Delays, Delays, Can't Help Them Sometimes...

Okay, I haven't touched my laptop in close to a week. This term has been nuts, courtesy of the rugby season in full swing and the Mid Year drawing nearer.

Still, managed to sneak on to do the Easter event for this year. I've already missed the one last year, and while I'm not exactly big on holiday events, I don't want to miss stuff like new soundtracks and emotes.

This year's Easter involves helping the problem prone Easter bunny out of trouble. Again. This time, he's let his entire stock of chocolate eggs get eaten by rats, mice, and other nasty chocolate munching cretins (Not sure when snails got into chocolate though), which conveniently got themselves trapped in a chamber. Of course, that still means the Easter bunny is out of eggs.

So, being the helpful adventurer you are, one has to set out to find and retrieve at least 3 eggs that were delivered before the pests invaded and finished every bit of chocolate. Wasn't that hard, although I did get the wrong statue of Saradomin. According to Tim, its the one outside Falador, not the one inside the park there.

Once retrieved, the Easter bunny will allow you into is warrren, complete with Easter flags and little rabbit guards. He then tells you of his plan to make more chocolate using a chocotrice, which turns people into chocolate, instead of the original with turns people to stone, since stone doesn't really taste good in Easter eggs. Making a chocotrice is a simple, just take a cockatrice egg and dip in chocolate apparently.

Manipulating an incubator, a contraption similar to the fractional distiller in the Regicide quest, to maintain optimum temperature for the egg to hatch. Once done, the Easter bunny will turn you into an adorable bunny as well so you can squeeze your way into the rabbit hole and into the cavern which the pests are trapped in, and where the chocotrice awaits your command. One has to turn 15 animals into chocolate to gain enough chocolate to save Easter.

Chasing and chocolatifying helpless animals by insulting the chocotrice so it attacks them was funny at first because of the hilarious taunts your player comes up with (Hey, that snail said you lost your tinderbox and cried)(Hey, that mouse said you took 3 months to get off Tutorial Island) but it eventually gets repetitive and boring.

Once done, one chucks all chocolate into a giant melting vat, and the Easter bunny gives you a cape that allows you to do a pretty odd emote. Speaking of which, getting more chocolate for the Easter bunny will help you unlock past emotes that you might have missed earlier on, like the bunny hop emote, which I missed last year.

Out of curiosity, I checked to see if there were any more rewards aside from getting a past emote. I almost fainted when I saw the Easter bunny was giving out EASTER EGGS!!! Now a discontinued item, one egg is about, say, 5mil to 6mil?? I rushed in to get one, but it turned out to be too good to be true. A quick check on the forums showed these new eggs can't be traded, although the old ones can.

Sorry for the lack of pics, too tired to upload...

Shortage!!!

Call me nuts if you want, but I've been hopping around the lobsters, sharks and monkfish, looking for the ones which have raws that are easy to buy, and easy to sell. Sharks were going so well, raws were being sold for under the market price, and the cooked ones were going so well...

Unless I single handedly sent the market up by myself by buying about 5k to 6k of them over time (which I doubt), the price has somehow skyrocketed to more than 1k right now, so I've switched over to monkfish for the time being.



YET another level up in Construction entirely from lamps and books of knowledge. Just goes to show how long I've been here...

While Cooking one day, my eye strayed over an article on Runewise on how to hunt aviansies in the God Wars Dungeon. It looked real promising, so I rushed my way to finish Eadgar's Ruse



But I've decided to put that off till I reach 99 Cooking. Maging is expensive in there, and I'm going to need a better range level than 59 to shoot them down.

I also decided to test run Vampire Bats when I hit 31 Summoning, after reading Smavey pour praise all over it on the Tip It forums. While I am rather impressed that it can hit around 8, it didn't turn out to be the pwnage Smavey made it sound like. Or maybe I shouldn't have let it make its debut on Cockroach Soldiers on a peak hour. It did help me beat moochers on a few occasions though.



And this is level up I never expected.



Just bought 2k monkfish, 8k more

P.S : Boombaye, since you've finished Deception Point and you liked it so much, why not try out Digital Fortress??

