The quest is very picky about when the shells will appear. If you scare the scarab into the pit with the tarantulas and the tarantula sees it and kills it after the blue glow has gone away from the scarab you will probably not get a shell. I lost 3 chances at getting a shell to this problem. It is also a good idea to kill anything aggro in the area, like ghouls or dune spiders, so that you don't get attacked while zapping the scarabs.

I don't know what you mean by 'blue glow'. I completed this quest, and know several beetles did no give me shells. I thought it was simply because it wasn't a 100% occurrence of the beetles giving shells. I could be wrong of course. Also, if you have invisible/sneak/stealth or a totem, you can use that and still zap the beetles so you don't have to kill everything. --Sage Locano Aredium of Antonia Bayle (talk/contribs/images) 22:21, 30 March 2007 (CEST)

The shells ARE 100%. The only time I have ever lost a shell is when another player on the quest approached one of my beetles and zapped it. The system will assign the drop to the last player to zap the beetle. It has NOTHING to do with how long the blue glow lasts. I run them in one at a time or 4 at a time, makes no difference. --Florence Sopher of Lucan D'Lere (talk/contribs/templates) 02:18, 3 April 2007 (CEST)

The shell drop rate was 100% for me, with one exception: If I chased more than one beetle at a time, I would only get a shell from the first who got killed, not the rest of them.

I found that it was 100% unless i was too far away when the beetle died, i could bring more then one at a time but i needed to be close as they died. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.141.207.37 (talk • contribs)

There are 2 things you must do in order to ensure you get a carapace:

1. You need to be near the skittish scarab when it dies.

2. You need to make sure that you have the skittish scarab as your target when it dies.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.47.82.228 (talk • contribs)

quest is still bugged as of 28/10/10 Edit

I can confirm the bug. I chased some skittish scarabs to the desert tarantulas and dune tarantulas. There were much fewer tarantulas and I had to circle for several minutes before the scarabs got close to the tarantulas. However, the tarantulas appeared to have lost their appetite for the scarabs, because they did not attack them, not even when the scarabs were flying through the tarantulas. Therefore, the scarabs are not killed by the tarantulas, the carapaces are not left behind, and you can't complete the quest. Gwarin 12:09, June 27, 2010 (UTC)

Zam said there was an apparent fix to this but not that I can see. Scarabs fly in circles around the rocks in the tarantula area and there's no spawns there. I finally got a scarab to attack a spider that was in a weird place (didn't respawn there) and the scarab killed it. Gunthore 20:21, January 20, 2011 (UTC)

The spiders do approach the rock, although none spawn there. They crawl close enough to attack the scarabs. The problem I ran into was not being able to loot carapaces. I did target it last, and stayed close to it. None of the other players near me could loot them either. 67.238.219.49 21:30, December 3, 2011 (UTC)