What's New at Amazon.com

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Runescape Menagerie: Pets in the House

 My last post was all about baby TzRek-Jad, and the culmination of my efforts to get him.  Mainly self-indulgent fluff, but I was pretty happy about it, so it got blogged.  :^)

Having Baby Jad, I started thinking how fun it would be to have one in my player-owned house menagerie, and one in my bank to follow me around.  Not sure if I want to get another 100 Zeal, but it's a possibility.

Thinking about pets, player owned houses, and menagerie started me wondering about the pets people choose to keep.  The menagerie is useful in allowing a summoning obelisk, so as I'm porting in from my last Slayer assignment, I can charge up Summoning points, pray at the altar, and repair any Barrows armor before continuing on.  It also has a pseudo-useful function in the pet feeder.  If you've got a pet with you, a quick click on the feeder will feed him.  That's convenient if you like to keep a pet with you in your travels.  But it's not a necessity.

A third function is to save some bank space by storing your pets in the menagerie.  Still and all, it's more of a luxury item, given to us as a way to personalize our house, and have more fun.  And in all truth, I love mine.  I really like the Baby Dragons, so I've mostly filled up the menagerie with them.  Since you can only have 1 baby dragon at a time in your bank or personal possession, the menagerie is a great way to stock up on multiples of those otherwise one-of-a-kind pets.

As an example, my favorite baby dragon is the black one.  Black dragons are the king of the chromatic dragons, and the egg drop (to me at least) seems rarer, harder to get.  So that's the one I wanted most of, followed by Red, Blue, and Green.  Originally I had 5 baby black dragons, and one each of the Red, Blue, and Green in the menagerie.  Then I forgot to bank my personal baby black while penguin-hunting in the wilderness.  Got killed, lost him, and was pretty mad.  

Since I already had some spare blue dragon eggs in my bank, I hatched and raised a blue baby, then swapped him for a black so I'd have a cool pet following me.  When I got another black dragon egg, I put the old one back in the menagerie, hatched the black, and had him halfway raised when I got Jad.
 Since Jad's a far cooler pet, I finished raising the baby black, and put him in my house.  So now there's 6 black, 1 red, 2 blue, and 1 green baby dragons.  Plus a small assortment of other pets I liked.  Eek the spider, a raven, couple of monkeys, and an iguana.  Eventually, there'll be a Jad in the house.  Maybe more than one...

All that to say, I very much enjoyed building my family of pets.  And I get a lot of pleasure every time I go in my house and see them roaming around.  It may not be extremely functional, but with all the pets, my house is a lot more fun for me.


Not really going anywhere with all that, just thinking about function versus luxury, and how important it can be.  Do you have a menagerie in your house?  How much thought have you put into it?  Do you still enjoy it?

Just wondering.

No comments: