It’s been a while since I've written about Melvor Idle. It’s not that I have not been checking into the game. Since most of it is idle or can be I just have been logging into it daily and trying to work out what is the next best course for me to take to further along my gameplay.
My two biggest restraints in this game so far have been bank space and gold. When I have gold, I don’t have enough bank space. When I have free bank space I seem to be out of gold. This was something I was hoping getting my first max level 99 skill in the game would end up resolving.
For a while, I was struggling with what skill should I put all my effort into. I wanted to start going heavy into combat and leveling up that skill. The biggest issue with that then was I'd need a lot better armor which meant I'd also need to focus on the main gathering skill for whatever combat style I went for.
Since I went for melee early on. That would require leveling up smithing so I could craft the armor and weapons I'd need to go along with leveling up my melee. This also meant I'd need to level up mining to farm the ore to make the armor and weapons for melee.
As a result, I ended up mainly focusing on mining. I’d try and log in once a day if I could and see how much I gathered. There is also a 24 hours of offline progress max you can have at a time. As long as I logged in daily my progress would keep going.
A lot of the ores I wanted to smelt required coal ore. While you can get some coal ore from fire making. I did not want to add to the mix yet another skill. I also tested how much coal ore I could get out of fire making and the results were less than thrilling. It seemed just mining for coal was the best bet.
What I should have done was spend a little more time looking over the game. It turns out I could have been making some decent gold returns by just mining the ores I needed. I, however, did not fully understand at the time how to leverage a few different aspects of the game.
While it’s true many skills in Melvor Idle are decided to help boost other skills. The last thing I wanted to do was add yet another skill I'd have to grind up to level 99 before just going out and focusing on what I wanted.
Mining as it would turn out would become one of my higher gold per hour activities. It all comes down to being able to mine for gems. Sure, in an almost 20-hour grinding session of letting my character go idle mining, he could bring in over 500 gems from topaz to diamonds. That is not a lot.
Once I started to have enough bank space and a growing pile of gold, I realized something. There is this item in the gold shop called Gem Gloves. While they cost 500k gold and only lasted for 2k mining actions. Each time a charge on that glove was used I'd get some kind of gem. This also meant that each mining action with the gloves active had a cost of 250 gold per charge which would net me 1 random gem.
As it would turn out the lowest gem you could get which is a topaz only sells for 225 gold. That would mean every time I looted one, I'd lose 25 gold. The highest-selling gem, however, sells for 1,150 gold netting me 900 gold every time I find a diamond. All the other gems sell at a profit.
After running some tests, I realized I was looting enough diamonds that they were covering the costs 3 to 1. So only was just finding diamonds ensuring I was making a profit on each charge of the gloves I had to keep buying. All the other gems like ruby, sapphire, and emerald were also in the profit each time I found one of those.
It’s a real shame I did not realize this sooner when I had my first 500k gold. Instead for quite some time, I kept dumping every gold I had into either more banking space or sadly the township which for quite some time I ended up letting decay, and my storage on that became full. I’ll however talk about the township in another post.
Once I was mining lots of gems, I was still more times than not letting overnight my character idle mine on coal. I could just never get enough of this stuff. I must have racked up a good 50k coal ore at one point after getting tired of running out of it every time I needed to smelt more ores.
Farming that much coal ended up being yet another mistake I have since learned from in mining. Once I hit level 99 mining, I could spend 1 million gold on a mining cape. What does the mining cape do? For each mining action, I would gain at least one coal. With my skills, I would sometimes get more than one.
Once that occurred, I started doing the unthinkable. I ended up just selling off excess coal for only 13 gold each. While that is not a lot now each mining action, I was getting ore, coal, and a gem. Sometimes multiples of each. Turning myself a nice little profit since the highest ores sell for 135 each.
I would also later discover once you max fire making that cape has a 100% chance of coal for each log burned. However, I'd also need to farm up wood in woodcutting to keep that going for coal. While the fire cape has other benefits, I preferred getting my coal from mining.
As I started to level up my smithing, I decided to check out the level 99 reward cape for maxing that skill out as well. To my shock, it reduces the amount of coal costs by 50%. As if I was not already overflowing with coal this would ensure once I had smithing maxed out and I bought that cape for 1 million gold that coal would be nothing.
Granted I would need to save 77k coal from smithing just to break even on the cape costs. Making it a bit questionable that once smithing to max level 99 it would even be worth it. Then you also had the cost of buying yet another bank slot for that cape to sit in. At one point I'd almost be spending 1 million gold per bank slot making banking space quite a costly thing to give up just to save on something that only costs 13 gold per and that I always get more than enough of mining.
After far too much time I ended up reaching smithing level 99. I even spent the money to buy the cape for that skill as well. It is however some days when I'm still struggling for bank space tempting to just sell it and a bunch of other stuff once you start to factor in how costly banking slots get in Melvor Idle.
Final Thoughts
It’s almost like mining in this game is a gold printing press. Where if you have enough gold to start with to guy gem gloves you can leverage your wealth to become ever richer. Sometimes I've been tempted to just mine with gem gloves for a full week. It, however, seems despite how much gold I now make I still never have enough at the end of the day. There are also so many other things to be doing than just mining.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Melvor Idle. If you wish to further support my content you can use enjargames at checkout or this referral link for Melvor Idle on the Epic Game Store.
Disclosure: The game was received for free.
Disclosure: As a creator of the Epic Games’ Support-A-Creator Program, I may receive a commission from certain purchases.