Player Safety Dungeon

Decided now would be a good time to take a break from Cooking and check out the new Stronghold of Player Safety Dungeon south of Edgeville, and coincidentally, right above the Stronghold of Security in Barbarian Village, and I must say, JaGex has, at last, released an update which will actually garner praise instead of bricks being thrown at their office headquarters. For once, they've released an update for F2P too.

It involves a mini-quest (Really mini), just taking a test from one Professor Henry Smith, a play on Henry Jones, father of Indiana Jones, right down the to beard and glasses, completion of which giving you full access to the jail cells beneath the school, as well as a new emote called Safety First.



Looks like something out of Ultraman, complete with a rising shield from the floor and crossed arms. Personally, I found that tacky.

What really makes this update good are the monsters in the lower dungeon, which is accessed by pulling back a poster that conceals a tunnel to the rest of the jail wing, and as pointed out by Timothy Gold, is a parody of the Shawshank Redemption, where Andy Dufrense, a convict in Shawshank Prison, hides the escape tunnel he dug behind a poster of Linda Ronstadt(He took 27 years and some spare change to dig it). Of course, in the Stronghold its an ugly gublinchette instead of a pretty country singer... At least they didn't parody the other aspects of that novella by Stephen King, because they sure as hell were disgusting...

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Giant roaches dwell deep in the prison cells, and believe me, have great drops. They drop dozens (literally) of law runes. I got almost 70 in 30 or so cockroach soldiers, and thats not all. They drop plenty of charms as well, mostly crimson for some reason, but the occasional green and gold comes along. GP drops are decent and frequent, and they tend to drop NOTED ores, which makes them stackable, mostly mithril. Best of all, they drop rune items like scimitars and square shields on a semi-regular basis which make for a quick buck if you high alch or sell them.



They have a range attack, but I heard that does close to nothing. Only problem here is, the place is a multi combat area, so watch out for moochers. My brother Hunter complains he has his cockroach soldiers swarmed by freeloading noobs quite often, even on worlds with 400< people on them. A cannon cannot be set up there as well, I read this on the Tip It forums.

I'd like to comment on the safety gloves you get upon pulling the lever on one of the higher levels and going through the jail doors. They certainly don't look safe to me, being spiky and all. Look more like something out of a BDSM ritual or something... Besides, I don't think they're safe for any poor pet you decide to pick up while holding them.

I decided to switch to sharks to speed up my advance for 99 Cooking, selling of the trout I had bought with relative ease, and its sure paid off.



The cost of 100k per 210 exp is insignificat. I must hurry up and get that skillcape.

This close to my first 99 though, I've started to give thought to the next skill I'll max out.

I've narrowed them down to the most possible candidates.

-Fishing
-Fletching
-Hunter
-Farming

Suggestions and advice are welcome, even if you think I should do another skill.

Recipe For Disaster Complete!

My exams were on for the last week or so, causing my lack of posts, my apologies.

I finally got down to getting enough quest points to finish off Recipe For Disaster once and for all, after finishing Rat Catchers and Watchtower.







Once those were out of the way, I strode in through the portal in Lumbridge to get rid of the Culinoromancer permanently. He summons 5 monsters to attack you, all food based parodies of enemies your character should have fought before.



First up, Agrith-Nana. A banana version of the demon you face in the Shadow Of the Storm quest, Agrith-Na. As easy to dispose of too...

Next up was Flambeed. A giant cake-like version of Fareed, the fire demon you face in the Desert Treasure quest. With the same effect of forcing you to drop your weapon when he hits you from the heat as well. I used a trick I saw on Youtube to get around it without ice gloves, binding it to one spot then running to a safe distance and hitting with water spells. Forgot to take a screenie, too busy running.



Next up was Karamel, a caramel version of Kamil, another boss in the Desert Treasure quest, and like the original, can use ice spells which freeze, as well as lower stats.



The fourth boss was Dessourt, a chocolate bar version of Dessouss (spelling?), the vampire in Desert Treasure. Unlike the real deal though, his candy version was only to easy to kill.



Fifth on the Culinoromancer chucked at me was the Gelatinnoth Mother. Thats right, an Dagannoth Mother. Made of jelly, but other wise completely the same, this was more annoying than hard to deal with, since can only be hit with certain spells when it is a certain colour. (Blue for water, brown for earth and so on...)





