One of my oldest untouched drafts is on Melvor Idle:
This is the Substack edition/draft of a lil Steam guide I’d maybe-like-to-but-possibly-won’t write for Melvor Idle. I picked up the original base game at the tail end of 2021 [fact check?] and quickly fell in love with it. I played through most of it through all skills to 99 and all but the last few event dungeons, I fell off shortly into grinding masteries towards 100% completion after around 6 months total. I finally got around to grabbing the expansion—which increases skill caps to 120 and adds a bunch of content for everything—around a month ago and have been diving back in.
In a nutshell, Melvor is a management game. To be totally reductionist about it, it’s about watching numbers go up. It’s an idle/incremental progress game for sure, so you will have to deal with long periods of time waiting for stuff to happen, but the progress tends to be less incremental, self-feedback-looping and more expansive/goal oriented—you’re not reincarnating/scrapping progress to speed up the existing process by 5%, you’re working towards being able to make a new thing to be able to make more new things to fight a thing to make more things. It’s a generic survival game without having to run from rock to rock to mine. The joy, at least for me, comes in the decision making process: what do I want to work towards, what do I want to set up for, how do I get there, how do I find the information to help me decide what I want to do?
It’s also heavily inspired by Runescape if that’s the kind of thing that’s your jam. It wasn’t for me, but “it’s inspired by Runescape” was enough for my wife to immediately go grab a copy for herself.
This guide will be about trying to help you find your fun with this game. I say “try” because mostly I’m going to outline the ways in which I’ve enjoyed playing with the game, which I’m hoping will at least springboard you towards finding the parts of it that appeal to you. I’m not going to be writing about how to optimize progression or outline what to do first or in what order, though I will point you at resources that can get you started in that way.
I’d drifted away from the game before finishing the post but then started a second draft on idle games broadly after I picked up Magic Research, which I also dropped off from before finishing a post. Third time’s the charm; lately I’ve been playing Unnamed Space Idle on the side of my other main-side game (which I’ve now written/am writing three unreleased posts on1).
Now I’m not really an especially huge idle game fan, and I need there to be a compelling framing to stay interested at all. Melvor Idle is stripped down Runescape, which was great and only fell off for me in the first expansion when I ran out of efficient tasks that required 8-10 hours at a time for sleep and work2. Unnamed Space Idle frames its progression as fighting through a hostile galaxy (and has layers of automation that accommodates variances in schedules a lil better). Magic Research was kind of on the edge but couldn’t hold my attention long enough for me to finish the first one and get into the sequel.
Melvor Idle gets recommendations from me, despite not making it through much of the first expansion and there being lukewarm reviews of the later expansions, which I have not played. One of the things that I like about it is that it’s not leaning on prestige resets for progress like Magic Research and Unnamed Space Idle et al. do. This is a mechanic3 I don’t like under normal circumstances but especially because it also tends to require you to babysit the game for a while after each reset to get back to where you were before, when some of the major advantages of playing these games is that you can do them in smaller chunks over time. Though that said, even Melvor unfortunately tends to give you reasons to want/need to keep the game open.
The thing that’s fun about these kinds of games for me is that the game is all raw decision-making and trying to optimize your opportunity costs. Often, they don’t strictly require perfection in this regard, but that’s the essence of everything from start to finish: which upgrade do you buy when, when do you switch task tracks, when do you reset for bonuses? I’m a little bit of a spreadsheet gamer4 and while idle games will tend to evolve so quickly that you’re not efficiently served by trying to map things out manually, they benefit from the same kinds of analytical thinking. As the genre advances, some of this work is helpfully done for you as quality-of-life features. Also, let’s not underestimate the raw satisfaction of watching numbers get bigger, although IMO this is sometimes undercut by how eager some games are to jump straight to scientific notation, but eventually the number-after-the-E itself gets joyously large.
Going to end on supposing that I think a lot of games could learn from idle-game-style resource and time management. The trick, however, is how to do we sprinkle these into a game organically instead of making it purely side content or bonus resource grinds. One idea I’m envisioning is a game that combines these with the “if this is too hard go somewhere else” design intention from Elden Ring. Another is rolling it into the meta-progression of a roguelite game.
Anyways, for now I’m cautiously looking forward to Melvor Idle 2.
As a reminder from a further back post, the first of those is a submission it for the ACX review contest and so I don’t want to reveal them here ‘til I know their ultimate fate there. As of posting the first round of voting is now up! If you’re familiar with my writing it’s probably pretty obvious which one’s me.
Also the combat side of the game gets both really tedious when it turns into grinding for gear and tends to be unsafe to let run completely unwatched.
That mechanic being: a game gives you incremental bonuses for periodically resetting your progress to the start, but often the permanent upgrades are making that starting point progress much faster.
This is a running gag in my regular friend group, partly from that one time I did some handy spreadsheet shenanigans for weapon DPS during the update for the second raid in the Division 2, because I couldn’t find the information and decided to just put it together myself, I tell the story in this post:
Because nobody had done it comprehensively for the newer updates, I was able to have some fun putting together a spreadsheet parsing all the different weapons, which gave us a little bit of an edge beyond the stock reddit build recommendations in some situations (though IIRC Bullet King ended up on top for a lot of situations, turns out not having to reload on an LMG is pretty powerful).