I was going to train my purse rat today, in order to get it ready for some slime tubing, but upon opening the familiar trainer, and selecting "train base weight",
I got a message "Don't know how to train a Purse Rat yet". Trying to use the other options in the familiar trainer give the same results.
That is because the purse rat, like certain other familiars, is rated 0 in every contest.
Switching to e.g. the organ grinder and trying to train it works, so this seems to be something which only affect the purse rat - I will admit that I only tried the one other familiar, though.
Here are all the familiars that are rated 0/0/0/0:
Code:
45 Pet Rock familiar45.gif none pet rock pet rock "Snooty" disguise 0 0 0 0
59 Reassembled Blackbird blackbird2.gif none reassembled blackbird tiny bust of Pallas 0 0 0 0
63 Toothsome Rock pettoothrock.gif none toothsome rock pet rock "Groucho" disguise 0 0 0 0
67 O.A.F. oaf.gif none Deactivated O. A. F. hardware upgrade 0 0 0 0
78 Bulky Buddy Box wcb.gif none Bulky Buddy Box 0 0 0 0
93 Black Cat blackcat.gif none black kitten 0 0 0 0
109 Purse Rat purserat.gif none designer handbag tiny cell phone 0 0 0 0
120 Stocking Mimic smimic.gif combat suspicious stocking bag of many confections 0 0 0 0
122 Jack-in-the-Box jackinthebox.gif stat0,item0 Jack-in-the-box brass crank handle 0 0 0 0
124 Baby Bugged Bugbear babybugbug.gif none panicked kernel bugged beanie 0 0 0 0
125 Money-Making Goblin mmgoblin.gif none 0 0 0 0
126 Floating Eye lower_e.gif none 0 0 0 0
127 Vampire Bat jubjubbird.gif none 0 0 0 0
128 Oyster Bunny hare2.gif none 0 0 0 0
129 Egg Benedict egg.gif none 0 0 0 0
130 Bank Piggy bankpig.gif none 0 0 0 0
131 Worm Doctor larva.gif none 0 0 0 0
132 Snowhitman snowhitman.gif none 0 0 0 0
133 Plastic Grocery Bag grocbag.gif none 0 0 0 0
144 Holiday Log holidaylog.gif none holiday log 0 0 0 0
147 Reconstituted Crow blackbird1.gif none reconstituted crow 0 0 0 0
152 Fancypants Scarecrow pantscrow2.gif none stuffed-shirt scarecrow 0 0 0 0
162 Reagnimated Gnome frankengnome.gif item0 Unagnimated Gnome 0 0 0 0
169 Homemade Robot homemadebot.gif none homemade robot homemade robot gear 0 0 0 0
180 Miniature Sword & Martini Guy smguy.gif combat,stat0 Anniversary Miniature Sword & Martini Guy really tiny cocktail shaker 0 0 0 0
There are 9 "April Fools" Familiars, which you can't actually have equipped.
There are some that you literally cannot train in the Cake Shaped Arena: the Reagnimated Gnome, for example.
There are some that we have not yet derived the arena parameters for, yet: The Fancypants Scarecrow or the Miniature Sword & Martini Guy. (I'm surprised about the first; I guess I'll try it out, by and by. The second one, I will do as soon as I get my 11th anniversary present in June.)
And then there are others that really do suck at every contest. You CAN train them, but it requires an entirely different algorithm. See below.
reveals that mafia knows about the purse rat's strengths and weaknesses, as they are presented on
the wiki,
A comment: we NEVER take arena parameters from the Wiki. We ALWAYS derive them ourself. At least, I do that; typically 12 trials per contest. I cannot tell you how many times I have done that, entered the parameters into KoLmafia's database, and, when I later looked at the Wiki, saw that the Wiki had incorrect parameters. (And before you ask, no I do not update the Wiki when I find that. My previous bad experiences with certain people when I've edited it in the past makes that a non-starter. At this point, I really don't care if the Wiki lags behind KoLmafia in presenting "correct" information, since we do not derive any data from it. It is not my problem.)
so I would think that mafia would be able to figure out a strategy to train the purse rat, even if it is bad at everything (after all its opponents is also bad at some things, and it is higher level than some of them).
The strategy is this:
If your familiar sucks at all contests, ONLY enter a contest against a contestant who also sucks at a contest. If both contestants suck at the contest you enter, you have a 50% chance of winning, I believe, regardless of weight.
So what I am hoping is that someone will take on the work of implementing familiar training for the purse rat, as I would guess that people sometimes would want to level it in order to get that extra edge when attempting to do fast slime tubes.
It is doable, except we'd want to distinguish between familiars that are 0/0/0/0 because we haven't derived the parameters, yet, those that are rated that way because they CAN'T be trained in the arena, and those that really are 0/0/0/0 and require this special training regime.