Encountering a Mouse
As soon as hunt is started you’ll encounter a mouse, there’s only two factors that determine what kind of mouse you can encounter, the location you’re hunting in, and the cheese you’re using.
At this stage the weight of the mouse is also determined, even if you don’t attract the mouse.
To help you visualise this process imagine a list of all the mice in the location, each of those mice belongs to certain groups (we’ll use the term a pool of mice), and your cheese will determine which pools are used to make up the “population” of mice that you can encounter, and one of those mice will be picked at random from the population to be the mouse you encounter.
So let’s take a look at those two factors:
Location
Each location has a number of different breeds of mouse, some breeds of mice are found in multiple locations, some are only found in one.
If you’re looking for a specific mouse, then hunting in the right location is essential.
As an example of these two different situations, the White Mouse is found throughout all of Gnawnia, so you can encounter it in the Town of Gnawnia, the Meadow, the Harbour and the Mountain, it’s also found in the Training Grounds of Furoma.
On the other hand, the Abominable Snow Mouse is only found in the Mountain.
Sometimes mice will be found outside of their normal locations for special events in the game, and often this is the best time to hunt for those rarer mice.
Cheese
Certain mice are fond of specific cheese, and can only be encountered if using the right type of cheese in the right location.
Other mice can be found with normal cheese, but are much more commonly encountered with a special type of cheese.
An example of this is the Nibbler Mouse in the Town of Gnawnia, if you hunt there for long enough you can encounter one using a cheese such as Marble, but you might have to use several thousand cheese in order to do so. On the other hand, using Super Brie in the Town of Gnawnia will allow you to encounter the Nibbler Mouse much more often, using less cheese and taking less time.
Populations
There’s nothing in the game that tells you how likely you are to encounter certain mice in a specific location, or which cheese to use, but this is where we come in. We’ve collected information from thousands of hunters in our survey, allowing us to see how the population of mice in a location is affected by the cheese. We don’t have an exhaustive list of every cheese in every location, but we do have the most commonly used cheese for each location.
If you visit the locations section of these pages and select a location you’re interested in, you’ll find the Cheese and Mice section contains information about the mice you can encounter, and the populations of mice with various cheese.
We present the population to you in two ways, first as a percentage of all the mice encountered with that cheese, so if a mouse shows 10.00%, it means that on average one out of every 10 mice you encounter will be of that type, we also give you an estimate of the mice attracted per 100 cheese used, there will be more on this in the next section for attracting a mouse.
Take a look at these populations, if the cheese are pretty similar there won’t be much difference between the percentages, but you may find that certain cheese are slightly (or dramatically) better for encountering a certain mouse. You can use this information to make part of your decision about which cheese to use in a location.
Myths and Superstitions
There are plenty of myths and superstitions about encountering a mouse, here are some of the more popular ones:
You Need a Certain Trap to Encounter a Specific Mouse
Plenty of people believe there is some kind of special trap setup that will guarantee seeing a mouse you’re after,
You’ll often see this on the forums, where people ask what trap others used to get a certain mouse, and as soon as they have an answer they’ll change their trap to match that.
Unfortunately the trap does not have any effect on whether you encounter the mouse or not, it does affect whether you can attract a mouse, and it does affect whether you can catch it, but not whether you’ll get it to visit your trap in the first place, just remember, if you’re in the right location and using the right cheese, you’ll eventually see one, even if you do have to be patient.
There’s a Special Cheese to Encounter More of a Rare Mouse
This isn’t a myth as such, because in some cases it’s true, but there are a lot of myths out there as to which cheese is best for which mouse. Sometimes someone will get very lucky and encounter a mouse in their first few hunts with a certain cheese, get two or three people saying this and it looks like it’s a sure bet, but these people normally represent the extremely fortunate few, that cheese may not be the best to use.
If you see something like this, try to get advice from more hunters, the more people who agree with a certain cheese, the more likely it is to be right, and also look at the Wiki and on here to see if those sources back the information up. For a long time people were convinced Marble was the best way to attract a Mole Mouse, until someone organized a large collection of information that showed that hunters were actually harming their chances of getting a Mole Mouse by using Marble.
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Next Stage: Attracting a Mouse
