After playing around with a few different professions I decided to focus on fishing as my main money maker. Melvor Idle is one of those games where you can go hard on trying to min/max things. There are also diminishing returns where I felt it was not worth trying to get every extra piece of gold out of it was not worth the time.
While there are higher-earning ways to make money in Melvor Idle. Since the game is idle after all I did not feel like needing to log in many times a day to keep switching between quite a few different professions just to reach an end good that sold higher.
Instead, I wanted to be doing something so that if I was unable to log in and do what was required to try to increase my gains, I would at least still be getting something out of it. This I felt for my playstyle outweighed many other options I could have gone.
A big important thing for fishing is doubling a couple of times the number of fish you can bring in each time one is caught. Instead of bringing in just one fish let alone two fish. You can get up to eight raw fish and one cooked fish. This, however, will not happen every time and requires a few things to make it happen.
First, I'm going to go over what I felt was a diminishing return and that is fishing hooks. It’s not that I won’t be going after that item it’s just I'm not going to be going out of my way; even more so, when I was leveling up fishing early on as these were more important for when I was ready to make the big money.
Fishing hooks give you a 10% increased chance to double the number of fish caught. The issue is you must farm them out of thieving as the main source for them from either the Dock Hand or the Fisherman. While you do get 1k fishing hooks every time you find any with my current thieving skills and other factors, I was only getting 10k every 8 to 10 hours. That did not seem worth it.
You can also get some fishing hooks out of some tasks from the town hall. They, however, required a lot of different fish. Getting fish hooks the task way and out of thieving was just a side way to add a little bonus to my fishing gains but was never something I went out of my way just to acquire.
When I do want to level up my thieving profession, I then go for the dock hand or fisherman. There is however one other reason to farm the Dock Hand in thieving for. That is the Sailor’s top.
While Sailors Top seems like an odd item. At the higher end of fishing, you only want to be catching fish to maximize your profit. At the lower levels of fishing getting gem drops is a lot better gold-wise. So, this is not an item you need right away.
So, what is the biggest thing you can do early on to make the most money out of fishing? At the lower levels, it is just switching up to the higher-tier fish along the way. I ended up going the route of shrimp, herring, carp, trout, salmon, shark, manta ray, and finally for the base game whale as my end game.
While you are leveling up you also want to buy the different fishing rods in the shop. This is at levels 10, 20, 35, 50, 60, and finally for the base game the dragon fishing rod at level 80. The number of fish you are catching is more than you can sell for enough to buy the rod upgrades as they become available. They will decrease how long it takes between fishing attempts by up to 40% once you get the Dragon Fishing rod.
The next biggest thing you can do just takes a lot of time farming the same fish. That is reaching mastery level 99 for that individual fish. Once one gets to 99 that doubles the number of base fish you get as a drop. Which is quite overpowering but takes a while.
If you are looking for ways to speed up the amount of fishing experience, you gain you can go for the astrology study of Ameria. I did not start working on astrology till later so I did not invest stardust into experience.
Once I was starting to level up astrology, I focused on leveling up the mastery for Ameria. You can invest dust into increasing double item in fishing and reduce the amount of time it takes per fishing attempt.
In Melvor Idle it can become quite easy to get sidetracked in what you want to focus on. Something like astrology is nice to have. It is, however, not just to do on its own for making gold. Which is why I did not put a few days into leveling it up enough to get the benefits I needed for fishing. This is also why I never got anything out of the agility profession for fishing.
What I did focus on getting was a higher enough summing profession so I could both craft Octopus and Pig. At the lower levels of fishing and on their own they are not worthwhile. Once you combine them, however, you get the synergy bonus of a 75% chance to catch a cooked fish along with your normal fish drops. A cooked whale goes for 2,048 gold each.
Do keep in mind this is more for when you are fishing for whales. I even started to save the lower-level raw and cooked fish I was crafting so I could make the octopus and Pig familiar tables since they are consumable. You will also be spending many millions on summing shards of green and silver. Making this not even an option if you are low on gold and want enough of these to last you the day or even longer.
While you can’t be fishing and crafting familiar tables. The math I ran checks out to be worth a couple of hours I spend every time I need to craft more. Even more so once you get higher levels of summing and the skill cape increases how many familiar tables you are crafting per action.
Another nice item to have is a Aorpheat’s Signet Ring for a 10% chance of doubling the base fish caught. I used to have one, but I got killed while wearing it and I lost it. This is quite a hard item to get as it requires two rather rare drops to craft a Signet Ring Half A and B. You get these from wearing a Gold Topaz Ring while doing combat or non-combat professions.
I lucked out and acquired another Signet Ring Half (A) from fishing. The B part drops only from combat, and I've not had any luck getting another one.
In my opinion, it’s not worth wearing Aorpheat’s Signet Ring in any situation where you can get killed and end up losing one till you have a backup to replace it. I’m still feeling the loss of that ring and it was months ago when I lost it.
Naturally, once you do get to level 99 fishing the Fishing Skillcape for 1 million is more than worth it. It’s going to double the base fish drop. Notice this is not an increase in double chance. It doubles what you would have gotten already. This does not work on the cooked fish you are getting from summoning synergy.
After what feels like a lifetime in gaming time you will hit 95% or higher mastery for fishing. What I did was save my mastery points till I had Whale unlocked i then started spending them to increase my mastery in that fish. Just make sure you stay above 25% mastery pool points, so you keep the 0% chance of junk items.
I did this as I wanted to get as quickly as I could to level 99 mastery for the whale and get double drops. I felt this was a lot more important than just a 5% chance to get a double fish. As I already would have a lot of other items increasing that chance anyway. Once I hit level 99 mastery in Whale, I stop spending my mastery pool for fishing and let it max out.
Don’t forget to claim any mastery tokens for fishing to help speed things along. That is a lot better option than just getting 1,500 gold each for them. You are going to need all the help you can to max this thing out anyway.
Final Thoughts
The result is having a decent chance of catching 8 raw whales, and 1 cooked whale. At the very least I'm getting no less than 4 raw whales every time I catch anything at all while fishing for whales.
After a while, I started earning so much money from fishing and selling them that I had no idea what to do with it all. I can now just spend insane amounts on bank space if I want. This is also going to make leveling up cooking quite easy with how much fish I can catch in a single action.
It is also crazy just how much synergy there is between the different professional skills in Melvor Idle. You can spend many weeks just trying to max out your profit per hour from something as simple as fishing. Granted it’s not always worth it and more times than not you will have reached your goals before you do so anyway.
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Disclosure: The game was received for free.
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