Laboratory
Sounds fun, but really, it’s not. The Laboratory is full of mice that you’ve seen before: granite, steel, bionic. These mice might also drop Radioactive Blue Cheese Potions. You NEED these. You need a lot of these, more than you can even imagine really. Stockpile them.UPDATE: As of January 2014, a new area, the Toxic Spill, has been released, and Radioactive Blue Cheese has become more important than ever! Be sure to stockpile a lot of this cheese in anticipation for the higher ranks when you can access the Toxic Spill location! More on this area below!
You’ll also need to be on the lookout for the dwarf mouse (seriously, are there dwarf mice everywhere??). This mouse holds the key to the Town of Digby. More on this in a minute.
You also might want the map to the Mousoleum (Moz). This can be found by catching a zombie mouse. Not necessarily an easy task, but it’ll come eventually. More on this in a minute as well.
Before we move on, this is what you need in the Lab: Radioactive Cheese potions, Moz map, and Digby key. Got it? Good, now get to work, and when you’ve obtained both maps, let’s move on for now.(Note: You will undoubtedly come back to the lab to continue farming radioactive blue potions. Just because I wrote a few paragraphs about this area doesn't mean you're here for a short time; instead, this area is fairly vanilla...you're repeating a task over and over.)
Town of Digby
Some players and guides will tell you to buy the Sinister Portal so you can go hunting in the Mouseleum for shadow mice. While that is a decent place to hunt, it can be incredibly frustrating, and many Master-level hunters simply are not prepared for the onslaught of misses and steals that will happen here. I think the Cheese and Whine forum was made specifically for the original hunters in the Moz.
So what’s the fuss anyway? Well, the Lycan Mouse in the Moz drops the Furoma map. Well, so does the Mole Mouse in Digby. And while he’s hard to attract, he’s not a strong mouse. “But Matt, the Moz has mice that I need for my collection!” Yes, they do, and you can get them later in the Catacombs (and you will). The Sinister and Ambrosial Portals are, for lack of a better expression, a complete waste of time and gold. If you have to get one, buy the Sinister Portal so you can farm sludge with it (from stale radioactive blue cheese).
But why do we want sludge? Remember all the talk previously about the Venus Mouse Trap? Well, once you accumulate 20 radioactive sludges, you can smash your Venus Mouse Trap with your hammer, which leaves the husk. Craft the 20 sludges with the husk and VIOLA! You have a Mutated Venus Mouse Trap! More on this trap later, because you really don’t need it until you get to Grandmaster and have to face the difficult Furoma region.
Radioactive sludge also has another purpose: creating Limelight cheese. You may have noticed that there are quite a few Digby mice that you may not have caught yet, and you haven’t even attracted them. Well, the only way to get them is to use Limelight Cheese. Formula: Limelight (3 pieces: 3 Living Shards (1200 each), 3 Radioactive Sludge, 30 Curds and Whey (12 each)
Living Shards are expensive for a Master-level hunter. Honestly, if you want my opinion, you can skip this part for now, because limelight cheese is used to attract the Big Bad Burroughs Mouse. What is that, you say? Think “Kevin Bacon fights giant man-eating worms.” You don’t have a trap strong enough to catch him yet. We’ll come back to Digby below, once you’re all grown up and have a trap capable of catching the BBB. How will you know when you're ready? The earliest you can do this with with the ACRONYM, though many people waited until they had the Enraged Rhinobot. Up to you.
Mousoleum
TONS of gold here, LOTS of red boxes too. This place will drive you mad.
There are two goals here: make loads of gold, and, if you didn’t want to get the Furoma map piece in Digby, you need to catch a Lycan mouse here. No easy task at all, though I must confess that I caught the Lycan on my first hunt ever in the Mousoleum. First things first: you have to equip your shadow trap. You want to use the Sinister Portal here. Strap it on. Next, you need to equip your radioactive cheese. Now you’re set! Your attraction rate is high here, but your catch rate is still only around 50%. Make no mistake about it; you’ll miss quite a few mice here, and you will probably get frustrated at first. But the rewards are good if you get on a lucky run. Ghost mice, the mouse you’ll catch the most of, nets around 3500 gold each catch. Then there are Bat mice, Mummy Mice, ravenous Zombie, regular Zombie, and Vampire to name a few.