Finally, the Culinoromancer decided to take me on himself. Despite being only around level 70, he can hit up to 24. His death scene is hilarious, he explodes into cake and jelly

Guthan's Warspear

Yes, I can hardly believe it myself!! When I first got this in the crypt, I thought "Wait, did I forget to bank the leaf bladed spear from my turoth task??" On closer examination, I realized that I had just gotten the most valuable possible drop from the barrows minigame!!

But now I had a problem. I had forgotten to bring a means of teleportation out of the crypts, and I wasn't exactly full on health, as you may (or may not) see from my screenie. I dashed out of the crypt hoping like hell I wouldn't get killed by the bloodworms and skeletons and got to the ladder with just 23 HP left.

I finally dared to believe my good luck when I had time to take a close look at it. The first thing I did was dash straight to the Grand Exchange to put it up for sale along side the 110 bolt racks I got as well. It made for a whopping instantaneous 5.8 Million gp, bringing my total gold up to 12 Million.

I cannot believe my luck. It was just a casual trip, one trip only, just for fun, a break from my cooking, and I struck the motherload, the jackpot!!

In other news, Jagex has made modifications to the Bounty Hunter Minigame to stop clan piling in it, as well as adding cash rewards to it and reducing the requirements for the Bounty Locate spell to just 32 Magic. A welcome relief to all those pkers who turned to it since the loss of the Wilderness!!

Farming has finally received updates as well, with updates to the amulet of Nature, the most noticeable change being the fact that it now has a face. It gives a farming bonus too, as well as being able to teleport you to the patch its bound to if it gets diseased.

The biggest update however, is still the addition of a new Farming minigame. Called Vinesweeper, its an obvious parody of the game Minesweeper, and runs on the same concept. Arriving there via the Tool Leprechauns, it runs on the same concept as its namesake. You have to try and find seeds that are hidden in the ground (Mines) and to do so, you have to dig the area with a spade, and digging a patch without seeds in it will result in a number popping up to show how many patches contain seeds in the surrouding 8 squares around it, like Minesweeper.

When you come across a patch which you think has seeds in it, you place a flag on it, and a farmer will come and dig it up, and if you guessed right, all around him will get points which can be swapped for rewards like seeds and Farming exp.

Of course, guess wrong, and the farmer won't return your flag. At 1k a flag, its pretty pricey.



Excavating seeds will result in loss of points as well. There are also rabbits which run around looking for flags, which means seeds and food to them, and will munch on any patch you put a flag on, which means no reward for you!!

Slow and Steady Is The Way To Go

I bought all the fish I'll need for 98 Cooking yesterday of the Grand Exchange. My bank account screams in agony (Just 6 million left), but all the fish was bought instantaneously, so there was no time to change my mind.

This will be the largest grinding job I've ever done so far, with 70k+ fishes to cook before I hit 98 Cooking, then just 2.5k monkfish to 99. Its going to take a LONG while, even if I keep my constant rate of cooking 800-900 fish an hour, I have my reasons. Its easy to multi-task while cooking, which I'll need to do if I'm going to study and sustain my A1's in both my maths and sciences since my school exams are in a week's time.

Cooked about 3k of them so far, I can see why Matman got bored so easily while cooking for his 99. Course, he didn't have to worry much about costs, since Tim donated 40k raw lobsters to him... Finally levelled up after the first 2k



Levelled up my Construction AGAIN using only genie lamps and knowledge books




Note to self, genie lamps and knowledge books have the most effect on stats around 40 or so.

Summoning, And Why It was Never Released For F2P

I was on my way to the Grand Exchange when my friend Gitabug tipped me off about a J Mod in Lumbridge in world 68. Seeing one is a rare occasion indeed, so I hauled myself to Lumbridge ASAP. She suggested I ask him any question concerning the recent updates or future ones, since the answer would be pretty accurate coming from a J Mod. The question of why Summoning was a no-show for F2P came into my mind. This is his reply.



If the picture isn't clear, just click on it for a larger one. Jagex's reason for not releasing the skill to F2P players is because they felt they had too many updates for them already, like Bounty Hunter and the Grand Exchange. Rather tired at the moment, so I won't say much more of this post, aside from the fact that I think their reason isn't exactly fair.