move.

The value of some of these foragers is immediately obvious: getting cockatrice eggs from a spirit cockatrice (Figure 246) lets you make more spirit cockatrice pouches or Summoning potions; free herbs, iron ore and fish are likewise self-explanatory. Other items may seem useless, but really aren’t: for example, evil turnip slices heal 6 HP each, so having a familiar generate a few of those while fighting in a dungeon could be rather handy.

Table 50 shows a list of all of the familiars that have foraging capabilities, including the item foraged and the familiar’s capacity.

Where foragers automatically create items for you over time, producers let you generate them upon request, generally using their special move scrolls, but sometimes via innate abilities. What happens with these items depends on the familiar: some store the produced items in their inventories, while others just drop them on the ground for you to pick up. Some, like the fruit bat, may actually do both.

Since you can use these abilities on demand (unlike foraging), Jagex had to put in limitations to prevent them from being abused. The first is simply that the items you can produce via scrolls are less powerful than those that can be foraged; for example, the ibis will forage tuna and swordfish, but only produce fish up to cod with its scroll. The second is that scrolls require special move points, so you can only use them so often. And finally, in a couple of cases there are extra limitations, such as the one-minute delay imposed between uses of the macaw’s Herbcall scroll. Note that even with these restrictions, you can generally get far more of these items in a given amount of time than is possible by waiting for a forager to randomly generate items.

The fact that many of the items produced are lower-level causes uncreative players to be deceived into thinking they are “useless”, when nothing could be further from the truth. A good example is the albino rat: players look at the Cheese Feast scroll and think, “big deal, I can buy cheese at the Culinaromancer’s chest if I want to make pizzas”. Yes, you can, but remember that cheese isn’t just an ingredient, it can also be eaten in its own right. Do you think a level 65 player trying to finish a Slayer assignment might find it useful to be able to generate 10 HP of healing at any time using scrolls that stack in one inventory slot? For more details, check out the full description of the albino rat.

The same applies to the ibis and the fruit bat. Sure, mackerel and cod aren’t the best fish, but imagine two friends deep in a dungeon, one casting Fish Rain scrolls and the other cooking the fish with logs and a tinderbox… pretty handy. The fruit produced by the fruit bat can mostly be eaten straight away, and remember that with a knife, pineapples heal eight. You can also save the fruit for Farming, or making more fruit bat scrolls!

That said, note that at present, some of these abilities work much better than others. The macaw’s scroll, for example, gives me an herb the majority of the time that I use it, where the beaver’s scroll often yields no results. The spirit spider does a great job of creating lots of red spiders’ eggs, but the desert wyrm’s special is not of much use unless you are a beginning miner—the time needed to deal with selecting the option and then retrieving the ore is more than it takes to just mine one more ore yourself.

One final tip: I’ve noticed that many of these producing abilities seem to work better outdoors than they do in a bank or other building, mainly in situations where the number of items produced is random. The fruit bat’s Fly ability, in contrast, will always yield seven fruit any time you are above ground on Karamja (see Figure 247).

Table 51 shows the familiars that have the ability to generate items, along with the particulars of how each works.

A few notes on this table:

• If the quantity is a range that includes zero, that means that there’s a chance of getting nothing from that scroll or ability.
  
  
• The fruit bat’s right-click move only works on Karamja, but the Fruitfall scroll will work anywhere.
  
  
• The Hydra (level 80) has the Regrowth special move, which is supposed to grant a “Chance of replicating standard fruit or vegetables in your inventory”, according to the RuneScape knowledge base. I’ve left this out of the table until I get high enough level to see what this really means and how it works.

Using Familiar Skill Boost Abilities Light Enhancement, Remote View and Other Abilities