All in all, you have to remain patient here. If you run out of cheese, head back to the Lab and start hunting for more potions. Obviously, you’ll get a better return on your potions if you use Super Brie+, but as previously discussed, SB+ is not readily available to the average user.
Next Steps
The main goal as a Master is to make gold. As mentioned previously, donating does offer advantages, one of which you’ll discover is the increased amount of cheese you get from potions when using Super Brie+.
You have a few options for hunting, and if you’ve done your requirements, such as earning all the map pieces you can, you can vary your hunting surroundings by alternating between the Moz, the GGT, the Lab, Digby, etc. You’ll get the most bang for your buck in the GGT, though the Moz mice drop more gold, you have limited access to the cheese needed there (dependent upon drops in the lab).
You’re going to need a high powered tactical trap in Furoma when you reach Grandmaster. As previously mentioned, you’re probably already done collecting map pieces by the time you reach 50% Master (if not before). Use this opportunity to farm radioactive sludge from your radioactive cheese. Just get a really stale trap and a really stale base (rocketine with explosive will work just fine), equip your radioactive cheese and head to the GGT. Make sure you have at least 25 pieces of cheese. You may get “unlucky” and actually catch a mouse with it, but when I did it, I got my 20 in 21 tries. It won’t take too long.
Bazaar (Grandmaster)
The Bazaar is a nice place. It has the same mice as the lab, so it
doesn’t really pay to hunt here unless you just want a break. Be warned;
there are no potions dropped here. The real beauty of the Bazaar is the General Store and the Cartographer. The general store sells several different items, all of which are necessary in your future endeavors. Go ahead and buy 8 droid parts (for the Ambush you'll craft), 300 curds and whey, 24 cheese fluffs, 24 glue, 24 paint, and 30 ionized salt. You DON'T need regular salt right now.
Got all that? Good. Now head to the cartographer and hand him your Shredded Furoma Map piece. This will cost you 90,000 gold and will take 24 hours to complete. Yah! Fun! Go ahead and buy the repair job, and either hang out in the Bazaar for the day, hunting those basic bionic and granite mice, or go somewhere else you're familiar with. But make sure you come back in 24 hours.
When the repair is completed, pick up your map at the cartographer and you'll notice you now have access to the Dojo, Meditation Room, and Pinnacle Chamber in Furoma. Nothing further to see here, these are not the droids you're looking for.
Head to the Dojo!
Catching the Big Bad Burroughs Mouse (Town of Digby)
Have a great physical trap like the Enraged Rhinobot? Or perhaps you're going to tackle this guy with the ACRONYM? Either will work fine. The Digby Dirt Dwellers can be caught with Physical Traps, Tactical Traps, Arcane Traps, or Shadow Traps. None of the 4 power types will give you an advantage over the other when it comes to Digby.
The best base to use here, again, is based on your progress. If you're a tournament player and manage to get the Silver Base (or the Gold, but that's fairly ambitious), use it. The Bronze Base will be a great base as well, giving you about the same results as the Aqua. If you have no tournament bases, use the Aqua obviously for the additional luck. If you're further into the game and have the Molten Shrapnel or Spellbook, by all means use those.
The BBB occasionally drops a the Monolith Base, which is a very powerful base, but offers no luck. It's a neat base if you manage to catch this mouse before you reach the SS Huntington, but beyond that, the Aqua is always better.
The rest of the mice here are simply here to catch, as of this writing, they offer no reward beyond their gold and point value. As it is, once you catch the BBB, unless you want to catch enough mice here to have silver crowns, there is little reason in continuing to hunt here.
Toxic Spill
UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!
